Content tagged with "history"
The actual letter which contained the declaration. This was a 1917 letter from the British Foreign Secretary to a leader of the British Jewish community which expressed support for a Jewish homeland in the area of Palestine. It was the first open acceptance and validation of Zionism. The letter was…
This refers to the fragmentation of something into smaller units that are hostile to each other. So, if a country were to break down into smaller regions, all of which went to war with each other, this would be an example of balkanization. I was familiar with the term from context, and from the…
There are multiple contexts here, but it’s most often used to refer to a specific German art and design school which operated in the 20s and 30s, and the aesthetic which emerged from it. It was a specific organization, but has become a general movement and approach to design. The Bauhaus school and…
Bebe Rebozo was a close friend, confidante, and adviser of Richard Nixon. “Bebe” was a nickname – it’s Spanish for “baby” as he was the youngest of 12 in a Cuban family. Rebozo was often suspected of criminal activity, but nothing was ever proven, other than a minor tax penalty. Rebozo was also…
In the Old Testament, several people are stated to have lived almost 1,000 years. Is this literal, figurative, or a mistake? One theory says that a simple translation error caused months to be counted as years. If someone was said to have died at 950 years, it was really 950 months, which is 79…
Lots of people have been killed on Sundays, and the phrase is used to describe lots of mass killings. Wikipedia shows 20+ events that are connected to the phrase. The most recent event and the one most clearly associated with the phrase from this generation is a 1972 shooting of protesters in…
The more modern term in use today is “Afrikaners,” though their are subtle differences. It came up often in a book about the world in 1913. I was pretty sure I knew what it meant, but not totally, so I looked it up. Sometime after this, I read The Covenant, which is a fictionalized history of South…
“Bohemia” was an actual place – it was the western end of the current Czech Republic, though it’s not technically named this anymore. The word “Bohemian” has come to refer to a carefree, counter-cultural, often traveling lifestyle. This usage comes from a French reference to the Romani people of…
A “vanity” is some physical object that’s considered sinful or promoting of sinfulness . So a “bonfire of the vanities” is a burning of these objects as a symbolic act to promote holiness and rid the world of temptation. The original “bonfire of the vanities” was an actual event in 1497 where…
A British businessman and politician who operated mainly in Southern Africa in the late 1800s, where he moved as a child. Rhodes is known for several things: Rhodes is a controversial figure. He was an avowed White Supremacist, and his business and politic interests were drivers of suffering and…
The Cheviot Hills in Northumberland, England Neither. Both the actor and the city were named for a medieval English hunting ground. The actor, who was born in 1943, is actually named Cornelius Chase. “Chevy” is a childhood nickname. The city in Maryland was named in the late 1800s. Which brings us…
This was a political movement in China in the late 1960s. Chairman Mao Zedong had lost power due to the failure of the The Great Leap Forward, and he was concerned that he was losing his grip on the Communist Party. He began the Cultural Revolution by stirring up fears that capitalists had…
He was the second Secretary-General of the United Nations, and is considered one of the greatest diplomats in world history. He served from 1953 to his death in 1961. He was killed in a plane crash in Congo. There are conflicting reports of the cause, and it was still being investigated into the…
This a period of American history at the end of the 19th century. Opinions differ on when it started – certainly post-Civil War, but various accounts have it starting in the 1860s or 1870s and running through the end of the century. The period was characterized by enormous post-bellum economic…
Ronald Reagan as George Gipp in Knute Rockne, All-American George Gipp was a football player at Notre Dame in the late 1910s. His nickname was “The Gipper.” He died of an infection during his senior year. In the 1940 film, Knute Rockne, All-American, he was portrayed by Ronald Reagan. In his…
No, this wasn’t a specific place. It was technically the name of the Soviet agency that managed the forced labor camps of the Lenin and Stalin eras. In the Western world, the term “gulag” came to refer to the generic Soviet system of camps, regardless of where they were. There were hundreds of…
This is a view of history that attempts to paint the Confederacy and its role in the American Civil War in the best possible light. It emerged sometime after the war, when southerners were trying to recover from the damage of the war and rationalize why it was fought. The “lost cause” means that the…