Earlier this month, on 1 October 2017, a lone gunman named Stephen Paddock opened fire on a group of oblivious concertgoers at the Route 91 Harvest music festival in Las Vegas. The worst mass shooting in recent US history, killing 59 people and injuring 546 more, it should have shocked the world, but did it? Continue Reading
Thanksgiving Day
Nowadays, Thanksgiving is a national holiday. There’s a parade in New York, and everyone gathers with their families and loved ones to eat turkey, spend time with one another and give thanks. But Thanksgiving hasn’t always been like this. The first Thanksgiving took place in 1621 in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Pilgrims from Britain came over Continue Reading
Jackie Robinson: Athlete to Activist
Jackie Robinson is a significant figure in African American history. He raised issues of race relations, not only in sport, but in society as a whole by becoming the first African American to play in Major League Baseball, erasing the colour line in the United States’ national pastime. When the Brooklyn Dodgers signed Robinson Continue Reading
Blood in the Water? The Hungarian Revolution of 1956
6 December 1956: The closing moments of an Olympic water polo match. Hungarian Ervin Zádor leaves the pool bleeding due to a punch from Soviet player Valentin Prokopov. The fracas? Evidence of the tensions consequential to a month’s worth of revolt in Hungary against the Soviet regime between 23 October and 10 November 1956. The uprising Continue Reading
End of a Cold War Era – Collapse of the Berlin Wall
“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” When Winston Churchill made this speech on 5 May 1946, he was speaking of the metaphorical division between Western Europe and the Eastern Bloc, and the tensions that would escalate into the Cold War. By 1961, this Continue Reading