Milestones

[johnbratten]

100 years ago today, October 10, 1924 the Washington D.C. baseball team The Washington Senators won their first and only World Series. President Calving Coolidge watched the game at Griffith Stadium in D.C.

Despite the win, the Washington Senators (in D.C. from 1901 till 1960) were better known as losers. For example it was said of them “Washington: First in war, first in peace, and last in the National League." A 1958 move about them (Damn Yankees) was about a man who sells his soul to the devil so they can beat The Yankees baseball team. The Senators left town in 1960 and became the Minnesota Twins.

 

[vadim69]

On this day 85 years ago, October 10, 1939, the USSR gave Lithuania its capital Vilnius. Before that date, Kaunas was the capital of Lithuania. In 1939, Vilnius was a Polish-Jewish city, where 65 percent of the population were Poles and 28 percent were Jews. Lithuanians in Vilnius in 1939 made up about 6 percent of the city's population.

 

[vadim69]

On October 11, 1899, the Second Anglo-Boer War began – it is commonly called “the last war of the 19th century”; and some experts consider it “the first war for democracy”. …It must be said that the entire world community of those times actively sympathized with the Boers. (And especially, for some reason, the Russian one – take at least the heartbreaking song “Transvaal, my country, you are all burning in flames…”
…The Boers (or rather, the Afrikaners) were the descendants of Dutch (and then German and French) colonists who appeared on the southern tip of Africa back in the middle of the 17th century. In a hundred and fifty years they would settle in quite well (and acquire a considerable number of black slaves) – but then a bigger beast would appear… that is, the ubiquitous Great Britain. To begin with, the British would occupy the Cape Colony. (At that time, Napoleon occupied the Boers’ homeland, the Netherlands… it turned out that now it was, supposedly, the territory of hostile France). The Afrikaners would go deep into the continent, organizing the Orange Free State and the South African Republic (or that same Transvaal. It is not worth talking about what happened to the indigenous population of these new lands… Meanwhile, in 1833 the British will pass a law abolishing slavery - and the British press will start telling stories about how the bad Boers torture their black slaves).