July 16, 1099
The Sacking of Jerusalem
Soldiers from all over Catholic Europe, known as Crusaders, overtook the defenses of Jerusalem and slaughtered both the Jewish and Muslim populations. According to Fulk of Chartres in his contemporaneous account, “Many fled to the roof of the Temple of Solomon, and were shot with arrows, so that they fell to the ground dead. In this temple almost ten thousand were killed. Indeed, if you had been there you would have seen our feet colored to our ankles with the blood of the slain. But what more shall I relate? None of them were left alive; neither women nor children were spared.”
Pope Urban II initiated this effort to wrest the Holy Land from the hands of the “Infidel” (the city had been under Islamic rule for 460 years) and assured those who joined the first crusade that God would absolve them from any sin associated with the venture.
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July 16, 1877
Firemen and brakemen for the Pennsylvania and Baltimore & Ohio Railroads refused to work, and refused to let replacements take their jobs. They managed to halt all railroad traffic at the Camden Junction just outside of Baltimore. The railroad companies had cut wages and shortened the workweek.
A contemporary artist’s rendering of the clash in Baltimore between workers
and the Maryland Sixth Regiment during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. The governor had called out the troops on behalf of the railroad company.
After a second pay cut in June, Pennsylvania RR announced that the same number of workers would be expected to service twice as many trains. The work stoppage spread west and eventually became the first nationwide strike
Background and growth of the Strike
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July 16, 1945
The U.S. Army’s Manhattan Project succeeded as its first hand-made experimental atomic bomb, known as the “Gadget,” was successfully detonated at the top of a 30m (100 ft.) tower in the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico (at the Trinity test site now part of the White Sands Missile Range). The original $6,000 budget for the intensive and secret weapons development program during World War II eventually ballooned to a total cost of nearly $2 billion (more than $25 billion in current dollars).
“Gadget” explodes
The “Gadget” just before the Trinity test July 16, 1945.
Assembled in the McDonald Ranch house nearby, the orange-sized plutonium core, weighing 6.1 kg (13.5 lbs.), yielded an explosive force of more than 20 kilotons (equivalent of 20,000 tons of TNT).
Trinity Atomic Bomb (A good read -A.)
What it’s like there today: “My Radioactive Vacation”
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July 16, 1979
The largest release of radioactive material in the U.S. occurred in the Navajo Nation. More than 1200 metric tons (1,100 tons) of uranium tailings (mining waste) and 378 million liters (100 million gallons) of radioactive water burst through a packed-mud dam near Church Rock, New Mexico. The river contaminated by the spill, the Rio Puerco, showed 7,000 times the allowable standard of radioactivity for drinking water downstream from the broken dam shortly after the breach was repaired.
A month later, only 5% of the tailings had been cleaned out.
Warnings not to drink the contaminated water were issued by officials, but non-English-speaking Navajo never heard them, having no electrical power for TV or radio. Humans and livestock continued to drink the water.
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July 16, 1979
Saddam Hussein became president of the Iraqi republic, secretary general of the Ba’ath Party Regional Command, chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, and commander-in-chief of the armed forces. He had been the ambitious protegé of Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, who resigned on this day.
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July 16, 1983
During a time of increasing tension between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics), and an escalating nuclear arms race, 10,000 peace activists formed a human chain linking the two superpowers’ embassies in London, England.
The same day, members of the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp painted the U.S. spy plane, Blackbird, and composed this song for their activities:
[to the tune of Count Basie’s “Bye, Bye, Blackbird”]
“Here I stand paint in hand
Speaking low, here I go
Bye bye blackbird
Just a dab of paint or two
Here I stand paint in hand
Speaking low, here I go
Bye bye blackbird
Just a dab of paint or two
Grounds you for a week or two
Bye bye blackbird. No one in the base could undermine you
Till we did some countersigning on you
Now you’re just a silly joke
Invented by some macho bloke
Blackbird bye bye.” |
Scottie's Playtime 