Professor Bob's "Fun with Historical Stuff"

     Joesph Stalin was not a man to just let a grudge die. As you will see in a future post I will demonstrate other ways where he would not only kill you but also your memory after you were gone. Indeed, he would try to make sure any trace of you was gone. His rage however, was not something that could be contained by borders of the Soviet Union as demonstrated by the murder of his one time chief rival and founder of the Red Army, Leon Trotsky.      Leon Trotsky was for many years the right hand man of Vladimir Lenin, the father of the Bolshevik Party and leader of the worlds first Marxist nation. However, Lenin did not live long after taking the reins, his health in steady decline from May 1922 and onward after he suffered the first of his three strokes...it seemed that the leader of the Red Army and fellow founding father of he USSR, Leon Trotsky would take the reins as Lenin faded. The Russian Civil War was still on when Lenin had his first stroke and that made Trotsky the second

      Well this year marks the 100th anniversary of the start of the "Great War". A war so awful it was supposed to end all wars in the future. The idea was that the brutality and horrible nature of that war would deter any wars of the future. Sadly, we know its not true. But being its the centennial, expect lots of WW1 stories. Not only do people not study the First World War much because the Second World War gets all the press, but we should because it is just ripe with interesting stories. This is one, the great raid on Zeebrugge which happened on St. Georges Day 1918.        As would happen in the Second World War, the Allies in the First World War had a great deal of trouble dealing with German U-Boats. At the beginning of the war there were stringent rules against unrestricted submarine warfare on civilian/merchant ships. The rules stated that a submarine would have to stop, board, and inspect merchant ships. If there was contraband on board they would have to evacua

     While watching the new trailer for the rebooted Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies coming out this year I was reminded of a story I once read about the Renaissance. It was some sort of divine lightning bolt of inspiration that came as a tangent. Given the TMNT turtles are named after Renaissance masters it jolted some sort of odd mental roadmap of tangents back to the story I thought you all would be interested in reading. And here we go....      We all know something about the Renaissance. The names Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo are known to most people. If you show someone a picture of the Mona Lisa or the statue of David in western civilization, a lot of them will be able to tell you the name of the work and the master that created it. However when we think of names like Leonardo, Botticelli, Brunelleschi, or Michelangelo we really never think of them as living in the same places at the same times.  We tend to think of them as these monolithic figures in art history tha