On this day in 1945, Jackie Robinson breaks the color barrier and the great game changed forever when Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey secured him from the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro Leagues. Rickey, who called the move baseball’s “great experiment,” knew that the player chosen to cross the “color line” would have […]
Tag: history
Bonhoeffer Stood Strong unto his Death
In 1939 Bonhoeffer had considered taking refuge in the United States but returned after only two weeks in New York City, writing to his sponsor, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, that “I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people.”
The Marshall Plan for a New World
On this day in 1948, President Harry S Truman signs the Marshall Plan into law. Officially it was entitled the European Recovery Program, an American initiative to aid Western Europe with over $13 billion in economic assistance for a Western European rebuild after the end of World War 2. Perhaps a touch more cynically, it […]
Pope John Paul II’s Transformative Papacy
Did Czechoslovakia’s Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk Commit Suicide?
In 1947 Masaryk made a fateful error in strongly endorsing the US offer of millions in aid under the Marshall Plan. When the US unveiled the brilliantly cunning and generous plan, the Soviets and their Czech lackeys demurred, and by strange coincidence a full-on communist coup was staged in February of ’48. Masaryk was one of the few non-communists left in place, a man largely alone.
Judicial Review and Separation of the Branches
On this day in 1803, the landmark case of Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137 (1803), is decided by the fledgling United States Supreme Court. This ruling forms the basis for the exercise of judicial review in the United States under Article III of the Constitution, and helped define the boundary between the […]