Indyintheclassroom.com is not responsible for content on linked websites.
Below are current event articles that relate to events, topics, and people found in The Winds of Change.
First Blood in Vietnam
AmericanHeritage.com
4/26/2010
On the evening of July 8, 1959, six of the eight American advisers stationed at a camp serving as the headquarters of a South Vietnamese army division 20 miles northeast of Saigon had settled down after supper in their mess to watch a movie, The Tattered Dress, starring Jeanne Crain. One of them had switched on the lights to change a reel when it happened.
A Civil Rights Watershed in Biloxi, Mississippi
Smithsonian.com
4/20/2010
The waters beside Biloxi, Mississippi, were tranquil on April 24, 1960. But Bishop James Black’s account of how the harrowing hours later dubbed “Bloody Sunday” unfolded for African-American residents sounds eerily like preparations taken for a menacing, fast-approaching storm.
Shooting the Moon
AmericanHeritage.com
4/12/2010
Gazing up at the Texas night sky from his ranch, Senator Lyndon B. Johnson did not know what to make of Sputnik I, the first artificial Earth satellite launched into orbit by a Soviet missile on October 4, 1957.
Gene Kranz's Apollo Vest
Smithsonian.com
4/1/2010
Forty years ago, for several unbearably tense days—April 13 to April 17, 1970—the whole world watched as NASA Flight Director Gene Kranz led a team that worked around the clock to rescue Apollo 13 astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise. After an explosion of an oxygen tank partially crippled the moon-bound spacecraft, NASA’s mission was to bring the trio safely back to Earth.
Chinese on the Western Front?
cumberland-courier.whereilive.
3/17/2010
Chinese on the Western Front? Many Australians have grown up hearing stories from the battlefields of WW1, but Chinese men on the Western Front? How did this happen, and why? Between 1914 and 1918, the governments of France and Britain recruited thousands of Chinese labourers and transported them to Europe to help the Allied war effort, thousands died by enemy fire. A few were executed by their employers.
Courage at the Greensboro Lunch Counter
Smithsonian.com
2/1/2010
On February 1, 1960, four young African-American men, freshmen at the Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina, entered the Greensboro Woolworth’s and sat down on stools that had, until that moment, been occupied exclusively by white customers. The four—Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr., Joseph McNeil and David Richmond—asked to be served, and were refused. But they did not get up and leave. Indeed, they launched a protest that lasted six months and helped change America.
Germany still paying off £50million in reparations following World War One
dailymail.co.uk
12/3/2009
Germany is still paying off £50million of the 'reparations' demanded from it after the end of First World War. The German Finance Agency, its authority on debt management, said tens of millions of euros are still being transferred to private individuals holding debenture bonds as agreed under the Treaty of Versailles signed on June 28, 1919.
Moonwalk Launch Party
Smithsonian.com
7/1/2009
In the summer of 1969, all eyes turned to a spit of land on Florida's Atlantic coast—the site of the Kennedy Space Center, named for the president who had challenged the nation to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade. That July, the Apollo 11 mission would attempt just that. I was 22, a year out of Colorado College and working as a photographer at Time magazine's Miami bureau. In the days before the launch, thousands of people drove from all over the country to see it firsthand, converging on Titusville, across the Indian River from NASA Launch Complex 39-A.
Italy Puts Iraqi Treasures Online
Artinfo.com
6/9/2009
Treasures from 6,000 years of Mesopotamian history are just a click away, now that Italy has put the National Museum of Iraq online. The Virtual Museum of Iraq, viewable in Arabic, English, and Italian, lets visitors "walk" through eight virtual halls and see works from the prehistoric to the Islamic periods, while video clips reconstruct the history of Iraq’s main cities. Looted after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, the museum partially reopened in February after six years, but the Web site will make its most important artifacts accessible to everyone.
Children of the Vietnam War
Smithsonian.com
5/20/2009
They grew up as the leftovers of an unpopular war, straddling two worlds but belonging to neither. Most never knew their fathers. Many were abandoned by their mothers at the gates of orphanages. Some were discarded in garbage cans. Schoolmates taunted and pummeled them and mocked the features that gave them the face of the enemy—round blue eyes and light skin, or dark skin and tight curly hair if their soldier-dads were African-Americans.
The Flu Hunter
Smithsonian.com
4/27/2009
**Webmaster's note: This article is linked to this Indy chapter because it represents the end of World War I, a time when a massive flu pandemic killed millions across the globe.
Robert Webster was in the backyard of his home in Memphis doing some landscaping. This was in the early winter of 1997, a Saturday. He was mixing compost, a chore he finds enchanting. He grew up on a farm in New Zealand, where his family raised ducks called Khaki Campbells. Nothing pleases him more than mucking around in the earth. He grows his own corn, then picks it himself. Some of his friends call him Farmer Webster, and although he is one of the world’s most noted virologists, he finds the moniker distinguishing.
N. Korea preparing for missile test
MSNBC.com
3/29/2009
North Korea is preparing to launch a short- or medium-range missile, possibly right after it carries out its plan to fire a long-range rocket in early April, a Japanese newspaper reported Sunday.
With a Camera to the Red Planet
AmericanHeritage.com
3/24/2009
When John Wesley Powell and his nine men pushed their four boats out into the roaring Colorado in 1869, they had no idea what lay downriver. They set out with the knowledge that they might not return—and several did not. As I reflect on the last decade's adventure of designing, building, testing, launching, and operating two complex and hardy robotic space vehicles on Mars, I cannot help but wonder if we were just as naive when we started out.