History Quiz!

feargale wrote: »

Which US President had a direct ancestor who was convicted of murder and executed?

I've cracked it. Both Grover Cleveland and his wife Frances Folsom were descended from Thos. Cornell Sr.. But she, not he, was descended from Thos. Cornell Jr., convicted of murdering his mother, mainly on spectral evidence.Cleveland, Nixon and Carter were descended from Sr. but not from Jr.,
Suspected axe murderer Lizzie Borden ( of both her father and stepmother ) was another descendant of Thomas Jr.. Richard Borden, her gtgtgtgtgrandfather married appropriately named Innocent Cornell, posthumous daughter of Thomas Jr..

Pinky, I haven't the answer but I remember, I think, hazy memory, that the word Photographic would lead you in the wrong direction.

The Trackball/Mouse comparison is like the Lightpen/Tablet comparison though tbh.

The famous Sketchpad demo by Ivan Sutherland:


The mouse itself wasn't a Xerox innovation but result of work done in SRI (Stanford Research Institute). The late great Douglas Engelbart on the 9th December 1968 carried out a demo which is now adays called 'The Mother of all Demos'

In it ye can see the use of windows, hypertext, graphics, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control etc.

Yup, John Philip Holland, the 'Fenian Skirmishing Fund' paid for the development of the 'Fenian Ram' submarine or to give it more formal name 'Holland II'. Holland VI would become USS Holland (SS-1)

Holland Torpedo Boat Company was the predecessor to the 'Electric Boat Company', basically they took over manufacture/design when Holland had financial troubles. They eventually diversified themselves and added aircraft production etc. (F-16 was originally a GD product), today the Electric Boat company still lives on as a subsidiary company under the name 'General Dynamics Electric Boat'.

What was the first country that introduced a fully decimal currency?

Russia?

What war led to the Philippines becoming a colonial possession of the United States of America?

What was the last country in Europe to grant citizenship to Jews for the first time?

The question is more complex than it seems.

In the first place, citizenship isn't a simple binary. A "second-class citizen', subject to various legal disabilities or restrictions, is still a citizen. Jewish emancipation in any country is generally dated from the date when the last legal disabilities were removed - e.g. in the UK Jews were permitted to enter Parliament in 1858 - but in fact Jews may have been citizens of the country concerned from long before that, or may never have been excluded from citizenship. So we need to clarify whether the question is seeking the country which last admitted Jews to citizenship, or which last removed legal restrictions or limitations affecting the citizenship of Jews?

The other point is that Jews frequently suffered from restrictions/disabilities which were not specifically aimed at Jews, and which affected other groups as well. For example the laws which kept Jews our of Parliament were not aimed at Jews; they required the taking of a religious oath in Trinitarian form, and thus operated to exclude everyone but Trinitarian Christians. Even today a Jew cannot succeed to the throne of the United Kingdom, but this is not because they are Jewish so much as because they are not Protestant. Until I think 1868 a Jew could not become a Romanian citizen (and from that date to 1923 could only become a Romanian citizen by special naturalisation) but, again, this was because of a law which excluded non-Christians (and which may have been aimed at Muslims/Turks as much as at Jews).

So, I think we need to clarify the question. Are we specifically looking at laws which target Jews, or at wider laws which affect Jews among others? And are we looking at laws which exclude from citizenship entirely, or which restict or limit the rights and privileges that other citizens enjoy?