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The fire, known as the Cloquet-Moose Lake fire because that is where the damage was worst, began at rail University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard dies after a vicious anti-gay attack. The two attackers then In one of the most surreal moments in the history of the Cold War, Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev pounds his fist on the table, and according to some reports, removes his shoe and threatens to pound a table with it in protest against a speech critical of Soviet policy in He was 63 years old.

His father served in the American Revolution On the morning of October 12, , the year-old British nurse Edith Cavell is executed by a German firing squad in Brussels, Belgium. Before World War I began in , Cavell served for a number of years as the matron of a nurse training school in Brussels. After the city was Live TV. This Day In History.

History Vault. Art, Literature, and Film History. Space Exploration. World War II. Sign Up. Whereas the Portuguese edged their way around Africa, the Spanish monarchs agreed to Columbus' bold plan to sail to Cathay by the uncharted western route. Please email digital historytoday. The third, the Santa Maria , was a nao — a larger square-rigged ship. The ships were small, between 15 and 36 metres long.

Between them they carried about 90 men. After sailing across the Atlantic Ocean for 10 weeks, land was sighted by a sailor called Rodrigo Bernajo although Columbus himself took the credit for this. He landed on a small island in the Bahamas, which he named San Salvador. He claimed the island for the King and Queen of Spain, although it was already populated. This initial encounter opened up the 'New World' to European colonisation, which would come to have a devastating impact on indigenous populations.

On Christmas Day , the Santa Maria hit a rock and was wrecked. Columbus transferred to the Nina and left behind the 39 crewmembers of the Santa Maria on the island of Hispaniola. He wanted them to start a new settlement.

Columbus reached Spain in March , and claimed his reward in riches. He was also given new titles. Columbus made three more journeys across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. It seems likely that these fishermen headed west with an expectation of finding land because of the stories or rumours they had heard in Iceland. It is probable that these Englishmen would have at least come in sight of Greenland as they sought out profitable fishing waters but is it possible that they also made it to the shores of Vinland?

This raises the question: why would these men not claim for themselves the glory of having discovered a new land? Perhaps the huge profits to be made from the rich cod supplies in the seas around Newfoundland made this a secret too valuable to be shared. Canada Rediscovered. Canadian Museum of Civilization, France joined the exploration game relatively late in the day, at least in an official capacity. They worked, however, on behalf of Castile, not France. Though the king treated Bartholomew well he chose not to patronize the project.

By the early years of the sixteenth century French adventurers were setting out on the Atlantic seeking to benefit commercially from the New World. In a sailor from Normandy, Binot Paulmier de Gonneville set sail and returned in claiming to have found a land south east of Africa. It is likely, in fact, that he travelled to the coast of Brazil. In a fisherman from Honfleur, Jean Denys, sailed to Newfoundland to take advantage of the cod; he would be the first of many. Indeed, the fishermen of Normandy, Brittany and the Basque region wasted little time in joining the English and Portuguese in the rich codbanks around Newfoundland.

According to one contemporary report, by over French ships were making annual voyages to Newfoundland and France rapidly became a significant force in the Newfoundland fishery. Nor did these fishermen stick to charted waters. The degree of competition with the fishermen of England and Portugal was an incentive to explore new areas. At the same time that the fishermen of France were out working in the new world, the king, Francis I, was too distracted by the Italian Wars to give much time or money to exploration.

Things had changed by the early s, however. Francis realised that he could not afford to lose out on the profits to be gained by exploration of the new lands and saw no reason why the expanding world should be divided between Spain and Portugal as it had been in the Treaty of Tordesillas. As Francis eloquently put it in his famous words to the Spanish ambassador:.

It was perhaps this attitude that led Francis in common with other European monarchs to back privateers or corsairs who raided Spanish ships, loaded with rich cargo, as they travelled between the Caribbean and Spain.

These corsairs were basically authorized pirates but, given that France was so often at war with Spain during the first half of the sixteenth century, the looting was viewed as a legitimate battle tactic.

In one of the first acts of piracy against Spain and its newfound gold supply, the corsair Jean Fleury seized four Spanish ships as they passed near the Azores and claimed their treasure which included riches from the recent conquest of Mexico for Francis I.

The extent of the profits to be made from these raids encouraged other privateers to travel further afield, even to the Caribbean itself, in order to attack not just ships but coastal settlements. By the middle of the century as many as thirty French raiding ships made the journey to the Caribbean every year; the number indicates not only how much profit these French sailors were making but also how familiar they were becoming with the ocean and its shipping routes.

There remained, however, more of the Atlantic, and the new lands, to explore. Verrazzano travelled a great stretch of the American coast from Cape Fear on the North Carolina coast to Newfoundland thereby establishing the vast length of the continent and the extent of the obstacle it posed to reaching Asia.

If the details of these visits had been lost, they still left a mark on the collective memory leading many contemporaries to the conviction that land would be found in the west. By , after the first circumnavigation of the earth, the whole world seemed to have been revealed to Europeans; these remarks from contemporaries express it well:.

Cornell: Cornell University Press, M Cohen. London: Penguin Classics, Revised and Expanded ed. Geoffrey Brereton. London: Longman, The Travels of Marco Polo trans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Barrett ed.

Turnhout: Brepols, Halifax: Nimbus, Database of Icelandic Sagas: www. Virtual museum of New France. Colonies and Empires From the Middle Ages to the Age of Discovery Cabasset, Spain, first half of the seventeenth century The cabasset was one of the most typical helmets for infantrymen from the early sixteenth to the middle of the seventeenth century. Its distinguishing features were a narrow, usually flat brim, and an almond shaped skull terminating in small backward-turning spur or spike.

Owing to the technological progress in the field of firearms, the importance of personal armour declined considerably during the Early Modern period. For certain people of the common villages, without any head or ruler, assembled together in Beauvoisin. Battle of Crecy, ca. A gateway is a community at the edge of a hinterland serving as the collection point and transshipment station for goods from various parts of this hinterland back to the core area.

One day a fish of enormous size appeared swimming after the boat, spouting foam from its nostrils and ploughing through the waves in rapid pursuit to devour them. The rueful monster that pursued the servants of God was immediately slain and cut up into three parts in front of them, and its slayer returned to where it came from. Henry Harrisse, ca.