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    Museum Pieces 2: More Forgotten History, Science, and Mystery Behind Some of the Most Interesting Museum Exhibits and Historical Places in the World
    Museum Pieces 2: More Forgotten History, Science, and Mystery Behind Some of the Most Interesting Museum Exhibits and Historical Places in the World
    Museum Pieces 2: More Forgotten History, Science, and Mystery Behind Some of the Most Interesting Museum Exhibits and Historical Places in the World
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    Museum Pieces 2: More Forgotten History, Science, and Mystery Behind Some of the Most Interesting Museum Exhibits and Historical Places in the World

    By Lenny Flank

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    About this ebook

    The unknown story behind historical places and exhibits from some of the most famous museums in the world, including the Smithsonian, the Field Museum, and others. Includes: Chicago 1968, The Whole World Was Watching; The Life and Death of Skylab; Airphibian, The Car That Flies; Gettysburg, The Strange Story of Private Wesley Culp; When Whales Walked; America's Oldest City; and more.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLenny Flank
    Release dateOct 29, 2014
    ISBN9781310370267
    Museum Pieces 2: More Forgotten History, Science, and Mystery Behind Some of the Most Interesting Museum Exhibits and Historical Places in the World
    Author

    Lenny Flank

    Longtime social activist, labor organizer, environmental organizer, antiwar.

    Read more from Lenny Flank

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      Museum Pieces 2 - Lenny Flank

      Museum Pieces 2

      More Forgotten History, Science, and Mystery Behind Some of the Most Interesting Museum Exhibits and Historical Places in the World

      by Lenny Flank

      © Copyright 2014 by Lenny Flank

      All rights reserved

      Smashwords ebook edition.

      Red and Black Publishers, PO Box 7542, St Petersburg, Florida, 33734

      http://www.RedandBlackPublishers.com

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Contents

      Apartheid in South Africa: A History

      May Day History: The Haymarket Riot

      The Pfeil Fighter: Push-Me Pull-You

      Chicago 1968: The Whole World Was Watching

      The INF Treaty: When the Nuclear Arms Race Got a Little Less MAD

      The Fish That Walked

      Craig Breedlove, the Spirit of America, and the Land Speed Record

      F-35 Lightning II: A History of the Most Expensive Military Program Ever

      Back From the Dead: The Story of the Coelacanth

      The Sky is Falling: The Life and Death of Skylab

      When Whales Walked

      The Mobile Quarantine Facility: Protecting the Earth From Moon Bugs

      Empire State Express No. 999: First Locomotive to Reach 100 mph

      The Gunship Philadelphia: Birth of the US Navy

      Apollo-Soyuz: When the Cold War Thawed Just a Little Bit

      The Airphibian: The Car That Flies

      The First Electric Cars

      The Course of Human Events: Writing the Declaration of Independence

      The Comrade's Car: The Tatraplan

      Our Lady of the Nile: Florida's Egyptian Mummy

      St Augustine FL: America's Oldest City

      The War Room: Churchill's Secret Underground Bunker

      The Wright Model B Airplane and the Patent Wars

      Queen of the Seas: The History of the RMS Queen Mary

      Gettysburg: The Strange Story of Private Wesley Culp

      Cahokia: The Forgotten City

      The Voyage of the Trieste

      The Vigeland Sculpture Park

      Pan Am: The World's First International Airline

      Avebury Stone Circle

      Mr Colt's Peacemaker

      The Viking Mars Mission

      Apartheid in South Africa: A History

      Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg, South Africa

      The first Europeans to reach southern Africa were the Dutch, in 1652. They established some outposts along the coast. In 1806, during the wars with Napoleon, the British arrived in the area and established an outpost at Cape Colony to protect their southern sea lanes between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. By the end of the 19th century, the British had established the provinces of Natal and Cape Colony, while the descendants of the Dutch, who now referred to themselves as Afrikaners or Boers, controlled the Orange Free State and the Transvaal provinces. The Boers were a strongly religious group, following a particularly hardline version of Calvinism. They had migrated away from the coastal areas into the interior, dislocating the native Africans in the process--a journey which they called The Great Trek. These conflicts produced a sense that the Afrikaners were a special people, blessed by God and destined to rule this land. It also produced a deep-seated and never-ending racism in the Afrikaners towards the African natives, who they viewed as sub-human.

      Incursions by the British into Afrikaner-controlled areas, particularly after the discovery of diamonds and gold in the interior, led to two conflicts at the end of the 19th century known as the Boer Wars. Also during this time, the British imported large numbers of people from India to serve as a cheap labor force.

      The British Government in London attempted to solve the underlying conflict between the English and Boer colonials with the 1910 Act of Union, which brought all four provinces together into a single nation--the Union of South Africa. Under the Union plan, South Africa would remain within the British Dominion, but was granted full political autonomy.

      The new Boer-dominated South African Government, under Louis Botha and Jan Smuts, quickly took steps to implement their heavily-racist Afrikaner ideology. South African society was divided into four racial groups: the Afrikaner and British Whites, the native African Bantus, the Indian Asians, and the mixed-race Coloreds--all of the non-Whites were collectively lumped together as Blacks. In 1923, the Pass Laws were imposed, which set up a system of internal passports carried by everyone, which restricted the movements of non-Whites. Only Whites (and, in the Cape Province, Coloreds) were allowed the right to vote, and in 1913 the Native Land Act restricted non-White ownership of land and made it illegal for all Blacks to own any land except in specified areas.

      This institutionalized racism did not happen without resistance. A brief rebellion began under the Zulu leader Bombaata, but it was crushed. Indian immigrant Mohandas (later Mahatma) Gandhi began his political career in South Africa by organizing nonviolent protests among the Indian populations of Transvaal and Natal. In 1911, an American-educated African lawyer, Pixley ka Isaka Seme, called upon African leaders to form a political organization to fight back. The result was the South African Native National Congress, which in 1923 changed its name to the African National Congress.

      During the First World War, the South African Government decided to enter the war on the side of the British. The ANC, hoping to gain British support for an end to the racist South African laws, also supported the war, and many South Africans, white and black, died in the trenches. Many Afrikaners, however, still resented the British, and after a failed Boer rebellion, J.B.M Hertzog formed the Nationalist Party, which preached a program of Afrikaner nationalism. By 1930, the Nationalist Party merged with the South Africa Party of Jan Smuts to form a coalition government under the new United Party. Hertzog served as Prime Minister, Smuts as Deputy Minister. In 1933, in response, a breakaway group formed by D.F. Malan split away to form the New National Party, which was even more virulent in its white supremacist nationalism.

      When the Second World War started in 1939, the still-simmering conflict between the British and the Afrikaners bubbled to the surface again. Hertzog argued for neutrality, but was over-ruled in a party caucus and was replaced as Prime Minister by Smuts, and the South African Government again decided to fight on Britain's side. Many Afrikaner nationalists, however, openly sympathized with the Nazis, and a faction formed a small underground pro-Nazi group called the Ossewabrandwag (Ox-Wagon Sentinals). Among its members were future South African Presidents John Vorster and P.W. Botha.

      In 1948, the New National Party, dominated by Afrikaner white supremacists, won the elections, and Apartheid, or separateness, became the ruling ideology of the state. A flurry of laws were passed which legally enshrined racism and white supremacy. Under the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act and the Immorality Amendment, interracial sex and marriages were outlawed; under the Abolition of Passes Act, the pass laws were actually tightened--Blacks were now required to carry a passbook with them at all times, and could not move from one area to another without permission. Under the Population Registration Act, the entire population of South Africa was registered by racial group. Under the Group Areas Act, land areas were assigned by racial group, and people who lived in the wrong areas were forcibly resettled (in Johannesburg, some 60,000 Bantu Africans were removed to the newly-built South West Township, known as Soweto; in Cape Town, 55,000 Asians and Coloreds were relocated from the part of town known as District Six). Under the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act, public areas such as beaches, swimming pools and restaurants were racially segregated; under the Separate Representation of Voters Act, the right to vote was limited to Whites only; and under the Bantu Education Act, a separate education system was set up for Blacks (but run entirely by Whites) to give appropriate education to each of the racial groups.

      To enable control of the population by the tiny white minority, South Africa was turned into a police state. The Suppression of Communism Act allowed the government to outlaw any subversive organization, while both individuals and organizations were subject to banning orders which prohibited them from writing, speaking in public, or attending public meetings. The Terrorism Act established the Bureau Of State Security (BOSS) which had authority to jail terrorists indefinitely without trial.

      The ultimate stage of the Apartheid policy was the formation of Bantustans or Bantu Homelands, which were small areas of marginal land set aside as independent states for the African populations. In theory, each homeland was to be a place where each major African tribe could have independence and self-rule, and all of the Africans were stripped of their South African citizenship and assigned to a particular Bantustan. In reality however the homelands were simply huge open-air prison camps, which functioned to keep the Africans away from the Whites until they were needed as pools of cheap labor. None of the world's nations ever recognized the legality of the homeland governments.

      Resistance to Apartheid soon coalesced around the African National Congress, which recognized that opposition only on a narrow ethnic basis would not be strong enough to defeat the white supremacists--only a unified mass organization made up of all the victims of Apartheid (as well as sympathetic Whites) would have the ability to challenge the Afrikaner power structure. Under the leadership of Albert Luthuli, Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, and Oliver Tambo, the ANC was heavily influenced by Gandhi's campaign of nonviolent non-cooperation. In June 1952, the ANC and other anti-apartheid groups began a Campaign to Defy Unjust Laws, a widespread civil disobedience protest that placed the ANC at the center of the freedom movement. One of ANC's strongest supporters was the mostly-White South African Communist Party, which had itself been outlawed by the regime. In 1955, the ANC issued the Freedom Charter, calling for a united non-racial democratic government in South Africa.

      The ANC was not without its rivals and opposition, however. In 1959, the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) was formed, which rejected the ANC's policy of working together with sympathetic Indians and Whites, and argued instead that Africans themselves must carry out the work of liberating Africans. One of the offshoots of the PAC was the Black Consciousness Movement, led by Steven Biko, which preached the South African equivalent of Black Power.

      In March 1960, the PAC organized a mass protest against the pass laws, in Sharpeville. The unarmed crowd was fired on by police with machine guns, and at least 60 people were killed. Both the PAC and the ANC were quickly outlawed, and over 18,000 people were rounded up and arrested.

      A short time later, the Apartheid regime announced its withdrawal from the British Dominion and the formation of the independent Republic of South Africa. In response, the ANC organized a stay-at-home strike, which became the target of brutal police repression.

      The Sharpeville Massacre and the stay-at-home strike convinced the ANC that nonviolent protest would never be effective against a regime as brutal as the Afrikaner state, and in 1961 Nelson Mandela was given responsibility for organizing an armed wing to carry out guerrilla attacks against the regime. Known as Umkonto We Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the guerrillas planned to target the symbolic installations of Apartheid, such as pass offices, police stations and courts. When the Western nations, alarmed by the presence of South African Communist Party members in the organization, labelled the ANC as a terrorist group, Mandela turned instead to the Soviet Union for weapons and training.

      In 1962, Mandela, Sisulu and eight other anti-apartheid leaders were arrested in Rivonia and charged with treason and sabotage. The government asked for the death penalty, but a wave of international pressure forced them to settle for a sentence of life in prison instead. Mandela and the others were imprisoned at Robben Island, and Oliver Tambo took over as head of the ANC.

      After the Rivonia trial, the Apartheid regime faced more and more international condemnation. In 1962, the UN passed resolution 1761, declaring Apartheid to be a criminal system in violation of international laws, and formed a UN Special Commission Against Apartheid. The International Olympics Committee voted to exclude South Africa from the Games. In 1974, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution to expel South Africa completely from the UN--but that resolution was vetoed by France, Britain and the United

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