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The Second Battle of Bull Run was fought between August 28 and 30, 1862 as part of the American Civil War. It was the culmination of an offensive campaign waged by Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia against Union Major General John Pope’s Army of Virginia. It was a battle of much larger scale and numbers than the First Battle of Bull Run fought in 1861 on the same ground.

Confederate Major General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson captured the Union supply depot at Manassas Junction following a wide-ranging flanking march and threatening Pope’s line of communications with Washington, D.C. Jackson took up defensive positions of Stony Ridge. On August 28, 1862, Jackson attacked a Union column at Brawner’s Farm resulting in a stalemate. The wing of Lee’s army commanded by Major General James Longstreet broke through light Union resistance in the Battle of Thoroughfare Gap and approached the battlefield.

Pope became convinced that he had trapped Jackson and concentrated the bulk of his army against him. On August 29, Pope launched a series of assaults against Jackson’s position and they were repulsed with heavy casualties on both sides. On August 30, Pope renewed his attacks and massed Confederate artillery devastated a Union assault.

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William Friedkin is an Academy Award-winning American movie and television director, producer, and screenwriter born in Chicago, Illinois. He is best known for directed The Exorcist and The French Connection in the early 1970s.

After seeing Citizen Kane as a boy, Friedkin became fascinated with movies and began working for WGN-TV right after high school. He started his directorial career doing live TV shows and documentaries. In 1965, he moved to Hollywood and two years later released his first feature film, Good Times starring Sonny and Cher. In 1971, he released The French Connection, a gritty cop film starring Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider and shot in a visceral, documentary style. It won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.

Friedkin followed up with 1973’s The Exorcist, based on William Peter Blatty’s best-selling novel about a little girl possessed by the Devil. It revolutionized the horror genre and was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. A now overly confident Friedkin directed Sorcerer, a remake of the movie Wages of Fear, that came out around the same time as Star Wars. It was received negatively by critics and performed poorly at the box office. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, his films received lackluster reviews and modest box office returns, although, his crime film, To Live and Die in L.A., starring William Petersen and Willem Dafoe, has become a critical favorite.

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Scientific American is a popular science magazine published first weekly and later monthly since August 28, 1845, making it one of the oldest continuously published periodicals in the United States. It brings articles about new and innovative research to the amateur and lay audience.

It had a monthly circulation of roughly 555,000 US and 90,000 international as of December 2005. It is a forum where scientific theories and discoveries are explained to a broader audience. In the past, scientists interested in fields outside their own areas of expertise made up the magazine’s target audience. Now, the publication is aimed at educational general readers who are interested in scientific issues. The magazine was founded by Rufus M. Porter as a single-page newsletter and throughout its early years Scientific American put much emphasis on reports of what was going on at the US patent office.

The publication reported on a broad range of inventions that includes perpetual motion machines, an 1849 device for buoying vessels by Abraham Lincoln, and the universal joint which now finds a place in nearly every automobile manufactured. The magazine evolved into something of a “workbench” publication, similar to the 20th century incarnation of Popular Science.

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Ira Levin was born in New York City and grew up in the Bronx and Manhattan. He attended Drake University in Iowa for two years before transferring to New York University, from which he received a bachelor’s degree in 1950. While in college, he entered a television screenwriting contest sponsored by CBS. He was a runner-up and sold his script to NBC where it became an episode on an anthology suspense series in 1951.

While still in his twenties and writing for TV, Levin published his first novel, A Kiss Before Dying about a cold-blooded ambitious young man who murders his wealthy girlfriend, gets away with it, and gets involved with her sister. The novel won the 1954 Edgar Award for the best first novel from the Mystery Writers of America and it was adapted into a film twice – in 1956 with Robert Wagner and in 1991 with Matt Dillon.

Rosemary’s Baby was published in 1967 and told the story of a young New York bride who may have been impregnated by the Devil. It was made into a critically and commercially successful film in 1968, directed by Roman Polanski and starring Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes. The Stepford Wives was published in 1972 and featured women in an idyllic suburb who appear to have been replaced by subservient androids. It too was adapted into a film twice – in 1975 with Katharine Ross and Paula Prentiss and in 2004 with Nicole Kidman and Matthew Broderick. Levin died in November 2007 from natural causes.

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Krakatoa is a volcanic island in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra in Indonesia. It has erupted repeatedly, massively, and with disastrous consequences throughout recorded history. The best known eruption culminated in a series of massive explosions on August 26-27, 1883, which was among the most violent volcanic events in modern times.

The eruption was the equivalent to 200 megatons of TNT – about 13,000 times the yield of the Little Boy bomb (13 to 16 KT) that devastated Hiroshima, Japan. The 1883 eruption ejected more than 25 cubic kilometers of rock, ash, and pumice, and generated the loudest sound in historically reported. The cataclysmic explosion was distinctly heard as far away as Perth in Australia approximately 1,930 miles, and the island of Rodrigues near Mauritius approximately 3,000 miles. Near Krakatoa, 165 villages and towns were destroyed and 132 seriously damaged, at least 36, 417 people died, and many thousands were injured by the explosion.

The eruption destroyed two-thirds of the island of Krakatoa. Eruptions at the volcano since 1927 have built a new island in the same location, called Anak Krakatoa. Small eruptions continued throughout October and were reported through February 1884. In the aftermath of the eruption, it was found that the island of Krakatoa had almost entirely disappeared, except for the southern half of Rakata cone.

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Galileo Galilei was a Tuscan physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the scientific revolution. His achievements include improvements to the telescope and consequent astronomical observations, and support for Copernicanism. Galileo has been called the “father of modern observational astronomy,” the “father of modern physics,” the “father of science,” and the “Father of Modern Science.”

His contributions to observational astronomy include the telescopic confirmation of the phases of Venus, the discovery of the four largest satellites of Jupiter, named the Galilean moons in his honor, and the observation and analysis of sunspots. Based only on uncertain descriptions of the telescope, invented in the Netherlands in 1608, Galileo, in that same year, made a telescope with about 3x magnification, and later made others with up to about 32x magnification. With this improved device, he could see magnified, upright images on the Earth – it was what is known as a terrestrial telescope, or spyglass.

Galileo could also use it to observe the sky and for a time he was one of very few who could construct telescopes good enough for that purpose. On August 25, 1609, he demonstrated his first telescope to Venetian lawmakers. His work on the device made for a profitable sideline with merchants who found it useful for their shipping businesses and trading issues.

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Rock ‘n’ Roll High School is a 1979 musical comedy film produced by Roger Corman, directed by Allan Arkush, and featuring the American punk rock band The Ramones. The film also starred P.J. Soles as the ultimate Ramones fan who dreams of meeting and giving them a song she wrote. She and her best friend attempt to go so see the band in concert but are opposed by Principal Togar (played by Mary Woronov) and must find a way to attend.

The film was originally called Girls Gym, then it was changed to Disco High by Corman, who wanted to capitalize on the disco craze, but was persuaded otherwise by Arkush. Originally, the filmmakers wanted Devo and then Van Halen before approaching the Ramones. They finally settled on Rock ‘n’ Roll High School after Arkush convinced Corman that the Ramones were the perfect band for the film. Guitarist Johnny Ramone was a huge fan of Corman’s films and when he heard that the producer was behind the film, he agreed to do it.

Shot in only 15 days, Rock ‘n’ Roll High School embodies the essence of the punk rock music that made the Ramones famous. Corman cannily marketed it as a Midnight Movie in the hopes that the same people who flocked religiously to The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) would come to see the Ramones. It was a modest commercial success upon its initial release. Repeated midnight screenings, coupled with steady appearances on TV, have helped the film endure over the years so that is has become a beloved cult classic.

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The Lockheed C-130 Hercules is an American four-engine turboprop military transport aircraft. It is the main tactical airlifter for many military forces worldwide. Over 40 models and variants of the Hercules serve more than 50 nations. The C-130 remains in production as the updated C-130J Super Hercules.

Capable of takeoffs and landings from unprepared runways, the C-130 was originally designed as a troop, medical evacuation, and cargo transport aircraft. The Hercules family has the longest continuous production run of any military aircraft in history. The Korean War showed that World War II-era transports were inadequate for modern warfare. On February 2, 1951, the United States Air Force issued a General Operating Requirement for a new transport that would have a capacity for 92 passengers, 72 combat troops or 64 paratroopers, takeoff capability from short and unprepared strips, and the ability to fly with one engine shut down.

The first flight of the YC-130 prototype was made on August 23, 1954 from the Lockheed plant in Burbank, California on a 61-minute flight to Edwards Air Force Base. After the two prototypes were completed, production began in Marietta, Georgia, where more than 2,000 C-130s have been built. Deliveries began in December 1956, continuing until the introduction of the C-130B model in 1959.

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Michael Collins was an Irish revolutionary leader, Minister for Finance in the First Dail of 1919, Director of Intelligence for the IRA, and member of the Irish delegation during the Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations. Members and supporters of Fine Gael regard him as their movement’s founding father.

On the road to Bandon, at the village of “the Mouth of Flowers,” Collins’ column of army vehicles stopped to ask directions. The man they asked was a member of the local Anti-Treaty IRA. An ambush was then prepared for the convoy when it made its return journey back to Cork city. Collins would return by the same route as the two other roads from Bandon to Cork had been rendered impassable by Republicans. When Collins and his men returned, five ambushers on the scene opened fire on the convoy.

The ambushers had laid a mine on the scene but they had disconnected it at the time of the attack. Collins was killed in the subsequent gun battle which lasted approximately 20 minutes. He was the only fatality in the action, killed while exchanging rifle fire with the ambushers. Under the cover of the armored car, Collins’ body was loaded into the tour car and driven back to Cork where it was then shipped to Dublin. His body lay in state for three days in Dublin City Hall where tens of thousands of mourners filed past his casket to pay their respects.

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Born in Ankara, Turkey, Joe Strummer was the co-founder, lyricist, rhythm guitarist, and lead singer of the English punk rock band The Clash. His family spent much time moving from place to place and he spent his childhood in places like Cairo, Mexico City and Bonn. He developed a love of rock music listening to records by Little Richard and The Beach Boys as well as Woody Guthrie.

In 1973, Strummer joined with some friends to form a band called The Vultures. After the band fell apart in 1974, he formed another one called the 101’ers and opened for then-unknown band the Sex Pistols on April 3, 1976. Some time after this show, Strummer was approached by Mick Jones and ended up forming a new band with bassist Paul Simonon, drummer Terry Chimes and guitarist Keith Levene. Simonon named them The Clash and they made their debut on July 4, 1976 opening for the Sex Pistols.

The Clash are considered to be one of the most overtly political, explosive and exciting bands in rock and roll history. Their album London’s Calling was voted best album of the 1980s by Rolling Stone magazine. During their tour in support of the Combat Rock album, the band members began to argue a lot and with tensions high, they began to fall apart. After firing Mick Jones and releasing the album Cut the Crap in 1985, which was panned by fans and critics alike, Strummer disbanded The Clash. He went on to work in film, composing the score to Walker and appearing in Straight to Hell among other films. He began producing solo records in 1989. Strummer died on December 22, 2002, the victim of an undiagnosed congenital heart defect.

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