Vol.14 No.3

Soviets had launched the first man-made
satellite, Sputnik, and a mere few months
after Kennedy’s inauguration, a Russian
cosmonaut became the first man to orbit
the Earth.
Kennedy responded by declaring in a
speech before Congress in May 1961 that
“this nation should commit itself to
achieving the goal, before this decade is
out, of landing a man on the Moon and
returning him safely to the Earth.”
Kennedy continued the push to surpass
the Soviets in the space race when he
gave a memorable speech at Rice
University the following year:
Why, some say, the moon? Why choose this
as our goal? And they may well ask why
climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years
ago, fly the Atlantic?… We choose to go to
the moon. We choose to go to the moon in
this decade and do the other things, not
because they are easy, but because they
are hard, because that goal will serve to
organize and measure the best of our
energies and skills, because that challenge
is one that we are willing to accept, one we
are unwilling to postpone, and one which
we intend to win….
Kennedy’s challenge inspired the
American people and, though he did not
live to see it, the ultimate success of the
nation’s space program in landing a man
on the moon boosted American
confidence at a time when the Vietnam
War was simultaneously sapping it and
indeed threatening to break asunder the
bonds of American society.
Ronald Reagan determines to defeat
the “Evil Empire” (1981)
In his long-range view of events, Ronald
Reagan displayed the conservative’s
appreciation for history and the
conservative’s rejection of the
provincialism of the present. This
approach to history was most evident in
the American president’s attitude toward
the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
“The West will not contain Communism;
it will transcend Communism,” he boldly
declared at Notre Dame University in
1981. “We will not bother to denounce it,
we’ll dismiss it as a sad, bizarre chapter
in human history whose last pages are
even now being written.” In March of
1983, he famously labeled the Soviet
Union an “evil empire,” warning an
audience of Christian evangelicals:
So, I urge you to speak out
against those who would place the
United States in a position of military
and moral inferiority. You know, I’ve
always believed that old Screwtape
reserved his best efforts for those of
you in the church. So, in your
discussions of the nuclear freeze
proposals, I urge you to beware the
temptation of pride—the temptation
of blithely declaring yourselves above
it all and label both sides equally at
fault, to ignore the facts of history and the
aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to
simply call the arms race a giant
misunderstanding and thereby remove
yourself from the struggle between right
and wrong and good and evil.
Despite criticism of his confrontational
attitude from all sides of the political
spectrum, Reagan’s resoluteness finally
compelled Soviet leader Mikhail
Gorbachev to accept an agreement to
reduce the two countries’ nuclear
stockpiles and exposed the moral,
economic, and political rot that infested
the heart of Soviet Communism. Less
than three years after Reagan left office,
the Soviet Union was dissolved. As Jan
Ruml, a former Czech dissident, put it
after the Velvet Revolution in
Czechoslovakia: “The fact that someone
out there called communism by its
proper name and actually did something
to promote freedom and democracy
helped us a great deal. Ronald Reagan
was the man instrumental in bringing
down communism.”
Post-Reagan paleo-conservatism has
largely adopted a pacifist attitude toward
war and conflict and cringes at the notion
of going abroad “in search of monsters to
destroy.” Yet, like it or not, there are
ideologies, religions, and countries that
seek to destroy the West, and to
acknowledge such realities does not
entail embracing schemes to make the
world safe for democracy. Nor does it
make one a “neo-con,” but in fact it makes
one a conservative, who in the spirit of
J.R.R. Tolkien, recognizes that “there is
some good in this world, and it’s worth
fighting for.”
African American develops first cell
phone On July 6th, 1971, Henry T.
Sampson invented the “gamma-electric
cell”, which pertains to Nuclear Reactor
use. According to Dr. Sampson, the
Gamma Electric Cell, patented July 6,
1971, Patent No. 3,591,860 produces
stable high-voltage output and current to
detect radiation in the ground. April 3rd,
1973, Motorola engineer Marty Cooper
placed the first
public call
from a
cellphone
according to
the Verge. In
midtown
Manhattan,
Cooper called
Joel Engel —
head of rival
research
department
Bell Labs — saying “Joel, this is Marty. I’m
calling you from a cell phone, a real
handheld portable cell phone.” The call
was placed on a Motorola DynaTAC
8000x, which weighed 2.5 pounds, a far
cry from today’s 4-ounce handsets.
Group of Americans instrumental in
developing the Internet (Al Gore is not
among them) - MIT developers and
associates - J.C.R. Licklider, Ivan
Sutherland, Bob Taylor, Lawrence G.
Roberts, Leonard Kleinrock, Thomas
Merrill, Frank Heart, Bob Kahn
Howard Frank, Doug Engelbart,
Elizabeth Feinler, Glen Culler, and
Burton Fried allowed users to finally
develop applications.
You could name all the men and
women that contributed, to radio,
television. motion pictures, medical
achievements, acadania, theolgical giants
like Billy Graham and the list would
never end. Americans have contributed
more to modern history than every other
nation combined.
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