Posts Tagged ‘shin-kickers from history’
Abd al-Qadir Fights Back
If the French hadn’t invaded Algeria in 1830, Algerian emir Abd al-Qadir would probably have been content to follow his grandfather and father as the spiritual leader of the Qadiriyah Sufi order. In the fall of 1832, when the French began to expand their control into the Algerian interior, the Arab tribes of Oran…
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Shin-kickers From History: Dr. B. R. Ambedkar–Untouchable, Reformer, Founding Father
Dr. Bhim Rao Ambedkar (1891-1956) was one of the great men of the twentieth century, though he is virtually unknown in the west. Untouchable Ambedkar was born into the “untouchable” caste of Mahars in the Indian state of Maharashtra. At the time, untouchables suffered under legal restrictions that made the Jim Crow laws of the…
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Edith Cavell: “Patriotism Is Not Enough”
Not all the heroes of the First World War fought in the trenches. Forty-nine year old British nurse Edith Cavell was the director of the first nurses’ training school in Belgium. When Germany occupied Brussels in the first month of the war, Cavell refused to leave. She turned her clinic into a Red Cross hospital…
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