The Kragujevac massacre (21 October 1941) was the mass murder of almost
2,800 men and boys in the city of Kragujevac in the German-occupied
territory of Serbia by German soldiers during World War II. Coming in
reprisal for insurgent attacks that killed 10 German soldiers in the
Gornji Milanovac district, it followed a punitive German operation in
which 492 males were shot and four villages were burned down. The
victims included Serbs, Jews, Romani people, Muslims, Macedonians, and
Slovenes. The massacre exacerbated tensions between the two guerrilla
movements, the communist-led Partisans and the royalist, Serbian
nationalist Chetniks, and convinced Chetnik leader Draža Mihailović
that further attacks against the Germans would only result in more Serb
civilian deaths. Several senior German military officials were tried and
convicted during and after the Nuremberg Trials for their involvement in
the reprisal shootings. The massacre has been the subject of several
poems and feature films. Commemorated annually in Serbia, it is
memorialised at the October in Kragujevac Memorial Park and its
21st October Museum.
Read more: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kragujevac_massacre>
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Today's selected anniversaries:
1520:
The islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon were visited by
Portuguese explorer João Álvares Fagundes near Canada, who named them
"Islands of the 11,000 Virgins".
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Pierre_and_Miquelon>
1805:
Napoleonic Wars: Lord Nelson signalled "England expects that
every man will do his duty" to the rest of his Royal Navy forces before
the Battle of Trafalgar off the coast of Spain's Cape Trafalgar.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/England_expects_that_every_man_will_do_his_duty>
1867:
The first of the Medicine Lodge Treaties was signed between the
United States and several Native American tribes in the Great Plains,
requiring them to relocate to areas in present-day western Oklahoma.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicine_Lodge_Treaty>
1966:
A coal tip fell on the village of Aberfan, Wales, killing 144
people, mostly schoolchildren.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberfan_disaster>
1994:
North Korea and the United States signed the Agreed Framework
to limit North Korea's nuclear weapons program and to normalize
relations between the two.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agreed_Framework>
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Wiktionary's word of the day:
backstretch:
1. (athletics, horse racing) Synonym of back straight (“straight part of
a racetrack, running track, etc., opposite the finishing line”).
2. (horse racing) An area next to a racetrack used to stable the racehorses
and house employees.
3. (figuratively) The middle part of an event.
<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/backstretch>
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Wikiquote quote of the day:
The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of
man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other
according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and
spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by
that synthetic and magical power, to which I would exclusively
appropriate the name of Imagination.
--Samuel Taylor Coleridge
<https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Samuel_Taylor_Coleridge>