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

_______________________________ 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

_____________________________ 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

___________________________ 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