Weekly History Quiz No.229

The Battle of Long Tan, fought on August 18th, 1966, is a key battle in Australian military history, and the reason 18th August is designated as Australia’s official Vietnam Veterans’ Day. It was an early defining engagement for the 1st Australian Task Force (1 ATF) during their deployment in Vietnam, where the 108 men of D company, 6th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (6RAR), encountered a vastly superior Viet Cong (VC) force. The battle took place in a rubber plantation near the village of Long Tan in Phuoc Tuy Province, an area where Australia had been assigned responsibility for security.

Around 1610 the Earth entered a new human-dominated geological epoch, the Anthropocene. Human's impacts on the environment are immense: humans move more soil, rock and sediment each year than is transported by all other natural processes combined.

Known as French Somaliland, the colony was important to the French due to its strategic position on the Gulf of Aden.

Hobbes was the first modern philosopher to articulate a detailed social contract theory that appeared in his 1651 work  Leviathan. In it, Hobbes set out his doctrine of the foundation of states and legitimate governments and creating an objective science of morality.

This was informed by the chaos of the English Civil War Hobbes saw in the preceding years.

It was a pivotal naval battle fought between an alliance of Greek city-states under Themistocles, and the Persian Empire under King Xerxes.

Completed in Malta, where Caravaggio was inducted and briefly served as a knight, before being imprisoned and subsequently escaping.

In practice both Spain and Portugal found the Papal bull (proclamation) to be unclear and did not directly follow it. However, it resulted in them negotiating the Treaty of Tordesillas a year later, which assigned all the territory west of a line in the mid Atlantic to Spain, and that to the east to Portugal. This is a significant reason why Brazil, which lies east of the line, was colonised by the Portuguese, while Spain colonised much of the remainder of South and Central America, which was to the west.

Queen of England and Duchess of Normandy by her marriage to William the Conqueror, she spent many years as serving as a very successful regent of Normandy in William’s absence.

The origins of the Democratic donkey can be traced to the 1828 presidential campaign of Andrew Jackson. During that race, opponents of Jackson called him a jackass. However, rather than rejecting the label, Jackson, a hero of the War of 1812 who later served in the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate, was amused by it and included an image of the animal in his campaign posters.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a novel by English author D. H. Lawrence. An uncensored version was published in the United Kingdom in 1960, where it was the subject of an obscenity trial, which the publisher Penguin Books won. The prosecution was ridiculed for being out of touch with changing social norms when the chief prosecutor, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, asked if it was the kind of book "you would wish your wife or servants to read". The publicity lead to the rapid sale of three million copies of the book.