Weekly History Quiz No.269

The Easter Rising, also known as the Easter Rebellion, was an armed insurrection in Ireland during Easter Week in April 1916 with the aim of establishing an independent Irish Republic while the United Kingdom was fighting the First World War.

The most recent known date from Norse settlements in Greenland is 1430. The Spanish reached the Americas in 1492.

The Berlin blockade and airlift was one of the first major international crises of the Cold War. During the multinational occupation of post–World War II Germany, the Soviet Union blocked the Western Allies’ railway, road, and canal access to the sectors of Berlin under Western control. It lasted from June 1948 to May 1949.

The Berlin Wall was constructed in 1961.

The Cuban Missile Crisis took place in 1962.

The Iran–Contra affair took place from 1985-87.

The beginnings of the modern era of cancer chemotherapy can be traced directly to the introduction of chemical warfare. A German air raid on Bari destroyed a ship carrying chemical weapons. Autopsies of mustard gas victims suggested that profound lymphoid and myeloid suppression had occurred after exposure. Dr. Stewart Alexander, a US chemical weapons expert, theorised that since mustard gas all but ceased the division of certain types of somatic cells whose nature was to divide fast, it could also potentially be put to use in helping to suppress the division of certain types of cancerous cells. This led to the discovery of nitrogen mustard, a chemical warfare agent, as an effective treatment for cancer.

In a 1495 Exchequer Roll King James IV of Scotland orders that John Cor use 'eight bolls of malt to make whisky'. This is the first written record of the distillation of whisky.

Occurring during the German Spring Offensive, it saw British Mark IV tanks supported by predominantly Australian infantry counter-attacking against German A7V tanks.

Henrietta Lacks was an African-American woman from Virginia whose cancer cells are the source of the HeLa cell line. This was the first immortalized human cell line, becoming one of the most important cell lines in medical research. She had a biopsy taken in 1951, which was used for research. She wasn't informed of this, nor did she give her consent. She died of cervical cancer the same year. Her family were only informed that the cell line was being used in 1975. The HeLa cell line is still in use today, despite the family raising privacy concerns about their genetic information being published without their consent.

Cheese - 8,000 BCE

Pizza - 600 BCE

Fish Sauce - 400 BCE

Pasta - 400 BCE

Founded in 1911 in Endicott, New York, as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, it was renamed International Business Machines in 1924. IBM’s inventions include the ATM, floppy disk, hard disk drive, magnetic stripe card, relational databases, the SQL programming language and UPC barcodes.

From the early 1930s IBM’s Hollerith punch card and alphabetical accounting equipment was used by the Nazi’s to categorize citizens of Germany and other German occupied nations. This data was then used to round-up Jews and other targeted groups, and to facilitate the bureaucracy of the Holocaust.

Hyundai was founded in 1967, Texas Instruments in 1930 and Apple in 1976

Rapa Nui was first settled by Polynesians around 1200 CE. They started constructing Moai relatively soon after arriving, and continued to construct them for the next 450 years.