Spitfire Vb AB910 - Cotswold Airshow, Kemble 2011
The RAF Battle of Britain Memorial Flight's Supermarine Spitfire Vb, AB910, displaying at the Cotswold Airshow 2011.
Built at Castle Bromwich in 1941, Spitfire AB910 had a remarkable front-line operational career spanning almost 4 years. The aircraft was initially allocated to 222 (Natal) Squadron at North Weald on 22 August 1941 but was soon re-allocated to 130 Squadron with whom it flew several convoy patrols and also escort patrols to the daylight bombing raids against the battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau in December 1941.
In June 1942, AB910 was delivered to 133 (Eagle) Squadron at Biggin Hill. She flew 29 operational missions with this unit, including 4 sorties on 19 August 1942 during the fierce aerial battles in support of the Dieppe Raid, her pilots being credited with one Do217 destroyed and one damaged during these combats. AB910 continued to fly operationally up to July 1944, serving with 242, 416 and 402 (RCAF) Squadrons. With 402 Squadron she flew numerous cover patrols over the Normandy invasion beach heads on D-Day itself (6 June 1944) and on subsequent days.
In addition to these operational assignments, AB910 was held on charge by various maintenance units and, after mid-July 1944, she was relegated to support duties with 53 OTU at Hibaldstow and then with 527 Squadron (a radar calibration unit).
On 14 February 1945, whilst at Hibaldstow, AB910 famously flew with an unauthorised passenger. LACW Margaret Horton, a WAAF ground-crew fitter, had been sitting on the tail whilst the aircraft taxied out to the take-off point (as was standard practice) without the pilot, Flight Lieutenant Neil Cox, realising she was there. The pilot took off with Margaret still on the tail. The combination of her weight on the tail and her grip on the elevator very nearly had disastrous results but fortunately the pilot was able to regain control and one circuit later he landed with a very frightened WAAF still wrapped around the tail!
In 1947 AB910 was purchased by Group Captain Alan Wheeler and was placed on the civil register as G-AISU for air racing. After a heavy landing during the Kings Cup Air Race in 1953, she was returned to Vickers-Armstrong where she was refurbished and subsequently flown regularly by Jeffrey Quill until being donated to the Flight in 1965.
AB910 is presented as Spitfire Mk Vb, EN951/RF-D, the aircraft of Squadron Leader Jan Zumbach, Commanding Ofiicer of 303 (Polish) Squadron in 1942.
Slavery in the United States | Wikipedia audio article
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Slavery in the United States
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- Socrates
SUMMARY
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Slavery in the United States was the legal institution of human chattel enslavement, primarily of Africans and African Americans, that existed in the United States of America in the 18th and 19th centuries. Slavery had been practiced in British America from early colonial days, and was legal in all Thirteen Colonies at the time of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It lasted in about half the states until 1865, when it was prohibited nationally by the Thirteenth Amendment. As an economic system, slavery was largely replaced by sharecropping.
By the time of the American Revolution (1775–1783), the status of slave had been institutionalized as a racial caste associated with African ancestry. When the United States Constitution was ratified (1789), a relatively small number of free people of color were among the voting citizens (male property owners). During and immediately following the Revolutionary War, abolitionist laws were passed in most Northern states and a movement developed to abolish slavery. Northern states depended on free labor and all had abolished slavery by 1805. The rapid expansion of the cotton industry in the Deep South after the invention of the cotton gin greatly increased demand for slave labor to pick cotton when it all ripened at once, and the Southern states continued as slave societies. Those states attempted to extend slavery into the new Western territories to keep their share of political power in the nation. Southern leaders also wanted to annex Cuba as a slave territory. The United States became polarized over the issue of slavery, split into slave and free states, in effect divided by the Mason–Dixon line which delineated (free) Pennsylvania from (slave) Maryland and Delaware.
Congress during the Jefferson administration prohibited the importation of slaves, effective 1808, although smuggling (illegal importing) via Spanish Florida was not unusual. Domestic slave trading, however, continued at a rapid pace, driven by labor demands from the development of cotton plantations in the Deep South. More than one million slaves were sold from the Upper South, which had a surplus of labor, and taken to the Deep South in a forced migration, splitting up many families. New communities of African-American culture were developed in the Deep South, and the total slave population in the South eventually reached 4 million before liberation.As the West was developed for settlement, the Southern state governments wanted to keep a balance between the number of slave and free states to maintain a political balance of power in Congress. The new territories acquired from Britain, France, and Mexico were the subject of major political compromises. By 1850, the newly rich cotton-growing South was threatening to secede from the Union, and tensions continued to rise. Many white Southern Christians, including church ministers, attempted to justify their support for slavery as modified by Christian paternalism. The largest denominations, the Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches, split over the slavery issue into regional organizations of the North and South. When Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election on a platform of halting the expansion of slavery, seven states broke away to form the Confederacy. The first six states to secede held the greatest number of slaves in the South. Shortly after, the Civil War began when Confederate forces attacked the US Army's Fort Sumter. Four additional slave states then seceded. Due to Union measures such as the Confiscation Acts and Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, the war effectively ended slavery, even before ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865 formally ended the legal institution throughout the United States.