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By the time of the Civil War, mercury poisoning had reduced countless numbers of factory workers to physical wrecks. Everybody knew the “Danbury shakes”. Erethism mercurialis or “Mad hatter’s Disease”, goes a long way to understanding Thomas Corbett.
The largest fresh water system on the planet, the Great Lakes of North America are estimated to hold no fewer than 6,000 shipwrecks and the loss of some 30,000 lives. Lake Superior alone forms the watery grave for some 350 wrecks, fewer than half of which have ever been found.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund (www.vvmf.org) began work in 2009 on a “Wall of Faces”, a virtual compendium containing a photo and a story to go with it for each of the 58,318 service members whose names inscribed on The Wall. In 2017, the organization was still looking for 6,000+ photographs. Today, fewer than 200…
We’ve all experienced that “oh shit” moment. Words you wish you hadn’t said. The text or email you wish you could unsend. Take heart. You will never be that sailor who accidentally fired a live torpedo. At the president of the United States.
In an alternate history, the June 1914 assassination of the heir-apparent to the Habsburg Empire may have produced nothing more than a regional squabble. Cooler heads could have prevailed, the diplomatic crisis of July resulting in nothing more than a policing action in the Balkans. As it was, mutual distrust and entangling alliances combined with adherence to…
“None of the state-of-the-art weather forecasts and wave models—the information upon which all ships, oil rigs, fisheries, and passenger boats rely—had predicted these behemoths. According to all of the theoretical models at the time under this particular set of weather conditions, waves of this size should not have existed”.
For most people, October 31, 1883, passed pleasantly enough. Fall festivals, children bobbing for apples and young women consulting mirrors or tossing nuts into fires, to see whom they would marry. Not so, Henry Rathbone. He had monsters in his head.
Bill Mauldin was a reporter, a free-range cartoonist roaming the European theater of WW2. He told the stories of the common soldier through the eyes of two characters, "Willie & Joe," usually at the rate of six strips per week.
There are 13 steps leading to the gallows, where the condemned meets the 13 knots of the hangman’s noose. The guillotine’s blade falls 13 feet. Diana hit the 13th pillar at Place d’Alma. Tupac was shot on Friday the 13th, and Fidel Castro was born on one.
The US chapter of Fenian Brotherhood was founded in 1858, based on the idea that Ireland should be free of English rule to become an independent, self-governing Republic. The Brotherhood traced its lineage back to 1758. By 1866, many of the membership were battle hardened veterans of the Civil War, ended only a year before.…
Born April 5, 1761, Sybil Ludington was barely sixteen at the time of her ride. From Poughkeepsie to what is now Putnam County and back, the “Female Paul Revere” rode across the lower Hudson River Valley, covering 40 miles in the pitch dark of night, alerting her father’s militia to the danger and urging they…
In 1974, logger Oliver ‘Porky’ Bickar chartered a helicopter and flew 70 old tires to the peak of the long-dormant Mount Edgecumbe volcano in Alaska. Dousing the pile with gasoline and setting the thing alight, townspeople gaped at the ominous black cloud rising from the volcano. Local police and fire were in on the gag…
“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then…
Fish flopped in the dry riverbed as, upstream, factories ground to a halt. Souvenir hunters and daredevils walked out on the dry river bed. Some even drove buggies. One unit of the United States Army cavalry paraded back and forth across the river. Treasure hunters found artifacts from the War of 1812: muskets, bayonets, even…
“In time of war, soldiers, however sensible, care a great deal more on some occasions about slaking their thirst than about the danger of enteric fever. Better known as typhoid, the disease is often spread by drinking contaminated water”. – Winston Churchill
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Possessed of all the physical prowess of youth, the individual assassin was well-read and highly intelligent, expertly trained in combat tactics, the art of disguise, the ways of silent infiltration and the skills of the expert horseman.