Karen Hill

REO Speedwagon was the name of an early 1900s flatbed truck, put out by the REO Motor Vehicle Company. The company was named after its founder, Ransom Eli Olds. After Ransom Olds sold his Oldsmobile Company in 1904, he couldn’t legally use his name again for a second company, and opted for his initials instead: … Read more

According to legend, Greek playwright Aeschylus met his death when a hungry eagle mistook his bald head for a rock and dropped a tortoise on it. Hey, sounds plausible to us, especially when you consider some of the other ways famous people in history have died: Curiosity, plain and simple, killed Pliny the Elder. According … Read more

It has been a long-standing practice at Apple to name their in-house, test-model computers after much-respected people. However, when Carl Sagan first got whiff that the company was calling their pre-released Power Mac 7100 the “Sagan,” he was less than flattered. He complained, and the company changed the name of the in-house computer to “BHA.” … Read more

Andrew Carnegie made his millions in Pittsburgh steel. He then sold his company to J. P. Morgan in 1901 and became the richest man in the world with over $500 million dollars, about $10.3 billion in today’s money. When he retired, Carnegie put all of his energy into writing essays and books devoted to the … Read more

By all indications, steel was first discovered and produced in eastern Africa sometime around 1400 B.C. The technology spread slowly; it wasn’t until the first century A.D. that the rest of the continent was also producing steel. Africans were first elsewhere, too. Even the Iron Age had come early to the continent, probably in the … Read more

For centuries, various regions of Scotland have always made and worn specific types of prints or tartans. The design depended on what plant dyes were available in the area. However, the idea of a set pattern for the different clans is a relatively new one and wouldn’t have been possible until the onset of chemical … Read more

No, William Wallace, also known as “Braveheart”, didn’t paint himself or his comrades before going into battle. This was the stuff of Hollywood screenwriter Randall Wallace (no relation) and his director sidekick, Mel Gibson. It proved a good theatrical addition, and didn’t substantially change the real story of the Scottish hero. The same can’t be … Read more

Forget everything you know: “Mc” isn’t the Irish equivalent to the Scottish “Mac,” nor does the difference denote socioeconomic status. “Mc” is simply an abbreviation of “Mac.” Any amateur genealogist has learned to be phonetically tolerant in the search for last names, and the Mac bunch is no exception. Incidentally, “Mac” is the Gaelic word … Read more

The British considered Celtic music to be a destabilizing force, galvanizing resistance, stirring up emotions, and reminding the Irish of their pre-occupation history. They outlawed it, and Queen Elizabeth I decreed that musicians were to be arrested and hanged on the spot. Queen Elizabeth faced a hostile, and in some places, a virtually autonomous Catholic … Read more

The history of the Gaelic languages is complicated, beginning over 2,500 years ago, and it involves many conquerings and several migrations. Originally, they spoke the same language and came from the same people, the Celts. The Celts eventually broke off into various groups all over Europe, ranging from the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) to … Read more

No, there never were any native snakes in Ireland, and St. Patrick didn’t really drive them away. Also, despite legend, he didn’t use the shamrock to illustrate the Christian doctrine of the three-Gods-in-one trinity. The first written mention of this idea didn’t appear until ten centuries after Patrick’s death. One explanation to the legend is … Read more

The Blarney Stone is so named because it resides at the top of Blarney Castle just outside the town of Blarney in Cork, Ireland. It’s at least the third castle that’s been built on the same spot, this one in the 15th century by the Lord of Blarney, Cormac Laidhiv McCathy. McCathy, like all Irish … Read more

Where did the dollar symbol come from and what does it mean? It’s a good question without a definitive answer. However, there is a likely explanation that is reluctantly accepted, in lieu of any exact proof of origin. In early America, various currency was used: French, English, Italian, and Spanish, whatever coins were available. The … Read more

A fathom is now considered exactly six feet, but it wasn’t always quite so standardized. In the days of the Vikings, they measured one fathom by extending their arms as far as they could reach; “fathom” in old Norse means “embrace.” A fathom is a unit of length in the Imperial system, and was used … Read more

No, the phrase “rule of thumb” did not refer to an old English Law that stated that men could beat their wives with a stick smaller than a thumb’s width. Although the myth has been cluelessly cited as fact over and over again in news articles and in other media outlets, there was no such … Read more

Yup, the mile 5280 feet instead of an even 5000 or something and you can blame it on the Tudors and their fondness for the furlong. Originally, the mile was 5,000 feet, but Elizabeth I decided that the mile should be divisible by an equal number of furlongs, one furlong measures exactly 220 yards, or … Read more

The length of a Marathon is yet another distance forever changed by the British royalty. The marathon used to be less than 26 miles. For the modern Olympics in 1896, the marathon distance was determined by the distance from Marathon Bridge, where the race began, to the Olympic stadium in Athens, 24.85 miles, or an … Read more

Long after the rest of the world, the Ottomans, the Chinese, the Byzantines, had realized the finer points of anatomy and physiology, western Europe stayed stuck in an old paradigm they had learned from the ancient Greeks. The practice of bloodletting was widespread, and had been practiced for over 2,000 years. It went something like … Read more

It’s a common myth that the hazards of smoking weren’t known until sometime in this century. Almost as long as tobacco has inhabited western civilization, most have been aware of its serious ill effects. Explorer Rodrigo de Jerez was probably the first European to take up smoking, sometime around 1492 when he accompanied Columbus on … Read more

Britain had discovered that German spies were using pigeons to send messages to bases over the English Channel during World War II. S.S. leader Heinrich Himmler was a pigeon fancier, and in fact was the president of the German National Pigeon Society. The Nazis confiscated pigeons from their owners to use for the war effort, … Read more

Mata Hari was executed by a French firing squad for being a German spy during World War I. She had been popular in Europe as a “Javanese” dancer but was really Dutch, born with the somewhat less exotic name Margaretha Geertruida Zelle. Mata Hari was her stage name. Margaretha Geertruida Zelle was born on 7 … Read more

During World War II, “Tokyo Rose” was the nickname for several Japanese deejays who broadcast propaganda to American sailors in the Pacific. The most notorious one was Iva Ikuko Toguri (aka, “Orphan Ann”) a Japanese American born and raised in Los Angeles. She became stranded in Japan after visiting relatives there prior to the Japanese … Read more

Operation Dirty Trick and Operation Bingo were early 1960s American schemes to create a politically defensible excuse for invading Cuba. Operation Bingo was a plan to fake an attack on the United States Guantanamo Bay military base as a pretext for a devastating U.S. military assault on Havana. Operation Dirty Trick was a plan to … Read more

When Julia Child was 37 years old, she enrolled in the famous Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris. Before that, she took hints from the classic The Joy of Cooking and experimented often on her new husband and their friends. Before that, you ask? Before that, Julia McWilliams, she hadn’t yet married Paul Child, served … Read more

Yes England was connected to Europe by a land bridge at one point in history, and not that long ago. Early humans walked over the land bridge to England about 500,000 years ago and stayed there, despite the depressing winters. They did this even as the waters rose and made escape to the Riviera impossible. … Read more

We may never know all of the ways, but from the ones we do know of, you can certainly see the effect that reading too many James Bond novels had on John Kennedy and his staff. Here are some of the wilder plots the United States government had to kill Fidel Castro after he took … Read more

No, prehistoric Neanderthals did not make any significant tools and art or develop any complex language. They therefore did not have a culture that we know of. Even though they did have brains as large as ours and lived concurrently with Homo sapiens at a time when humans were making tools, painting caves, and traveling … Read more

The first of the African Roman emperors, Septimius Severus ruled Rome from 193 to 211 A.D. He was born in April of 146 in the ancient city of Lepcis Magna, now modern day Libya, which was, at the time, part of the Roman Empire. His family had become Roman citizens when he was young, and … Read more

Besides being the name of a blood-sucking “tsetse” fly that spreads African sleeping sickness, it’s also a Bantu people’s name for the lightning character in an African creation story. Is there a connection between the two? Nobody seems to know. Tsetse is sometimes spelled tzetze and also known as tik-tik flies, are large biting flies … Read more

All we know is that we giggle like school kids whenever we have the occasion to say “Homo Erectus.” Even knowing that it means “upright man” doesn’t dampen our exuberant mirth. In fact, it only seems to add to it. But we don’t get out much, and we aren’t paleontologists, so we suspect they’re a … Read more

The answer to where did the Cajuns come from lies thousands of miles northeast in Acadia, a French colony founded by about 100 families near Canada’s Bay of Fundy in 1604. During the French and Indian War in 1755, British troops drove the French Acadians from their homes. Of the 10,000 refugees, about 4,000 of … Read more

The Equal Rights Amendment was an amendment to the United States Constitution that read: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” In fact, it was such a commonsensical no-brainer that the U.S. Congress and 35 of the necessary … Read more

The first woman was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1917. Montana had granted women’s suffrage in 1914. Three years later, they elected Jeanette Rankin to serve in Congress. She served twice: from 1917 to 1919, and again in 1943. Rankin is also remembered for being the only congressional vote against American entry … Read more

St. Patrick’s Day is only about a hundred years old, and it didn’t actually originate in Ireland. It came from ye old Emerald Island, Manhattan in New York City, at the beginning of the 20th century, when Irish immigrants to New York’s Lower East Side adopted corned beef from their Jewish neighbors. Another tradition that … Read more

All the extra bits of the Lady Goldiva story were embellishments of prudish churchmen in the 17th century. You know the elements: At noon on the appointed day, the streets were completely cleared of people; Godiva’s freakishly long hair hid all the good parts anyway; and a “Peeping Tom” looked out his window and was … Read more

Because so many of the great British legends have been proven to be patently untrue, many people assume that the Lady Godiva story of her riding a horse through the streets of Coventry England naked is equally false. Yet according to accounts by 13th- and 14th-century historians, the core of the story is true. Here’s … Read more

The word “smog” was originally coined by a French scientist, Dr. Des Voeux, at a July 3, 1905, Public Health Council meeting in London as a description for its worrisome pollution-saturated fog. The word was created by blending the words “smoke” and “fog.” The July 26, 1905 edition of the London newspaper Daily Graphic stated … Read more

Bonfire Night is another name for Guy Fawkes Day, a uniquely British holiday celebrated on the evening of 5th November every year. Celebrations are held in every town and neighborhood, with huge bonfires, children in masks, firecrackers, and burning effigies of Guy Fawkes, the 17th-century traitor who, along with his band of co-conspirators, tried to … Read more

London’s famous fog is air pollution. It’s been a problem in London for almost 1,000 years, beginning at a time in history when wood supplies started running out. The people of the city began using sea coal for heat and cooking, which wasn’t very efficient and produced an abundance of smoke in the air. At … Read more

They weren’t just photo props, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill smoked a lot of cigars. It’s estimated that Churchill smoked 300,000 cigars in his lifetime. Churchill acquired a taste for Havana cigars after traveling to Cuba to observe the Spanish fight the Cuban guerrillas in 1895. Sir Winston Churchill was born on 30 November, 1874, … Read more

It’s true, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill suffered from what was then called melancholia and what we now call depression. He referred to it as “the black dog,” and the only thing that seemed to relieve it, to his horror, was aggression. He took up bullying at a young age and seemed to get a … Read more

The 1980s British leader and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was a tough cookie. “The Iron Lady” was a nickname given by a Russian newspaper, and the name stuck. Not to be confused with “Iron Maiden,” which was the name of both a medieval execution device and a torturous 1970s rock band. Margaret Hilda Thatcher was … Read more

Winston Churchill is widely known to have coined the term “Iron Curtain”. In most history texts, you’ll find that he used the term publicly in a speech given at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, in 1946. Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, however, says the term was in use long before his speech. “The expression ‘iron curtain’ … Read more

First of all, many tourists assume that the Tower Bridge in London is really the more famous, but less impressive, London Bridge. Even those who know its real name assume that it is about as old as its ancient neighbor, the Tower of London. But it was finished in 1894, making it younger than even … Read more

In 1762, King Louis XV of France gave Louisiana to his cousin, King Charles III of Spain. The new Spanish aristocracy called the French-speaking people who lived there Criolla, the Spanish word which means “from this place.” Originally, it referred to people of European descent only. Eventually, the original Creoles began using the phrase negres … Read more

The name Big Ben doesn’t refer to the chapel clock in London, but to the 13-ton bell that rings in the clock tower. The “Ben” behind the bell was Sir Benjamin Hall, the first commissioner of works at the time of installation in 1856. A loud man, it’s said. So the name was very appropriate. … Read more

Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., during the 1963 March on Washington. King’s delivery of the speech on August 28 during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, was a defining moment of the American Civil Rights Movement. The speech … Read more

Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little to Earl and Louise Little in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1925, and was also known as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. Malcolm X was an African-American Muslim minister, public speaker, and human rights activist. He was a courageous advocate for the rights of African Americans, and a man who was harsh on … Read more

Alex Haley wrote the Autobiography of Malcolm X in 1965, besides Roots: The Saga of an American Family. Malcolm X never saw the book. He was killed right before the manuscript went to press. Other literary works by Haley include a biography of the security guard Frank Wills, who discovered the break-in at Watergate, A … Read more

His name was Oliver Brown, and he was a boxcar welder for the railroad in Topeka, Kansas. He sued the Topeka Board of Education for segregation because his young daughter Linda couldn’t attend the all-white Sumner Elementary School near his home. Brown ultimately won this civil rights legal battle before the Supreme Court. Lawyer Thurgood … Read more

Only two African Americans have served on the Supreme Court in 2002. The first, Thurgood Marshall, was a widely recognized civil rights theorist who had headed the NAACP. He had been an accomplished attorney who convinced the 1954 Supreme Court that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, and he was a respected jurist with … Read more

In 1924, native-born Indians were finally granted American citizenship, and many were allowed to vote at that point. However, in some states they were forbidden from voting until as late as 1954. The struggles of women and African Americans point out the fact that citizenship does not automatically ensure voting rights. Throughout the 1800s, native … Read more

New Zealand was the first country in the world to give women the right to vote in 1893. Women voted for the first time in the election held on 28 November 1893. The first time the post of Mayor had been held by a woman anywhere in the British Empire was in 1893 when Elizabeth … Read more

Wyoming was the first U.S. state to give women the right to vote in 1869, when it was still just a territory. Colorado was next in 1893. Utah and Idaho followed in 1896. The next state to grant suffrage was Washington, but it wasn’t until after the turn of the century in 1910. These days, … Read more

The Oklahoma bombing of 1921 was one of the worst acts of terrorism in the United States in the 20th century. But it’s probably not the Oklahoma bombing you’re thinking of. Even though Timothy McVeigh’s April 19, 1995, bombing that killed 168 people was a terrible act, the dynamite assault on Tulsa’s black community in … Read more

The first lunch counter sit-in over racial segregation was at Woolworth’s department store in Greensboro, North Carolina. The date was February 1, 1960, and the protest consisted of four black students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, Ezell Blair Jr., and David Richmond, sitting at a “white’s only” lunch … Read more

From 1889 through 1930, at least 3,724 people in the United States were lynched during and after the American Civil War ended. About 80% were black, and nearly all of the lynchers were white. Some of the victims were merely hung; others were burned alive; and some were tortured hideously with castration and dismemberment first. … Read more

Mississippi was the last U.S. state to abolish slavery after the American Civil War. No, not in 1865, but in 1995. While slavery obviously wasn’t practiced up until this date, because federal laws supersede state laws on this issue, it took this long for the laws to be officially changed in their state books. Jeez, … Read more

The line that ended up symbolically delineating the border between the North and South was named after two British surveyors who were hired to settle a boundary dispute between Pennsylvania and Maryland in the 1760s. Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon were astronomers by training, but their line proved to be more accurate than most surveyors’ … Read more

Fewer than one in five Southerners actually owned slaves when the American Civil War began. Of these, most owned one or two slaves. About 8,000 land owners, fewer than one in a thousand of the people living in slave states, owned 50 or more. That’s a lot of slaves for personal use.