History

A battle-axe is certainly a better weapon than a guy with a joust on a horse. Why? Because a joust isn’t a weapon in and of itself; it’s a specific type of competition at a medieval tournament. Two armored knights would mount horses and face one another, each holding a lance. They would then charge … Read more

Native Americans gave the troops the name, probably because they hadn’t seen many African Americans and thought the soldiers’ short, dark, curly hair resembled the mane of the buffalo. The name was thought to be a sign of respect because the buffalo was an important animal to the Indians. The name originated with the Cheyenne … Read more

The Buffalo Soldiers were the ninth and tenth cavalries of the United States Army, which, in those segregated times, were made up entirely of African Americans. The first peacetime all-black regiments in the regular U.S. Army, they were first formed in 1866 and sent to the West to fight Indians, protect settlers, capture outlaws, and … Read more

The Zulu perform an intricate ritual before going to battle. The regiment, which is up to 1,000 warriors, congregate in the cattle kraal (the area blocked off for cattle near or within the village area) and jump around, miming their moves in battle. This is done in full war regalia, which can include headdresses of … Read more

Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders did not exist for very long, except in American legend. Teddy Roosevelt, anxious for a war with Spain, resigned as Secretary of the Navy and was authorized to put together a thousand-man volunteer cavalry force. Roosevelt was a Harvard boy, and so most of his early recruits were of similar ivy-league … Read more

The Zulu defeated the British in the Battle of Isandhlwana in 1879 by out-generaling them, so to speak. In other words, they had an intricate plan, drawing the British closer and closer while they quietly surrounded them. They then sent waves of warriors rushing straight into the British lines, heedless of British guns, cannons, and … Read more

The old expression and exclamation “hurrah!” is from an old Norse warrior word “Huzzah!” which meant “On to paradise!” The use of the word in its current form has its origins around the Victorian era as evident in literary works by Shakespeare. More recent usage in its current spelling include the phrase “the last Hurrah”, … Read more

Raphael was an Italian painter of the Renaissance period in the Late Middle Ages and did indeed have a last name. His given name at birth was Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino. Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance, Raphael was admired for his perfection, and was one of the great masters of that period. … Read more

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle cartoon’s artists, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, say the difference in spelling for the character Michaelangelo was a mistake. When they created the comic book series, computer spellcheckers weren’t widely available. The turtle ended up with an extra “a” in his name purely by accident. It should be noted that … Read more

It is possible, but doubtful that the Arabian Nights stories was told to save a king’s young wife from execution. Also known as “One Thousand and One Nights”, which was the original Arabic name, it is a collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age. The … Read more

Some accounts say the Harlem Renaissance took place from about 1925 to 1935 and centered around New York City, but the movement had actually begun many years before it was discovered by the rest of the world. During this decade following World War I, Rhodes scholar Alain Locke defined the movement of cultural enlightenment and … Read more

Ian Fleming wrote the book Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. The movie, which was also called Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, was a 1968 feature film based on the book. You may know Ian Fleming better by his other writings, however. He was the author who introduced the world to Bond. James Bond.

No, composer Salieri didn’t really try to swindle Mozart out of the Requiem. As the screenwriter for the movie Amadeus Peter Shaffer puts it, “It’s a fantasia based on fact. It is not a screen biography of Mozart and was never intended to be.” Antonio Salieri was a contemporary of Mozart and admired his work … Read more

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his wife, Constanze Weber, despite their money troubles, were a loving couple up until his early death at age 35. The playful pair kept Constanze in a perpetual state of pregnancy. They had a total of six children in their eight-and-a-half year marriage, only two of which survived: their second child, … Read more

It wasn’t until Beethoven’s twenties that he began to lose his hearing in any significant way, and by that time he had already studied with the likes of Joseph Haydn and Mozart. He gave his first solo concert in his late twenties. However, by the time he reached his early thirties his hearing was gone, … Read more

Some say there was indeed a real Romeo and Juliet that the Shakespeare play was based on, but after so many years and so many tellings and retellings, it’s impossible to verify. What we do know is that Shakespeare based his play on an old Italian tale that was possibly based on real events. The … Read more

William Shakespeare definitely smoked some tobacco in a pipe, as did most men in 16th-century Elizabethan England. And recent excavations of his Stratford-upon-Avon home have uncovered that he may have smoked a little more than tobacco. Residues in pipes found there contained trace amounts of cocaine and marijuana. However, what this means is hotly debated, … Read more

Manfred von Richthofen, also known as The Red Baron, was credited with shooting down 80 aircraft during World War I. However, skill and luck finally failed the 25-year-old pilot in 1918. While dogfighting with a Canadian pilot over Allied territory, the Red Baron was fatally hit by Australian gunners on the ground below. The Australians … Read more

There are a couple of theories of origin for the term Molotov Cocktail, but the Molotov name probably comes from Stalin’s premier and foreign minister, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov It was while he was minister of defense that Russians started the policy of using petrol bombs as an anti-tank weapon so that in any situation, they … Read more

Thirteen people were killed, eight jailed, one hanged in the war between the Hatfields and the McCoys. The Hatfield-McCoy feud between 1878 and 1891 is a permanent staple of American folklore that has become a metaphor for bitterly feuding rival families and parties.

There was already a great deal of tension between the two families about big issues and small, including some conflicting loyalties in America’s Civil War. The families involved in the feud descended from Ephraim Hatfield and William McCoy. The feud started when Asa Harmon McCoy was murdered on January 7, 1865. The despise for Harmon … Read more

That’s a really heartwarming ending to the story of the Hatfield-McCoy feud, but a complete myth, nonetheless. True, there had been a Romeo-a-Juliet-style romance between two of the young-uns, but their romance lasted only long enough to start a pregnancy before the fickle young Hatfield boy took up with his girlfriend’s cousin and wisely moved … Read more

No. In the Red Baron’s native Germany he was called Der Rote Kameliegger, meaning “The Red Battle Flyer.” Why the “Red”? Before effective anti-aircraft guns made camouflage a necessity, pilots tended to paint their planes bright colors as a way of identifying each other. Von Richthofen favored red. These colorful planes looked so brightly festive … Read more

Some things never change. Even after publishing Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman, one of America’s greatest poets couldn’t survive on a poet’s royalties. He worked as a low-level Washington bureaucrat, as a clerk in the Indian Department. He often saw his big boss, Abraham Lincoln, walking up the streets of Washington, D.C. Whitman was a … Read more

Quite a few folks survived Custer’s Last Stand in The Great Sioux War of 1876. All of them were Native Americans, however. There was one survivor from Custer’s party, an Indian translator. However, the American government got its revenge—they used his defeat as an excuse to indiscriminately wipe out tribes in the area.

When Crazy Horse left the Indian reservation without permission to take his wife to see her parents, he was arrested by U.S. soldiers. When he realized the soldiers were going to lock him up in a guardhouse, he struggled against the officers holding his arms. A soldier then ran him through with a bayonet.

Believe it or not, some argue Henry David Thoreau never really lived out in the “wilds” at all when he wrote the book Walden. As proof, they say that at no time did he ever reside more than two miles from his mother and sister’s house in Concord. Thoreau’s house was situated so that he … Read more

I’m assuming you’ve heard amazing statistics on this or you wouldn’t be asking. What you’ve heard is probably true, or close to it. Robert Louis Stevenson, reportedly suffering from tuberculosis and on a six-day cocaine binge, wrote the classic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in a frenzy. His wife commented that it seemed unbelievable a … Read more

Although this was true in European theatre in Shakespeare’s time, the reverse was true in Japan—at least in the beginning. Perhaps that was because the art form was invented by a woman. Kabuki first came about in the spring of 1603 in Kyoto. Women, led by a shrine maiden named Okuni, dressed up in elaborate … Read more

Yes, Mark Twain said “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics” in his autobiography. But he didn’t invent the phrase, he was simply borrowing it. The man responsible for the witticism (or truism, as the case may be) is Benjamin Disraeli, British author and politician. To his credit, Twain rightly attributes … Read more

Nope, the Bible doesn’t say “God helps those who help themselves” because the verse doesn’t exist. It wasn’t Moses, David, Peter, Paul, or Mary. Instead, it was that fable-telling fiend (who may or may not have really existed), Aesop. In Aesop’s tale of “Hercules and the Wagoner,” a man’s wagon gets stuck in a muddy … Read more

You clearly didn’t have older brothers when you were growing up. Virginia Woolf got the nickname “The Goat” when she was child. There are no specific references as to why the name, but it may have been because of her temperament. Regardless, the name itself was said to have been meant affectionately. It was a … Read more

Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso didn’t “paint everything in sight,” but he was a prolific painter in many senses of the word. He produced over 15,000 paintings in his lifetime—working on three or more canvases a day—and he also painted … Read more

Charles Dickens working career was a little eclectic, and it started when he was quite young. At the age of 12, his father was in debtors’ prison, and Charles was removed from school by his parents and sent away to work in a shoe polish factory called Warren’s Shoeblacking Factory and Warehouse. His experiences there … Read more

Kamasutra means “guidebook” (sutra) to “sensual pleasure” (kama), and most historians believe the Kama Sutra was translated into Sanskrit by a fellow named Malianaga Vatsyayana somewhere between the third and fifth centuries A.D. Vatsyayana broke it down into an easy-to-digest step-by-step guidebook so that the basics could be followed and remembered by readers (it would, … Read more

Washington Crossing the Delaware was painted by Emanuel Leutze in 1851, a German-born painter, living at the time in Germany. The river you see in the picture is actually a stand in for the Delaware. It’s the Rhine. It’s sort of fitting, actually. When Washington crossed the icy Delaware in the cold of winter on … Read more

Nero didn’t literally play a fiddle, they didn’t have fiddles or even violins in ancient Rome. They did, however, have lyres. Nero played and composed on one regularly. He didn’t consider himself a mere politician but a richly talented artist and musician as well. When fire swept through Rome in 64 A.D , many believed … Read more

In English, the book if Adolf Hitler’s book Mein Kampf is titled My Struggle. Combined with elements of autobiography and Hitler’s political ideology, Volume 1 of the book was published in 1925 and Volume 2 in 1926. Work on the book began when he was imprisoned for political crimes after his failed revolution in Munich … Read more

Well, maybe in some of the movie cowboys they wore heels to make them look taller. The real-life cowboys, however, wore them for two reasons: to keep their feet from slipping out of the stirrups and to put some extra distance between their feet and the muck when walking through fields full of cattle excrement … Read more

The ten-gallon hat can hold about three quarts of water. So, how did it get its name, you may well ask? Some say it was just a cowboy exaggeration about the size of the hat, but those who claim to know say that it’s because the hat was advertised as being big enough for 10 … Read more

Cowboys in the American Old West were called cowpokes or cowpunchers because poke and punch is what they literally did to cattle that balked at going up the ramps leading to railcars and packing plants. Cattle prods were used to help move cattle to where they wanted. Back then, they didn’t have electric cattle prods … Read more

Both mustangs and Texas longhorns ran wild through the plains of California and Nevada when the first settlers moved west. It was just a matter of catching and domesticating them. Neither animal, though, was indigenous to the Americas-they were descended from animals that had been brought over to Mexico by Spaniards in the 1500s. Over … Read more

In the middle of the 1800s, before the U.S. got wired with telegraph, you’d send a piece of mail from the East Coast to the West and not expect it to get there for months. A simple mail exchange of “Here’s the contract; do we have a deal?” could require a half year or more … Read more

It was a dangerous job, as indicated by the newspaper ads that recruited riders: “Wanted: Young, skinny, wiry fellows. Not over 18. Must be expert riders. Willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred.” Surprisingly, though, the 183 riders, aged 11 through the mid-40s, despite the ad, survived pretty well. Only one was killed by Indians, … Read more

Some goods were carried across country, but it was an expensive and overly difficult task, coming across mountainous regions and prairie terrain. The easier, although far more distant, route west was by sea. Almost all goods, including those used to start work on the transcontinental railroad, were shipped around Cape Horn and across thousands of … Read more

No, slaves did not work on the U.S. transcontinental railroad when it was built in the 1860s. By the time work began in the 1860s, the Civil War was already raging and slavery was on its way out. Instead, two work crews began laying track from the two ends of the railroad line, and they … Read more

No the Native American Indian word “how” did not mean hello, but good guess. You’re not far off from what it’s come to mean for most American movie watchers. “How,” or something sounding similar, came from the language of the Sioux tribe. The word was used at the beginning of their sentences in the same … Read more

Gunmen in the Wild West did do the quick-draw shoot-out duel nearly as often as in the movies. In fact, there isn’t a single documented case of it ever happening like the movies portray it. The whole quick-draw myth came from early dime novels. When Wyatt Earp was asked about quick-draw shoot-outs in the 1920s, … Read more

Living in an American Wild West town was not as dangerous as you’d think. As a matter of fact, the modern-day cliche of using the Wild West as a metaphor for the dangers of big cities does a grave disservice to the olden days. Take wild, wild Dodge City. Its absolutely worst year for violence … Read more

During the 1870s, Palisades, Nevada, got a reputation as one tough little town because train passengers on rest stops there often witnessed stagecoach robberies, shoot-outs, and even Indian attacks. In reality, though, it was all a big joke. A conductor had once mentioned to a Palisades resident that his passengers were disappointed that the Wild … Read more

Covered wagon trains in the old West could travel one to two miles per hour, or the equivalent of a toddler’s walking speed. They could go about a hundred miles in a seven-day week of travel, but many devout people refused to travel on Sunday, slowing them down even further.

A dogie is what they used to call a motherless calf. Stray calves or those that have lost their mothers at too young an age are still called dogies, actually. Often the term is colloquially used to refer to all bovine in a herd. The origin of the word “dogie” is unknown, but may stem … Read more

The average speed of a cattle drive in the old West was not that much faster than a wagon train. Fifteen miles in a day was pretty typical as the cowboys moved the dogies toward a railroad stop where the cattle could be shipped for slaughter in eastern slaughterhouses. Until the railroad lines reached the … Read more

The fastest way to get across the plains was by stagecoach. Traveling day and night, you could rip through about 100 miles per day, an average of a little more than four miles an hour.

Judge Roy Bean liked to call himself “the law west of the Pecos.” He presided over his jurisdiction from his combination court and barroom in Langtry, Texas. An article in Smithsonian Magazine characterized his unschooled judging as “unfettered by legalities and governed by simple greed, prejudice, and rough-handed common sense.” When he discovered that a … Read more

Calamity Jane was a woman who lived on the Western Frontier in the late 1800s. She was a controversial character for a number of reasons, including the fact that she dressed in men’s clothes. She was known to loudly boast of her stint as a Pony Express rider and about serving under General Custer. Some … Read more

Calamity Jane was born Martha Jane Canary. She added “Burke” to that and went by “Martha” or “M. Burke” during her marriage to a man named Clinton Burke, but she dropped it after abandoning him. Her nickname, “Calamity Jane,” before and after her marriage was her name of choice. By 1902 she lived down to … Read more

Annie Oakley was a stage name, as was the “Annie,” too. Her real name was Phoebe Moses, and she was born in Darke County, Ohio. Another stage name she used in advertisements was “Little Sure Shot.” The famous Native American chief Sitting Bull gave the name to her, after being wowed at her marksmanship. As … Read more

A group of American pioneers dubbed it Death Valley in 1849 after they were seriously misrouted there on their way to California’s Gold Country. As they finally escaped the valley, one of the women turned around and shouted, “Goodbye, Death Valley!” The name stuck. Despite the name, though, only one of their members actually died … Read more

It was a desperate situation in the Donner Party. Trying to get to California, 90 people left too late, gambled on the weather holding, and lost. They were trapped in the Sierra Nevada by winter snows. Separated into several groups, stuck from November until April, they began eating their dead when the food ran out. … Read more

You’re thinking of Alferd Packer, and much of the story is a popular myth. Here’s the true story: In 1873, Alferd Packer and five other residents of Colorado went prospecting. They got lost in a snowstorm and their provisions ran out. When authorities came upon the scene months later, the five others had been killed, … Read more

The kindly author of The Wizard of Oz wrote two editorials on the subject when he was editor of the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer. Here is the core of one of them: “The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had … Read more

Colonel John Chivington of the U.S. Army was a commander of the local fort, and it was Chivington whom the delegation of Indians came to, trying to arrange a peace treaty. Carrying an American flag, 28 men and 105 women and children believed that they had reached a sympathetic ear. They were wrong. While the … Read more

Contrary to popular myth, it was not a Native American custom but a colonial one first. Scalping on the American continent was first instituted by the Dutch colonial government around New York when they actually set a bounty for killing Indians. They came up with the idea of requiring a scalp as concrete evidence of … Read more

You’d think from the movies that the Indians were a constant threat to wagon trains crossing the plains. In reality, during the time between 1840 and 1860, when many of the worst hostilities took place, your chances of dying of sickness on the wagon trains was much higher than dying from a Native American attack. … Read more

The Trail of Tears was the name given to a series of forced marches in the 1830s, moving five Indian tribes from the woods and fields of their southeastern homelands to a desert wasteland, which was officially designated as “Indian Country.” Although promised “conveyances and provisions” to get them across the 800 miles to the … Read more

Jinglebobs, heel chains, and rowels are parts of a cowboy’s spurs. A spur is a metal tool worn in pairs on the heels of riding boots. It’s used to direct a horse to move forward or sideways while riding. It’s also used to supplement the riding aids or commands and to back up the natural … Read more

“The pipe draws wisdom from the lips of the philosopher, and shuts up the mouth of the foolish,” wrote W.M. Thackeray a hundred years ago; and to this day, pipe smoking retains a certain connotation of sophistication. The hoi polloi may take their tobacco by cigarette or cigar, but a true connoisseur of the brown … Read more

At the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, two recent American inventions were placed on public display for the first time. One, a certain voice-transmission apparatus invented by a man named Alexander Graham Bell attracted widespread attention among the fairgoers. The second, called the typewriter, attracted almost none. Yet by the time of the American Bicentennial Celebration, … Read more

Imagine a vast network of streetcar lines connecting America’s cities, with trolley cars whisking passengers between neighboring towns at speeds of seventy or eighty miles an hour. A prospect for the distant future? No, a fairly accurate description of American interurban travel around the turn of this century. Yes, that’s right, we said trolley cars! … Read more

“Preposterous!” scoffed American tycoon Russell Sage to the first proposal for an underground transit system in New York City. “The people of New York will never go into a hole in the ground to ride.” Well, as everyone knows, Russell’s counsel turned out to be less than sage. By the time of his death in … Read more

The vast legions of American ice cream-lovers fall basically into two camps: those who favor chocolate, and those who champion its chromatic antithesis, vanilla. Although vanilla and chocolate, long the most popular ice cream flavors in the United States, may be diametrically opposed on the color scale, they share more in common than you might … Read more

Let us now turn to the subject of brolliology. What is brolliology? Why, it’s the study of the brolly, of course, the gamp, the parasol, the parapluie, the bumbershoot, the bumbersoll, to you, the umbrella. Which brings us to the History of the Umbrella. If you think the ribbed, collapsible umbrella was the invention of … Read more

To many minds, the tulip and the windmill are virtually synonymous with the Netherlands. Most historians would agree that the windmill in Europe made its first appearance in the Low Countries, sometime before the twelfth century. But you may be surprised to learn that the tulip is not a native of Holland, and was totally … Read more

The scene: winter in a wooded area of southern France. A group of farmers moves among the trees, following the meanderings of a half-dozen pigs. Suddenly, one of the pigs noses into the dirt, grunting and snorting in hungry anticipation, and begins to dig into the ground with its hooves. The farmers rush over and … Read more

“I believe,” wrote Alexander Graham Bell in 1878, “that in the future wires will unite the head offices of the Telephone Company in different cities, and a man in one part of the country may communicate by word of mouth with another in a distant place. I am aware that such ideas may appear to … Read more

Step into a modern shoe store and take a look around. High-heeled and platform shoes, boots, sandals, moccasins, wooden-heeled clogs, quite a variety for today’s shopper. Recent fashions? Well, not one of the footwear styles you see today is less than 400 years old! The History of Shoes is indeed interesting. The loftiest high-heeled and … Read more

On April 10, 1849, a New Yorker by the name of Walter Hunt was granted patent Number 6,281 for a device he called the safety pin. Never heard of Walter Hunt, you say? Well, Hunt was not destined to be pinned with the tag “inventor of the safety pin” for one simple reason: The safety … Read more

Here’s something to think about: a dry goods dealer has a five-yard piece of thirty-six-inch wide material, and wishes to sell a customer one-and-a-half yards. But neither a yardstick, nor a tape measure, nor any other measuring device is available. Can the dealer complete the sale? Yes, it can be done, as you’ll discover later; … Read more

Quick, name a flower. Well, you may not have said rose, but if you were to experiment with the question you’d probably find that, of the estimated 300,000 species of plants on earth, the rose is the first flower to pop into most minds. Why? It’s difficult to say. Many other flowers are larger, more … Read more

The restaurant is such a seemingly natural and necessary institution that you’d suspect it’s been with us for as long as man has lived in cities. But the restaurant, as we know it today, is a surprisingly recent development. That’s not to say there weren’t any commercial eating places before our time. But the menu, … Read more

A prominent encyclopedia has suggested that the invention with the greatest impact on worldwide economic life since the railroad is, no, you’d never guess, the refrigerator! Isn’t the refrigerator more of a convenience item? Hardly. Refrigeration technology has completely revolutionized farming and led to the rapid development of a worldwide food trade. It would be … Read more

“Meat and potatoes” are the foundation of most American cooking and of many European cuisines as well. The spud is so rooted in Western cooking that it’s sometimes hard to believe the vegetable was totally unknown in Europe just a few hundred years ago. In the mid 16th century, Spanish conquistadors in South America discovered … Read more

The pocketknife is obviously a recent invention, right? After all, the technological skill required to craft a workable fold-up knife must be a product of the industrial age. Besides, what need would men have had for a pocketknife in the days before pockets? Well, don’t be surprised if you come across a rusty, time-worn pocketknife … Read more

Ask even a hard core cardsharp about the origin of playing cards and pointing to the king and queen in their Renaissance raiment, he may well answer smugly that, of course, the cards originated in Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Well, the reply would be half correct; yes, the design of modern playing … Read more

“Peanut” may sound like a plant that can’t quite make up its mind where it belongs in the world of botanical classification. What’s your guess? A nut, you say? Nope, the goober is actually more a pea than a nut. The versatile, tasty morsel we call the peanut is the pod or legume, and not … Read more

As you may have heard, the famous Battle of New Orleans, won by Andrew Jackson and his troops over the British during the War of 1812, was fought on January 8, 1815, 15 days after the war had ended. A treaty ending the conflict had been signed in Europe, but the news failed to reach … Read more

An old fable tells of a miser who buried his gold in the forest. Each day, he crept into the woods, dug up the trove, counted his coins, and buried them again. But one day, another man spied him counting his gold, and returned that night to steal it. The next morning, the miser discovered … Read more