This Day In History: July 29, 1862 Confederate spy Marie Isabella “Belle” Boyd, often called the “Cleopatra of the Secession”, was arrested by Union troops on July 29, 1862, and incarcerated in Old Capital Prison in Washington D.C. It was the first of three arrests for this teenage espionage agent from Martinsburg, Virginia. Belle’s town was one of the first […]
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In the third decade of the third century CE, climate issues, civil war, economic depression and plague combined to seriously destabilize the Roman Empire. Beginning a fifty-year period where leadership of the empire passed between at least 26 men was the short reign of perhaps the largest emperor of Rome, Maximinus Thrax. Born Gaius Julius Verus in about 173 CE […]
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Captain Robert Campbell began his British Army career in 1903 at the age of 18. Shortly after WWI started, in July of 1914 Campbell and the soldiers he was leading, the First Battalion East Surrey Regiment, were sent to Mons-Condé canal in the north west of France. One week later, after an attack by German forces, Captain Campbell was seriously […]
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This Day In History: July 28, 1750 Regarded as one of the greatest composers of all time, Johann Sebastian Bach was from a family of seven generations of musicians. Beethoven considered Bach the “original father of harmony.” His influence was so encompassing that his death on July 28, 1750 marks the end of the Baroque period in music. Born in […]
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On March 3, 1876, one Mrs. Crouch was working in her yard in Bath County, Kentucky, making soap, when suddenly “meat which looked like beef began to fall all around her. The sky was perfectly clear at the time.” Falling like large snowflakes and settling all around the 5000 square foot yard, pieces of flesh ranging in size from about […]
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The following is an article from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader American history might have been written in French or Spanish. Here’s part of the reason it wasn’t. PLUNDERERS FOR HIRE In 1562 some French Protestants known as Huguenots landed on what is now Parris Island, near Beaufort, South Carolina. Like the English Pilgrims who would arrive a half century later, […]
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This Day In History: July 27, 1940 On July 27, 1940, a legendary, world-renowned rabbit was born in Brooklyn, New York. (Actually, he was born in Hollywood, but you’d never know it from the accent.) He’s the wise-cracking, street-smart, self-assured star of the screen, Bugs Bunny. But he didn’t just appear out of nowhere. The bunny that became Bugs was […]
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This is a weekly wrap of our popular Daily Knowledge Newsletter. You can get that newsletter for free here. Bonsai! Long before the bonsai art form of creating miniature trees came to Japan, the wealthy in China were perfecting their craft known as “penzai” and “penjing.” The former means “tray plant” and the latter “tray scenery.” It is from the […]
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In this video from our new YouTube channel (click here to subscribe), we answer the questions of who Craig is from Craigslist, and how and why he ended up starting that site.
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In this week’s “best of” our YouTube channel, we discuss who invented the QWERTY keyboard and how it became the defacto configuration for keyboards, the truth about who really invented the Fortune Cookie, the interesting story behind the song “A Boy Named Sue” and what famous children’s poet wrote it, and a bunch of fascinating Harry Potter facts. Be sure […]
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This Day In History: July 24, 1911 On the drizzly, damp morning of July 24, 1911, Yale professor Hiram Bingham was leading an expedition through the jungles of the Andes Mountains in Peru. He was searching for the last two capitals of the Inca Empire, Vitcos and Vilcabamba. Instead, with a young local boy leading the way, Bingham happened upon […]
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According to the only book I currently have on my desk, everyone poops and that’s okay. What’s less okay though is when there’s nowhere for that poop to go- something people in Victorian era London found out first hand when all of the sewage they’d pumped into the Thames dried up and caused a stench that spurred London’s City Press […]
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This Day In History: July 23, 1948 “To watch his work is like being witness to the beginning of melody, or the first conscious use of the lever or the wheel; the emergence, coordination, and first eloquence of language; the birth of an art: and to realize that this is all the work of one man.” – James Agee David […]
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As the general rule goes, you should never bring a knife to a gun fight… unless of course that knife happens to be an NRS-2, a knife that also just so happens to have a gun built into the handle. Designed in early 1980s for Spetsnaz troops, the NRS-2 is still used today by some members of the Russian special forces. The […]
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Brandon M. asks: Is it true that McDonalds had to pay millions of dollars to someone because she spilled hot coffee on herself or is it an urban legend? The infamous McDonald’s “Hot Coffee” legal battle is considered by many to be a premier example of a frivolous lawsuit. The general story is often told that a woman named Stella […]
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This Day In History: July 22, 1893 On July 22, 1893, a young professor of English literature from Wellesley, Massachusetts named Katharine Lee Bates wrote a poem that morphed into one of the most iconic songs in American history. She was traveling cross-country by train to lecture at Colorado College that summer. What she saw along the way inspired her […]
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In this video from the crew at SciShow, they answer the question of why certain smells end up causing you to remember sometimes long forgotten things from many years before when you smell them again. If you like this video, be sure and subscribe to their channel here. You can also join us in supporting their efforts to make more […]
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R. Cantos asks: I was just wondering who came up with the expression “piss like a racehorse”? When most horses take a leak, it is a dramatic sight, with the stream typically about one-third to one-half an inch in diameter, creating a veritable “river” of urine that seems to have impressed some wordsmith sufficiently to coin the phrase, “piss like […]
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