One this day in 1854, Alfred, Lord Tennyson published his poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade”. At the time, he was the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom. He wrote the poem under the pseudonym A.T. because he used traditional structure and felt it might be considered beneath Read more…
Eli Whitney was born on Dec. 8, 1765 in Massachusetts. As a youth he showed talent in the mechanical arts by building his own violin. He graduated from Yale in 1789 and hope to become a teacher. Things did not work out and he ended up stranded in Georgia. Read more…
The night of Dec. 6 Second Lieutenants George Welch and Ken Taylor spent drinking, like most servicemen stationed at Pearl Harbor. Next morning, they sobered up quickly as Japanese planes bombed the Pacific Fleet and their air base Wheeler Field. It was impossible to take off from there, so Read more…
Charles VI ruled France from 1380 – 1422. He started off well and was known as “Charles the Beloved”, but before his reign was over he was known as “Charles the Mad”. His insanity was evidenced in several ways. He once murdered some of his knights in a fit. Read more…
The myth of the Bermuda Triangle exploded after an incident on Dec. 5, 1945. On that day, a training flight took off from the naval station at Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The 5 TBM Avengers torpedo bombers were led by Lt. Charles Taylor. He was a veteran of the war Read more…
Sir Arthur Aston was a professional soldier who commanded mercenary forces in the Thirty Years’ War. In 1642, he was back in England and he joined the king’s forces in the English Civil War. Somewhere along the way he lost a leg and it was replaced by a prosthetic. Read more…
He was born in 1800 in Connecticut to an abolitionist family. They moved to Ohio where his father allowed the home to be used by the Underground Railroad. John went to school to become a minister, but had to drop out. He ended up as a tanner like his father. Read more…
On Dec. 1, 1887 the first Sherlock Holmes story appeared in print. Arthur Conan Doyle had been turned down by several publishers before he finally found someone to print it. He was 27 years old and wrote “A Study in Scarlet” in three weeks. It was not a success, but Read more…