He was born on Dec. 18, 1878. His name was Joseb Besarionis dze Jugashvili. He changed this to Josef Stalin which means “man of the steel hand”. His father was an alcoholic cobbler and his mother was a washerwoman. At age 7, he contracted smallpox which left him with pockmarks Read more
Dec. 16, 1770 is used as his official birth date, but it was actually his baptism day. It is unclear what day he was born on. He was named after his grandfather. His older brother, who died at just six days old, was also named Ludwig. His grandfather and father Read more
*** Take the most sensational of these facts with a grain of salt. Roman historians tended to be very anti-Nero. He was born Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus. His father was a consul and his mother was Agrippina the Younger, sister of Caligula. Supposedly when he was born, his father said: “Nothing Read more
James Doolittle was born on Dec. 14, 1896. He saw his first plane at age 14 and was bitten by the aviation bug. He started making homemade gliders. He left college in 1917 to enlist in the Army Signal Corps Reserve as a flying cadet. He spent WWI in America Read more
In the early 1500’s, Leonardo Da Vinci painted a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of an Italian noble. It became known as the “Mona Lisa” and is now the most famous painting in the world. People ask what makes it such a masterpiece. Some point out the eyes Read more
Sigmund Freud had his problems. He smoked 20 cigars a day most of his life and ended up having thirty operations for mouth cancer. He determined that cocaine was good for his patients and got hooked on it for several years. He introduced his fiancé to it and a Read more
Stetson Kennedy loved Southern and African-American folklore from childhood. When he turned 21, he got a job working for the Works Progress Administration. He headed the Florida Writers’ Project. It collected folklore and oral histories of African-Americans. After WWII, he became interested in civil rights. Since he was unable Read more
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