May - 2022

Martha Hughes Cannon: The First Female Senator Elected In The US, Defeating Her Own Husband.

Martha Hughes, or Mattie, as she preferred to be called, was born in Llandudno, Wales on July 1, 1857. Around the time of Mattie’s birth, her parents joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, often referred to as the Mormon church. The family: Mattie, her parents, and one older sister, though quite poor, wanted to join with other Mormons in Utah. In 1860, they left Wales for the United States. Mattie’s father was ill and unable to work, so the family remaine

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The 1937 Great Ohio River Flood

The collection of photographs in Time magazine shows the impact of The Great Ohio River Flood of 1937 - and is particularly poignant in the aftermath of the destruction wielded by superstorms of recent years experienced in the US Photographer Margaret Bourke-White chronicled the aftermath of the flooding as people sought refuge in shelters, stood in line for food and crafted makeshift barges to move around. One picture shows a line filled with African-American men, women and

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The Story Of How Mozart Came To Copy Down Allegri’s Miserere, After Hearing It Twice

Allegri’s sublime Miserere has been a choral favourite for centuries. Once it’s heard, it's never forgotten. That soaring high C, always a challenge for the boy treble who has to reach it, makes it one of the most sublime pieces of choral music ever. But the piece was once closely guarded, only ever sung during the days of Easter within in the hallowed confines of St. Peter’s Rome – and never published for performance anywhere else. In 1770, who should arrive at the Vatican f

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Duelling Pistols at the 1908 Olympics

Duelling Pistols was a short-lived sport at the start of the 20th century, in which two heavily protected competitors faced off and shot wax bullets at each other. It is often stated that this shooting sport of bloodless duelling was a part of the Olympic Games in 1908, however, it wasn't even an official demonstration sport. This duelling competition was held at a similar time to the Olympics in 1908 by enthusiasts of the new sport, demonstrating the emerging French sport to

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That Time The NRA Fought For Tougher Gun Control (When The Black Panthers Had Guns)

With each passing day, the debate for or against gun control rages on within the United States. And although the National Rifle Association (NRA) currently leads the charge for the rights of citizens to carry guns of all types with little to no interference from the government, the original gun rights advocates to take that stance were the Black Panthers. Throughout the late 1960s, the militant black nationalist group used their understanding of the finer details of Californi

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Moroccan Scholar Ibn Battuta May Be The Greatest Explorer of all Time

The title of “history’s most famous traveler” usually goes to Marco Polo, the great Venetian wayfarer who visited China in the 13th century. For sheer distance covered, however, Polo trails far behind the Muslim scholar Ibn Battuta. Though little known outside the Islamic world, Battuta spent half his life tramping across vast swaths of the Eastern Hemisphere. Moving by sea, by camel caravan and on foot, he ventured into over 40 modern day nations, often putting himself in ex

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The Assassination Of Reinhard Heydrich, The 'Architect Of Holocaust'

When head of Nazi security police and governor of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Reinhard Heydrich, died in June 4, 1942, due to wounds inflicted by Czech parachutists during an assassination attempt, it marked one of the highlights in the history of Czech resistance and proved a great blow to the Nazi war effort. The death of the man nicknamed “The Butcher” signified that even the top-ranking German officials were not invincible. Ruthless Reinhard Heydrich One of t

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The Making Of Sgt Pepper

The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band may or may not still be the “greatest rock album of all time,” but it most certainly is “an extraordinary mirror of its age.” The album also marks several great leaps forward in studio recording techniques and pop songwriting, as well as production time and cost. Sgt. Pepper’s took five months to make and cost 40,000 pounds. By contrast, the first Beatles album, Please Please Me, was recorded live in a single day for a cost

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Dr. Sally Ride, The First American Woman In Space

Say hello to Sally Ride, at just 32 years old, Ride was the first American woman, and the youngest American, to leave the atmosphere when she boarded the Space Shuttle Challenger on June 18, 1983 and over two trips Ride spent a total of 14d 07h 46m in outer space. During the six-day mission, she worked as a mission specialist using the shuttle's robotic arm to deploy communications satellites. Her career as an astronaut began as she was completing her Ph.D. in astrophysics a

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Witold Pilecki, The Man Who Volunteered To Be Imprisoned In Auschwitz.

Witold Pilecki – codenames; Roman Jezierski, Tomasz Serafiński, Druh, Witold- – was a founder of the Secret Polish Army. He was born in Olonets, Karelia, northwest Russia, as a descendant of Polish patriots. He was raised in a patriotic manner as well. In 1914 he entered Scouting, which was then a forbidden organisation, outlawed by the Russian State. In 1918 he sneaked into Poland, a country that just gotten back its independence after 123 years of occupation. The Young 2nd

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The Very Hollow Lincoln Memorial

ASCEND THE 145 WHITE MARBLE steps at the Lincoln memorial, step forward into the shrine room with the seated Great Emancipator, and then direct your gaze down at the floor. Unseen beneath the Tennessee pink marble floor lies a cavernous three-story, 43,800-square-foot basement with architecture that wouldn’t look out of place in a World War II bunker. Construction began on the Lincoln Memorial in 1914 on the muddy stretch of land known as the Potomac flats. The Army Corps of

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Károly Takács: A Man Of Focus, Commitment And Sheer Fucking Will.

Károly Takács might not be a name you're familiar with, but the Hungarian is a legend within his own country after winning successive shooting gold medals at the 1948 and 52 Olympics, but relatively unknown outside its borders. His story has to be one of the most inspirational of all Olympians. His Olympic journey started when he was in the Hungarian army. Takács was the top pistol shooter in the world and preparing for the 1940 Games which were due to be held in Tokyo. But d

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Stanislav Petrov, The Man Who Saved The World

The year was 1983. It was more than two decades after the Cuban Missile Crisis, that who-will-blink-first moment when President Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev faced off over the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba. Ask any historian today when the world came closest to nuclear war, and they’ll probably point to the Cuban Missile Crisis, and yet the story of 1983, and Stanislav Petrov, is every bit as extraordinary. Petrov was a Soviet officer who, that fateful n

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Ray Manzarek’s Keyboard Part On The Doors', Love Her Madly

I love when you can focus on the musicianship of a song you know very well by hearing it in a completely new way. The following audio isolates The Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek’s playing on Love Her Madly from the 1971 album L.A. Woman. Hidden by the final mix are Manzarek’s deft touches which can be fully appreciated when heard like this. One surprise that I had never previously picked up was discovered at the 2:03 mark. The syncopated arrangement and honky-tonk style piano

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The Weird Butcher Beatles Album Cover

The Beatles decided to use this photograph for their Yesterday and Today album cover. The four normally squeaky clean Beatles had dressed in smocks resembling butcher’s garb with dismembered dolls and pieces of meat dripping crimson. It was supposed to be a bit of fun. The Beatles “Butcher cover” ended up a big fiasco. Maybe today this cover would not even raise an eyebrow. But in 1966 this album cover shocked the music industry. Billboard Magazine June 25, 1966 ‘Salesman of

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Say Hello To 'Starfish Hitler', The Weirdest Japanese TV Supervillain Of The 1970s

I admit that I’ve never seen it, but from every indication the 1974 Japanese TV series Kamen Rider X was bloody amazing. Kamen Rider means “masked rider,” and the show was part of a popular “tokusatsu superhero” series created by one of the most prolific practitioners of the genre, Shotaro Ishinomori. The show revolved around the valiant efforts of the technology-fuelled, motorcycle-riding, insect-themed hero to battle the malign machinations of the villainous organization G.

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The British Enthusiasm For Concentration Camps

Today, the expression “concentration camp” evokes the horrors of Nazi Germany, conjuring up black-and-white images of Auschwitz and Belsen. But Germans were neither the first nation to make use of concentration camps nor the last. Both during and immediately after the war, concentration camps and slave-labour camps operated throughout the United Kingdom. A year after World War II’s end, British agriculture only functioned thanks to slave labour. In May 1946, while high-rankin

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The O’Halloran Sisters, Armed With Poles And Boiling Water, Fought For Their Land Against The Army

The O’Halloran sisters – Annie, Honoria and Sarah – lived with their parents and their brothers, Patrick ad Frank, in Bodyke, Co. Clare. They were the tenants of Colonel John O’Callaghan, who would become notorious by the end of the Land War. The Second Irish Land Act of 1881 had attempted to give tenants more security by paving the way for rent reductions, guarantees of the same rent for periods of 15 years, and, in some cases, eventual proprietorship. O’Callaghan had been c

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The Man Who Killed Himself To Prove There Is Life After Death

Is there really life after death? For devout Spiritualist Thomas Lynn Bradford there was only one way to prove the existence of the afterlife: He would have to go there. Humanity has been questioning the unknown since the dawn of time, filling the terrifying void with gods and monsters to bring us comfort in the darkness, to find meaning and hope that there is something waiting for us on the other side. That our consciousness exists beyond the death of earthly bodies. That we

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The Clash and Combat Rock, 40 Years On

Take a quick glance at the Clash’s 1982 album Combat Rock and you’ll see photographer Pennie Smith’s image of four men standing together, just off the rails. Perhaps coincidentally, that’s also where they stood, figuratively, as a band. After releasing the triple-LP Sandinista! in 1980, a political and multicultural album that also made many critics’ lists of year-end bests, they toured and rested through much of 1981 before going back to the studio — first in London, and the

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An Animated Visualisation of the Bass Line for the Motown Classic, “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough"

Jamerson is the Schoenberg of getting from the I chord to the IV chord. He’s algorithmically generating a new pattern every phrase…[He] belongs with Bach, Debussy and Mozart. - Jack Stratton Never heard of James Jamerson? You probably have, even if you don't know his actual name. A true session giant, Jamerson has played on over 30 number one records, laid down stone-cold grooves for the biggest artists Motown, soul and funk could throw at him, and has influenced scores of ba

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Humphry Davy, the first person in history to inhale laughing gas, and he never stopped!

History has taught us that the combination of a thirst for knowledge and personal sacrifice is the most powerful force behind some of the greatest discoveries. But it appears that certain scientists in the past took this combination to a whole new level by literally risking their own lives for the sake of science. Before American psychologist Wayne Oates coined the term “workaholic,” which in recent decades has been used to describe someone obsessively addicted to work, there

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Bad Luck, Starvation and Cannibalism. The Story Of The Donner Party And Their Doomed Journey.

Today, the Donner Party is virtually synonymous with one thing: cannibalism. But while most have heard about the gruesome tale of the Donner Party’s cannibalism, at least in passing, the details of this fateful journey are far less well-known. At the outset, the pioneers of the Donner Party were just like so many others heading westward in the mid-19th century. Led by Jacob and George Donner, along with James Reed, they gathered in Springfield, Illinois in April 1846 and prep

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How the Israelis Captured Nazi Adolf Eichmann

“It was well known that there was at least one strong Jewish underground unit that had been working ceaselessly since the end of the war in all parts of the world, tracking down Nazi war criminals who had evaded the Allied net in 1945. He had heard that its members were fanatically devoted to their task, brave people who had dedicated their lives to bringing some of inhuman monsters responsible for Belsen, Auschwitz, and other hellholes to justice.” Jack Higgins, The Bormann

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