Category: History Blog

Around 19,000 years ago, Native Americans started building villages near the confluence of what we now call the Monongahela, Allegheny and Ohio rivers in western Pennsylvania. European explorers arrived in the early 1700s, building trading posts as early as 1717. Actual European settlement in the area didn’t happen until the late 1740s, when an English outfit called the Ohio Company won a land grant and sent a large group to survey the area. But the French were there, too, having moved south from Quebec. From June 15 to November 10, 1749, a French expedition headed by Celeron de Bienville warned the English to stay out what they considered French territory.

It seemed inevitable that the French and British would clash over the matter, and that’s exactly what happened. The governor of Virginia, Robert Dinwiddie, sent Major George Washington of the Virginia militia to warn the French that the area was British, not French, thank you very much. Washington delivered the message to French commanders at a couple of forts, and was received with all the courtesy officers gave each other. But his message was ignored. Dinwiddie then sent Captain William Trent to build a fort at the confluence; thus, Fort Prince George became the first permanent European settlement in what we now call Pittsburgh. 500 French soldiers soon arrived, and they ran off the British, tore down the fort and built a new one – Fort Duquesne – in its place.

Of course, the British had to respond to this, so Dinwiddie sent a regiment under Colonel Joshua Fry to take the fort back. Fry ordered his second in command – Washington – to lead an advance column, and on May 28, 1754, that column clashed with French forces in what would become known as the Battle of Jumonville Glen. 13 French soldiers were killed, and 21 taken prisoner. It was all pretty routine stuff, at least until one of Washington’s Indian allies, the Seneca chief Tanacharison, executed the French commander, Ensign Joseph Coulon de Jumonville, with neither Washington’s knowledge nor permission.

The French were outraged, and sent a whole mess of troops to track down Washington and his men. Desperate, Washington asked Tanacharison to round up as many Indian allies as possible. A motley bunch of Delaware, Shawnee and Seneca Indians joined the group, as did the rest of Fry’s men (but not Fry himself: he’d fallen off his horse, and died of a broken neck two weeks earlier). With a French attack only a matter of time, the ragtag group exhausted itself building Fort Necessity. The French finally arrived, and Washington ordered his troops to attack. But the Virginia militia were terrified, so they fired a single shot then fled into the safety of the fort. Washington, on the battlefield with only a handful of British army regulars and Indian warriors of dubious loyalty, had little choice but to retreat as well. The British, tired, scared, and dreadfully low on supplies, surrendered to the French on July 4, 1754. It was George Washington’s only surrender… but he had inadvertently set a chain of events in motion that are now called the Seven Years’ War, sometimes called the French and Indian War in the United States.

Continue reading “Misspelling Your Own Name”

If you drive north on Beatties Ford Road headed towards Huntersvillle, you will eventually come to the intersection of Beatties Ford and McIntyre Avenue:

If you look to your left, diagonally across the intersection, you’ll see a gravel parking lot, a lonely picnic table, and his only friend, a trash can:

If you were to park your car in this lot… well, first you’d see this creepy sign warning you to “walk with a friend”, a polite way of saying “don’t come here alone”:

But what you’d really see is a tiny park, not much larger than a typical residential lot. And the only amenity at this park, other than the picnic table and trash can, is a poorly-maintained path, which winds around the park:

The whole park seems kind of pointless, as if the Mecklenburg County Parks & Recreation Department somehow ended up with this piece of land, and half-heartedly decided to turn it into a neighborhood park.

But something really, really important to Charlotte’s history happened here. If you take a few steps back, you’ll see something amazing:

OK, so that was a bit of a let down. But don’t let that empty space fool you.

Continue reading “The Charlotte History Field Trip”

A while back I stumbled across this article at British newspaper The Guardian‘s website. It’s a filler piece written by a young man named Richard Morris. In it, he discusses the “five best” and “five worst” things about the year he spent studying at the University of West Georgia in the United States. One of Morris’ “worst things” was American coinage:

I’m not very good with numbers, so maybe this didn’t help me, but I still cannot understand American coins after living here for 10 months. One of the coins which is larger actually has a lower value than a coin which is smaller (and of the same colour), go figure. “Dimes” and “nickels,” still mean nothing to me.

Of course, to many of you the real mystery might be why anyone would travel 4,270 miles to go to West Georgia! SERIOUSLY: THOUSANDS OF UNIVERSITIES IN THE UNITED STATES, AND YOU CHOSE THAT ONE?? But that’s neither here nor there. And it is true that many foreign visitors have trouble with American coins. So let’s take a look at the history of American coinage and see if we can make sense of it all.

*     *     *

Modern American coins go back 221 years, to the Coinage Act of 1792. The act authorized the construction of the US Mint in Philadelphia, the very first building erected by the federal government under the new Constitution. The act also made the dollar the national currency of the United States, finally abolishing the hodgepodge of British and Spanish coins that had been used before. The act also defined several types of coin, which I’ll summarize below:

THE MILL

A mill is a thousandth of a dollar, or, to put it another way, a tenth of a cent. The name comes from the Latin millesimum, which means “thousandth part”. The funny thing is, even in 1792 mills were useless as a unit of currency. One couldn’t buy anything with a mill coin, so the Mint never bothered to make any. A few states made mill coins out of cheap materials like tin or paper for the purpose of paying taxes, but for the most part, mill coins have never existed.

But just because mills don’t exist as coins doesn’t mean they don’t exist as units of currency. In most American locales, property taxes are calculated using mills. Counties assess the value of each property in their jurisdiction and apply a millage rate to calculate the amount of tax a landowner owes. For example, a county might assess a piece of property as being worth $250,000. If the tax rate is 5 mills, then the homeowner owes $1,250 in taxes ($250,000 x .005 = $1,250). Mills are also used in a couple of industries: electric power is usually measured internally in mills, and stock brokers often charge their clients in mills rather than percentages.

But outside property taxes, the average American sees the mills most often with gasoline prices. In every US state, gas prices have nine mills tacked on the end, so that gas might cost $3.109 per US gallon. Why this is so is a mystery. Some say it came about thanks to a 1933 increase in the gas tax from 1¢ to 1.5¢ per gallon. Others say it’s just “charm pricing”, which is to offer an item for $1.99 instead of $2.00, because our brains process the former as being significantly cheaper than the latter. Still others believe a more likely story: that back when gasoline emerged as a consumer item in the early 1900s, it was sold in such small amounts and at such low prices that mills actually mattered.

But gas prices reveal something else about American culture: the universal dislike of mills. With the exception of property taxes, most every American will discuss such small units of currency as fractions of a cent instead of mills. No one ever thinks of a gallon of gas costing $3.10 and 9 mills… it’s $3.10 and 9/10 of a cent. And this might be because of trading stamps.

For almost a century, retailers across the United States offered trading stamps with every purchase. You’d save the stamps and redeem them for things like clocks, toasters and lamps. You may even remember the “54-40 and Fight” episode of The Brady Bunch, in which the kids agree to pool their saved trading stamp books, but chaos breaks out when the boys want to use the stamps to get a “boy’s item” (a row boat) while the girls want to use them for a “girl’s item” (a sewing machine).

Of course, the stamps weren’t free. Companies like Sperry & Hutchinson charged retailers to join their programs, and charged for each roll of stamps the retailer ordered. And retailers, not surprisingly, passed these costs on to consumers as higher prices. In 1904, the state of New York passed a law requiring trading stamp companies to offer cash rebates in addition to housewares and sporting goods. Companies like S&H placed a value of one mill on each stamp, meaning that one could trade a book of 1,000 stamps for a dollar. But here’s the thing: almost no one took them up on the offer, because it was almost always a better deal to redeem stamps for goods instead of cash.

Continue reading “The (Bizarre) History of American Coinage”

Several historians have described the American Revolution as the “American Secession”. This is because the American Revolution was pretty tame compared to later revolutions in France and Russia. Most Americans weren’t even in favor of the Revolution, and the majority of those that were didn’t want to change their entire world… they just wanted the British to leave them alone. So after the British left, life continued for most Americans more or less as it had for decades.

Contrast this with the French Revolution, where revolutionaries railed against a millennia of rule by a theocratic monarchy. Most of France belonged to the monarchy or aristocracy, and much of the rest belonged to the church. From a revolutionary point of view, it wasn’t enough to just change their form of government. Society had to be recreated from the ground up, and certain people needed to be gotten rid of or “re-educated”. So aristocrats, bishops and priests were executed by the thousands, and their wealth and property redistributed to the working class.

But even that wasn’t enough. French revolutionaries created a new calendar to eliminate religious and monarchical days. The calendar would start not from the birth of Jesus, but from the founding of the Republic. Revolutionaries even invented a new decimal clock, partly because of its perceived ease of use, but also as another way to eliminate all traces of the Ancien Régime.

Many reforms weren’t very popular. Decimal time became the “official time” of a handful of towns, and was readily embraced by a few scientists and revolutionaries… but almost no one else. The Republican calendar was more successful, being used by the French government for 12 years. There was, however, a significant error in the calendar related to the calculation of leap years which made it mathematically inaccurate. And while many Frenchmen were at least initially more enthusiastic about the calendar than the clock, so many people had to use the Gregorian calendar so often – in business dealings with other countries, or working with dates from before the Revolution – that most just gave up and went back to the old calendar. For some reason, I’m picturing an 18th century French version of Lewis Black, complete with liberty cap: “we already had one perfectly good calendar, but invented a new one… SO WHY THE HELL DO WE KEEP GOING BACK TO THE OLD ONE? IF EVERYONE’S GONNA KEEP USING THE OLD ONE, WHY DON’T WE JUST DITCH THE NEW ONE? AM I THE ONLY SANE PERSON IN THIS REPUBLIC??”  In any case, the French government agreed and went back to the Gregorian calendar in 1805.

But there was one reform that was insanely popular. It was so popular, in fact, that almost the entire world now uses it. And people in France at the time were happy to see it.

It’s the metric system.

The first unified system of measurement used in France was established by Charlemagne in AD 790. His system was remarkably similar to Britain’s “Imperial System”. For instance, the pouce was the French equivalent of the inch, and was exactly 1.066 inches. And the pied du roi (“the king’s foot”, usually just shortened to pied) was equal to 12 pounce (12.86 inches, or 1.066 feet). Thus, the pied carré (square foot) was equal to 1.136 sq ft. The toise, the French equivalent of the fathom, was 6.394 feet, compared to 6 feet in England (the English only used fathoms at sea; the French used it on both land and sea). Liquid measurements varied a bit: the chopine was equal to .84 Imperial pints (but almost exactly 1 US pint, which was the system in use in England until 1824), the pinte was 1.86 Imperial pints (or 2.01 US pints). The quade was equal to a US half-gallon (or .42 Imperial gallons) and the velte was equal to 2.01 US gallons (or 1.68 Imperial gallons).

Continue reading “Taking Measure”

“Selling coal to Newcastle” (or variations, like the alliterative “carrying coal to Newcastle” or the less popular “taking coal to Newcastle”) is a British idiom for a pointless or foolish action. The city of Newcastle upon Tyne was the home of Britain’s coal industry for at least 150 years, so taking coal there to sell would be silly. I’m not sure there’s an exact analogue for it in American English, but the old saying “he could sell ice to Eskimos” shows a similar ironic humor.

But there was once a man who did sell coal to Newcastle. And his name was Timothy Dexter.

Dexter was born in Malden, Massachusetts on January 22, 1748. His family would probably be considered poor by modern standards, but was a typical farming family of the day that didn’t have a lot of material wealth. Timothy therefore stopped attending school at age 8 and, barely literate, started working on the family farm. At 16 he was apprenticed to a leathermaker. At some point thereafter, he moved to Newburyport, Massachusetts to open his own leather business. The historical record is silent on whether Timothy’s business was a success, but somehow or the other was soon able to convince a rich widow named Elizabeth Frothingham to marry him.

Dexter was nothing if not ambitious, and frequently petitioned the Newburyport council for some sort of job that might improve his station. Remember, Dexter was barely literate: not only was his spelling awful (even by the loose standards of the time), his penmanship was said to be truly terrible. It’s likely that the Newburyport council only read the first or second petitions, then tossed all subsequent petitions into a pile. But they could only ignore him for so long: the pile of Dexter’s petitions eventually got so tall that the council, perhaps sarcastically, resurrected the ancient title of “Informer of Deer” – a job not filled since the early days of the Massachusetts Colony, when the line between eating and starving was so thin that it was considered a good idea to have a person whose full-time job was to go out and look for deer. So, Timothy Dexter: Informer of Deer.

Local “society” types in Newburyport took an instant dislike to him. I don’t know if this was strictly because of Dexter’s lower-class background, his lack of formal education, his “eccentric” personality or what. But many of Newburyport’s moneyed men purposely gave him bad business advice, in hopes of making him go broke. Unfortunately for them, Timothy Dexter seemed to have the world’s longest streak of good luck.

Continue reading “AMAZING LIVES: Timothy Dexter”

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, currently the commander of the International Space Station, has an awesome Twitter feed in which he frequently posts amazing pictures of Earth as seen from the ISS. For example, he recently posted this picture of nighttime London as a memorial to Margaret Thatcher’s passing:

What’s striking about this picture is that you can clearly see the River Thames as it bisects London. What you can’t see in the picture, however, are the 21 other rivers in Greater London that flow into the Thames. And that’s because, in most cases, the rivers are now underground:

Here’s a brief summary of just a few of London’s “lost rivers”:

*     *     *

The largest, and perhaps most well-known, is the River Fleet. The river begins as two separate steams near Hampstead Heath, an ancient park which first entered the historical record in AD 986 when the gloriously (and accurately) named King Ethelred the Unready gave one of his servants land there. From Hampstead, the streams flow through Kentish Town to Camden Town, where they join. The river then flows underneath King’s Cross, which was previously known as Battle Bridge, because Roman historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus said the Romans fought legendary Iceni ruler Boudica at a bridge over the Fleet there. It then flows down Farringdon Road, and then Farringdon Street, before ending in the Thames underneath Blackfriars Bridge.

For centuries, the Fleet was a regular part of London life. It’s thought that the Romans built the world’s first tidal mill on the Fleet. The Anglo-Saxons, who called it fleot, meaning “tidal inlet”, dug several wells next to the river, from which Londoners got place names like Clerkenwell, Bagnigge Well and St. Bride’s Well. They also used the Fleet for shipping, and two short streets now named Newcastle Close and Old Seacoal Lane were originally wharves.

Sweepings from Butchers Stalls, Dung, Guts and Blood,
Drown’d Puppies, stinking Sprats, all drench’d in Mud,
Dead Cats and Turnip-Tops come tumbling down the Flood.

– Jonathan Swift, on what the Fleet looked like after a heavy rain

But by the 1200s, the river had become so polluted that the area became home to slums and prisons. Sir Christopher Wren advocated widening the river after the Great Fire of London (1666), but instead a man named Robert Hooke turned the river into a canal in the style of Venice in 1680. The upper part of Hooke’s canal was never popular, so in 1736 the area was covered up and a market built over it. The market survived until 1829, by which point it was so decrepit that it was knocked down and modern Farringdon Road was built in its stead. And the lower part of the river – already mostly covered by bridges and buildings – was built over in 1769 as part of the construction of Blackfriars Bridge.

To where Fleet-ditch with disemboguing streams
Rolls the large tribute of dead dogs to Thames
The king of dykes! than whom no sluice of mud
with deeper sable blots the silver flood

– Alexander Pope, 1728

The most famous part of the Fleet is probably the street named after it. For centuries, Fleet Street was home to most of London’s newspapers, and although most have since moved away, “Fleet Street” is still synonymous with the British media, in the same way that “Madison Avenue” in synonymous with American advertising.

The current Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, wants to uncover the Fleet as part of a “beautification plan” for the city, although the government agency tasked with the project is unsure it can be done.

Continue reading “London’s Lost Rivers”

In this History Blog post, I talked about Robert Fortune, the Scot who almost single-handedly made tea the national drink of Great Britain.

The problem that needed solving was this: the British were absolutely mad for Chinese tea. However, the Chinese weren’t interested in any of the goods the British wanted to trade for tea. Instead, they demanded payment in silver. Shipping silver halfway around the world to buy tea wasn’t just risky, it also caused inflation at home, too… as Isaac Newton found out. So the East India Company set up a trade triangle in which British goods were shipped to India and traded for opium – which the Chinese loved. The opium was shipped to China, where it was exchanged for tea, which was shipped back to the UK. And everyone was happy.

Well, everyone except the Chinese government. Needless to say, the Chinese were angry that the British (and French and Americans) were shipping tons of addictive drugs into their country. After several diplomatic attempts failed to find a solution, the Chinese decided to go to war against the Westerners. Which seemed like an easy win: the Chinese had an army of 200,000 to go against Britain’s 19,000 troops. And the Chinese were clearly superior to the European barbarians. How could they lose?

As it turned out, they lost. Badly. China’s sense of racial superiority ran headlong into Britain’s modern weapons and tactics. The war lasted 3 years, 5 months, 1 week and 4 days, and China lost 20,000 men to just 69 for British forces. And in almost every battle, the British played the role of the 1995 Chicago Bulls to China’s [insert your area’s worst high school basketball team here]. And so, on August 29, 1842, representatives of the Qing Empire boarded the HMS Cornwallis (ironic?) and signed the Treaty of Nanking. The treaty gave the British five “treaty ports”, in which they would have considerable autonomy. The Chinese also agreed to pay the British $21 million in silver dollars for various reparations on a three-year installment plan, with 5% interest charged for late payments. The Chinese also gave the British the island of Hong Kong, which will be important later.

The Chinese weren’t happy with the Treaty of Nanking. They tried to ignore it whenever possible, or halfheartedly enforce it when compelled to. In 1844, French officials signed the Treaty of Huangpu and American officials signed the Treaty of Wangxia. These treaties gave French and American traders rights similar to those enjoyed by the British, but with one crucial difference: there was a clause in both treaties whereby they could be renegotiated every 12 years. And, because of China’s lack of enthusiasm for enforcing those treaties, the French and Americans fought for more concessions in 1856 when they came up for renewal. And the British decided that they too wanted to renegotiate the Treaty of Nanking, something the Chinese flat-out refused to do.

Continue reading “The Strangest City on Earth”

Samuel Beazley led an interesting life. Born in Westminster in 1786, he wrote his first play at age 12. He later served in the British Army during the Peninsular War, where he had two interesting adventures in particular. At one point, he was knocked unconscious during a skirmish and, thought to be dead, was prepared for burial, only to wake up at the last minute. He also played a role in the rescue of the Duchesse d’Angoulême, daughter of Louis XVI, from approaching French forces led by Napoleon.

Beazley returned to England after the war and wrote over 100 plays, mostly comedies. He also wrote two novels – The Roué (1828) and The Oxonians (1830) – and translated several Italian opera librettos into English. He also designed a spa, a town hall, a couple of hotels, the South-Eastern Railway Company’s London Bridge station and several other stations on their North Kent line. In Warwickshire, he also designed the hilariously named Studley Castle.

But Beazley was mostly known for being Britain’s first “theatre architect”. He designed St James’s Theatre, the Royalty Theatre and the City of London Theatre, led major renovations of the Adelphi Theatre and the Drury Lane Theatre, and designed two theatres each in Dublin, Belgium and India and one in Brazil. He even designed the Lyceum Theatre twice: his original 1816 building burnt down in 1830, so he designed its replacement, which still stands today:

Yet, despite all his good works, Beazley is best remembered today… for a prank.

*     *     *

Beazley had a friend named Theodore Hook. Born in Charlotte Street, London on September 22, 1788, Hook was the son of James Hook, a composer of popular songs of the period. His elder brother, also named James Hook, became Dean of Worcester Cathedral.

Theodore was something of a musical prodigy: his father often took him to theatres to show him off to other performers, and at sixteen Hook debuted his first work, a comic opera called The Soldier’s Return. He wrote several more works, all of which were commercially popular. He seemed to have a bright future, and his music so charmed the Prince Regent – the future King George IV – that the prince named him accountant-general and treasurer of Mauritius, a gig that paid him a healthy £2,000 a year.

Unfortunately, £12,000 ended up missing from the island’s accounts, and Hook could provide no answer for the discrepancy. So he was arrested and returned to England. While awaiting trial, Hook made money by writing articles for newspapers and magazines. His writings were so popular that he was able to start a newspaper, John Bull, which was yet another success.

However, Hook never did address the missing £12,000. He was arrested again, and this time sent to a “sponging-house”, a kind of halfway house for debtors. Typically, one would be sent to a sponging-house as a last ditch warning to figure out a way to pay off debts. If unsuccessful, the debtor was usually sent to debtor’s prison. Hook was able to use his charm to get out of the house after a couple of years. But the debt hung over him the remainder of his life, and after he died on August 24, 1841 the government seized his estate to settle the debt.

Continue reading “The Berners Street Hoax”

From the History Blog’s “Well, the Legend is Real” Department:

Laurentius – known to history as Lawrence of Rome – was born in 225 AD, and served as a deacon of the Catholic Church under Pope Sixtus II. Sixtus and Lawrence lived in Rome during the reign of Valerian the Elder, who ruled from 253 to 260. And if there was one thing Valerian couldn’t stand, it was Christians. In 258, Valerian went on a rampage, ordering the executions of as many deacons, priests and bishops as he could get his hands on. Sixtus was beheaded on August 6, and Lawrence was scheduled to die on August 10.

But, according to legend, Lawrence wasn’t beheaded or crucified. So the story goes, he was taken to the area of what is now the church at San Lorenzo in Panisperna and burned on a gridiron. And supposedly, as he sat roasting over the fire, his last words were “turn me over … I’m done on this side”… which is why St. Lawrence is the patron saint of both comedians and chefs. He’s also the patron saint of related culinary professions, such as brewers, butchers, confectioners, cutlers, restaurateurs and vintners. Because of his work with preserving early church documents he’s also the patron saint of archivists and librarians. He did a lot for the poor, especially children, so he’s also the patron saint of paupers and school children. For reasons I’m not really clear on, he’s also the patron saint of armorers, glaziers, laundry workers, tanners and the diocese of Amarillo, Texas.

Although it’s kind of an amusing story – who even knew that comedians had a patron saint? – evidence for or against it is kind of murky. The first written account of the story comes from the book Liber Peristephanon, written by the Roman Christian poet Aurelius Prudentius Clemens. But Prudentius was born in Tarraconensis (northern Spain) in 348, ninety years after Lawrence had been martyred.

One theory – from the fabulously named Father Pio Franchi de ‘Cavalieri – says that the whole thing boils down to a transcription error. At the time, Christian authors and record keepers would note the death of a martyr with the phrase passus est, meaning “he suffered”. Maybe someone somewhere accidentally wrote it down as assus est (“he was roasted”), and someone else made up a story to fit the text. I mean, can’t you just imagine a modern day DMV worker typing  “Lawrence of Rome” into his computer? “Look lady, it says here he was ROASTED, okay? Unless you got paperwork from the Department of Health that says otherwise, he’s ROASTED to the State of New York, OK?”

It’s thought that Constantine built a small chapel on the site in Lawrence’s honor, and there is an actual gridiron – said to be from the martyrdom, naturally – under the altar at the Church of St Lawrence at Lucina. However, the gridiron was given to the church by Pope Paschal II, who reigned as pope from August 13, 1099 until his death on January 21, 1118. I’m not going to research where the gridiron allegedly was for 800 years before ending up at the church, but you can draw your own conclusions. Incidentally, Paschal II was the first pope to appoint a bishop to North America, and he did it 400 years before Columbus sailed to the New World: Erik Gnupsson (in his native tongue, Eiríkr Gnúpsson, but also known under the Latinized name Henricus) was appointed Bishop of Greenland and Vinland, the latter of which many historians think was Newfoundland.

Whether or not Lawrence died joking about being “ready to turn”, the real joke ended up being on Valerian. Two years after he’d ordered the death of Lawrence, Sixtus and the others, Valerian found himself at the Battle of Edessa against an army of Persians led by Shapur I.

According to most accounts, the battle was something of a stalemate, so Valerian decided to meet with Shapur to work out some kind of truce. But Shapur decided to seize Valerian instead, which caused the entire Roman army to surrender. What happened next depends on who you read. Persian and secular authors say that Valerian was taken to a city called Bishapur and lived out the rest of his life in relative comfort. Edward Gibbon, the English author and historian whose six volume The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was published between 1776 and 1788, tells it a bit differently:

We are told that Valerian, in chains, but invested with the Imperial purple, was exposed to the multitude, a constant spectacle of fallen greatness; and that whenever the Persian monarch mounted on horseback, he placed his foot on the neck of a Roman emperor. Notwithstanding all the remonstrances of his allies, who repeatedly advised him to remember the vicissitudes of fortune, to dread the returning power of Rome, and to make his illustrious captive the pledge of peace, not the object of insult, Sapor still remained inflexible. When Valerian sunk under the weight of shame and grief, his skin, stuffed with straw, and formed into the likeness of a human figure, was preserved for ages in the most celebrated temple of Persia; a more real monument of triumph, than the fancied trophies of brass and marble so often erected by Roman vanity.

Other accounts say that Valerian was killed after being made to swallow molten gold, or by being flayed alive. The source for most of these tales, it should be noted, was a Roman Christian author named Lucius Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius (“Lactantius” for short), who just might have had an ax to grind against Valerian for martyring Sixtus, Lawrence and the others. But Lactantius would go on to become an advisor to Constantine I, and Valerian would remain the only Roman Emperor in history to be captured and held as a prisoner of war.

“Kiwi” became THE nickname for New Zealanders and the national symbol of the country thanks to… Kiwi shoe polish.

At the start of the 20th century, there were several nicknames and symbols for New Zealanders, none of them dominant. Among others, symbols included the moa (another bird), the silver fern (the symbol of many New Zealand sports teams, including the famous All Blacks rugby team), the kiwi bird and the Southern Cross constellation, which is still on the New Zealand flag:

In 1906 an Australian named William Ramsay developed the shoe polish, which he named after his New Zealander wife, Annie Elizabeth Meek. There were other shoe polishes on the market, but Ramsay’s was one of the first to emphasize making shoes and boots shine, in addition to restoring their color and water-resistance.

Ramsay loaded several cases of the polish onto a cart and traveled to farms handing out free tins to farmers for their work boots. Kiwi rapidly became the best-selling shoe polish brand in Australia. But Kiwi’s big break came in World War I, when the British and American armies started distributing the polish to soldiers. Millions of men became familiar with not just the product, but the “Kiwi” name, too. Soon, everyone was calling New Zealanders “Kiwis”.

Today Kiwi shoe polish is sold in 180 countries and holds 53% of the worldwide market for shoe polish. But even more than that, it’s the only product to give a nation’s citizens their nickname!