Category: History Blog

In this History Blog post, I raged about people who misspell “Gwinnett”, the name of a county in metro Atlanta. It’s named after Button Gwinnett, one of Georgia’s signers of the Declaration of Independence.

In the article, I mentioned that Gwinnett’s signature is one of the most valuable and sought-after in the whole world. This is because there’s a group of autograph collectors who try to collect signatures from all the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Gwinnett’s signature is very rare, because he was practically unknown before the American Revolution and died in a duel only ten months after signing the Declaration.

Well, it looks like another copy of his signature has been found. According to the linked article, St Peter’s Church in Wolverhampton has discovered his signature in its parish register, from when Gwinnett married a local girl named Ann Bourne in 1757. Five years later, Gwinnett and wife would emigrate to the colonies, first to Charleston and later to a plantation on St. Catherine’s Island, Georgia.

The document, which has since been secretly moved to a bank for safe keeping, is expected to fetch over £500,000 ($795,550) at auction, a huge windfall for St Peter’s.

And, just to show you what a small world it really is, the current mayor of Wolverhampton, Malcolm Gwinnett, is descended from Button Gwinnett.

On December 1, 1948 the body of a man was found on Somerton Beach in Adelaide, Australia.

He was a white male in his early 40s. He was clean-cut and wore a white dress shirt, a red and blue striped tie and brown pants. Strangely, he also wore a brown knit pullover and a European-style overcoat, even though December is summertime in Australia, and the previous day had been quite hot, the previous evening very warm. Even stranger, all the tags had been removed from his clothing (most clothing tags of the day bore the name of the store where they were purchased and not a global designer brand; this was sometimes useful for identifying bodies). None of the items found on the body – a pack of Juicy Fruit gum, an American-made steel comb, a box of matches, and a pack of Army Club cigarettes (which actually contained Kensitas brand cigarettes) – assisted in identifying the body.

An autopsy was performed on the man, and there things only got stranger. The pathologist, Sir John Burton Cleland, was convinced that the man had been poisoned, due to the peculiar damage to the man’s internal organs. But no trace of poison was found in the man’s body. Cleland was even able to determine that the man’s last meal had been a pasty, a British pocket pie similar to an empanada. But no poison was found in the pasty, either.

Local media initially thought the the body might be that of a missing local man called E.C. Johnson. But on December 3rd, the very same Mr. Johnson walked in to a police station to identify himself, so that lead went nowhere. The next day, police announced that they had found no match for the man through fingerprint and dental records. The day after that, newspapers reported that police had started looking through military records after a local claimed to have been with the man at a local hotel bar on November 30th, and had allegedly seen the deceased with a military pension card with the same “Solomonson” on it. This also came to nothing.

Continue reading “Australia’s Greatest Mystery”

– Thomas Jefferson was incredibly sloppy in many ways. His clothes were usually out of style, too small, and often threadbare. Instead of sitting properly in a chair, he was known for throwing his legs over one arm and reclining comfortably. His office and study often had massive piles of books and papers lying about in huge stacks. In other ways, though, Jefferson was amazingly meticulous. He recorded the weather and temperature every day of his adult life, and he faithfully recorded every penny he ever spent. His notes were so voluminous that Jefferson even felt the need to create a 650 page index of them! But his most amazing precision was saved for architecture. On his plans for Monticello, his home in Virginia, he specified a measurement of 1.8991666 inches. Even today, with the best computer-guided saws, it’s extremely difficult to cut any piece of wood to a millionth of an inch. Why Jefferson bothered is a mystery to this day.

– Worcestershire sauce was created by accident. Sort of. As the story goes, an English aristocrat returned from overseas with a burning desire to recreate a particular sauce he’d had in India. He approached two noted apothecaries, John Wheeley Lea and William Henry Perrins of Worcester, to see if they could reproduce the sauce. Based on the man’s description, Lea and Perrins mixed malt vinegar, molasses, sugar, salt, anchovies, tamarind extract, onions, garlic, cloves, soy sauce, lemons, pickles, peppers and other ingredients in a barrel. By all accounts, the new sauce was positively awful. However, instead of throwing the foul mixture away, the apothecaries decided to keep it for reasons unknown, and so the barrel was rolled into a basement corner. The barrel was rediscovered a couple of years later, and the men tasted the sauce again on a whim. Aging was the key, as the sauce had turned from awful to delicious.

– The first written record in the English language of someone drinking tea comes from the famous diary of Samuel Pepys. Pepys mentions that he drank tea for the first time on September 25, 1660. Oddly, he doesn’t say anything else about it, including whether or not he enjoyed it. What’s interesting about this whole thing is that Pepys’ comments were mentioned in an 1812 book by Scottish historian David Macpherson called History of the European Commerce with India. The thing is, although Pepys’ diaries were available for viewing at Oxford University at the time, no one ever had before. And the reason for that was because the diaries were written in an obscure form of shorthand that had fallen out of use. Pepys’ diaries were, for all intents and purposes, written in an unknown language. They were not translated into standard English until 1822. How Macpherson managed to find and translate a single line of text out of six volumes of Pepy’s diary is unknown.

– The first music ever broadcast over radio was probably “Ombra mai fù”, an aria from Georg Friedrich Händel’s opera Xerxes. I say “probably” because many people in many places were experimenting with radio at the time. However, the airing of “Ombra mai fù”, on December 24, 1906, is the first musical broadcast we know of for certain.

You can be forgiven for not having heard the name James Chadwick before. No, not the Nobel prize-winning British physicist who discovered the neutron. I’m talking about the one who lived a century earlier. This James Chadwick is an obscure figure in British history. He is barely remembered, if at all, in Britain, and is more or less completely unknown outside his home country. But his life displays a mind-bogglingly interesting series of strange connections that shows just how amazingly connected history can be.

To begin with, his father, Andrew Chadwick, was a good friend of John Wesley, the Church of England reformer who, along with his brother Charles, founded the “Methodist Movement”. This sect, which emphasized open-air evangelical preaching, eventually became the Methodist Church, a Protestant denomination with around 12 million members today. Andrew also started the first Sunday School in the county of Lancashire.

Andrew apparently practiced what he preached when it came to giving his money away to the less fortunate. Unlike other sons of Britain’s rich, James was forced to get a job and provide for his family. So he began his adult life as a teacher. History doesn’t record if James was a good or bad teacher, but he must have done something right, because one of his pupils, John Dalton, is generally credited with discovering the atom and for doing the first major research into color blindness, which was for years called Daltonism in his honor.

James later left teaching to become a journalist, and to that end he spent time in Paris. There he was a roommate of the Anglo-American revolutionary Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense, which popularized the American Revolution, The Crisis, which urged Americans not to abandon hope in the darkest hours of the revolution, and The Rights of Man, a treatise on human rights inspired by the French Revolution.

Continue reading “Connections”

Dick Puddlecote was angry. And not your average “oh, I forgot to pick up the dry cleaning” angry, either. He was angry to the very core of his being. Trillions of cells made up Dick’s body, and every last one of them was furious with the King of England.

Dick had been born in London, sometime in the 1270s or 1280s, to what we would today call a lower middle-class family. Dick was educated enough to read and write, a skill he parlayed into a series of low-paying assistant jobs. But Dick had dreams, dreams of one day owning his own business exporting wool, butter and cheese to the cities of northern Europe. So Dick scrimped, saved and called in every favor he could until his dream came true.

But then the King of England defaulted on a loan given to him by the merchants of Flanders. In retaliation, those merchants seized the trade goods of every English merchant in the area, and threw every Englishman they could find into prison… which was where Dick was, and why he was so angry.

Continue reading “The Heist of the (14th) Century”

Inns have sold food to weary travelers for millennia. Pubs and other drinking establishments have sold munchies to drinkers for centuries. But the modern “restaurant” – a place people go to for a culinary experience, rather than out of necessity – dates back only to the French Revolution.

Like most upper classes in the rest of the world, the French aristocracy always ate only the best, and the French in particular developed high standards of quality and presentation for their food. But when the Revolution came, tens of thousands of highly trained chefs found themselves unemployed when their masters met the guillotine.

As this article at Mental Floss notes:

Aristocrats fled to the countryside, leaving behind their highly skilled chefs and the fine wines from their cellars. Suddenly, unemployed cooks and abandoned bottles found their way to the city’s eateries, and within a year, nearly 50 elegant restaurants had popped up in Paris. These epicurean temples catered to the new class of French deputies and businessmen and were featured in travelogues throughout Europe. As word of their deliciousness spread, Parisian restaurants became tourist attractions on par with Notre Dame.

The whole article is worth a read; check it out if you can!

The town of Beit She’arim, in Galilee, has an important place in Jewish history. Founded during the reign of King Herod in the first century BC, Beit She’arim was a prosperous market town that became the de facto capital of Israel in AD 70, after the destruction of the Second Temple forced the Sanhedrin (the Jewish legislature and supreme council) to evacuate to Beit She’arim. The town was destroyed by fire during a rebellion in AD 352, and although it was resurrected by the Byzantines and later the Arabs, the town never regained its luster. In fact, it was a sleepy Arab village named Sheikh Bureik when it was purchased by the Jewish National Fund in the 1920s.

Beit She’arim was also the site of a large and important cemetery. Historically, the most desirable burial place for Jews was the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. But once Jews were barred from the area in AD 135, Beit She’arim became the main alternate burial place. Jews from as far away as Tyre and Palmyra were buried there, as was Rabbi Judah HaNasi, the second century AD Jewish leader who codified Jewish oral tradition into the Mishnah, which itself became the basis for the Talmud. Needless to say, HaNasi is a really important guy in Jewish history.

Because of all this, archaeologists had studied the area around Beit She’arim as far back as the 1880s. By the 1950s, the area around the cemetery had been excavated so well that it was decided to build a museum on the site. And so, in 1956, a bulldozer was brought in to flatten a small, archaeologically insignificant cave. But shortly after the bulldozer went to work, it hit a gigantic item that it couldn’t move. The item – which was 6½’ x 11′ and 18″ thick – weighed 9 tons and was, strangely enough, perfectly level on top.

Continue reading “The Mystery Slab”