Queen Elizabeth’s speech to her troops at Tilbury, on the eve of the Spanish Armada (and their intended invasion of England):
My loving people, we have been persuaded by some that are careful of our safety, to take heed how we commit our selves to armed multitudes, for fear of treachery; but I assure you I do not desire to live to distrust my faithful and loving people. Let tyrants fear, I have always so behaved myself that, under God, I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and good-will of my subjects; and therefore I am come amongst you, as you see, at this time, not for my recreation and disport, but being resolved, in the midst and heat of the battle, to live and die amongst you all; to lay down for my God, and for my kingdom, and my people, my honour and my blood, even in the dust. I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field. I know already, for your forwardness you have deserved rewards and crowns; and We do assure you in the word of a prince, they shall be duly paid you. In the mean time, my lieutenant general shall be in my stead, than whom never prince commanded a more noble or worthy subject; not doubting but by your obedience to my general, by your concord in the camp, and your valour in the field, we shall shortly have a famous victory over those enemies of my God, of my kingdom, and of my people.
Except for the bitter cold, Wednesday, March 1, 1950, started off like any other day in Beatrice (Bee-AT-riss), Nebraska. Kids went to school, dads went to work, and housewives did their shopping. Everything seemed perfectly normal in this small town of around 10,000 people.
Wednesday was the day that Beatrice’s West Side Baptist Church usually held choir practice. Owing to the piercing cold, pastor Walter Klempel went to the church late that afternoon and lit the furnace so that the sanctuary would be warm by the time practice started at 7:30 that evening. He then went home for dinner, expecting to come back at around 7:15 when choir members usually started showing up.
At 7:25 that night, West Side Baptist Church exploded. The blast was so intense that it blew the sides out of the building, causing the roof to fall straight down. Windows were shattered in many neighboring houses, and the town’s only radio station was temporarily knocked off the air.
Investigators would later determine that the explosion was caused when a gas leak outside the church came in contact with the furnace’s pilot light. But that’s not what makes the “West Side Explosion” so interesting. No, what makes the story so remarkable is that no one was hurt. It might sound like an urban legend, but in this case it’s true… all 15 members of the church choir ran late that night:
– Reverend Klempel normally brought his wife and child to practice. But at 7:10 that night his daughter Marilyn Ruth spilled something on her dress. Mrs. Klempel had to iron another dress, causing the family to run late. They were at home when the blast occurred.
Since the dawn of human civilization, people have needed to communicate secretly, because as long as there have been generals, diplomats, revolutionaries, and businessmen, there have been other generals, diplomats, counter-revolutionaries and businessmen who wanted to know their secrets.
In humanity’s early days, people needing to communicate secretly often relied on trusted messengers to relay information. The problem with this approach is obvious: a messenger can get lost or killed, he can be bribed, he can be tortured to reveal the message, or he can be searched for any messages hidden on his person. Sometimes using a trusted messenger isn’t even very practical – Herodotus, an ancient Greek historian, wrote about a ruler who shaved a slave’s head, tattooed a message on his now bald head, then waited for the slave’s hair to grow back before sending him on his mission. One wonders how “pressing” a secret message is if one has to wait two months before it can be sent.
The ancients certainly had other methods of sending secret messages. The Spartans used a long strip of fabric called a scytale to send secret messages: the strip was wrapped around a wooden rod, and a message was written on it. The person receiving the message would simply wrap the strip around another rod of identical diameter, and the message could be read. Transposition ciphers, in which letters are shifted by a certain amount, were also popular. Julius Caesar is thought to be the father of the Caesar Cipher, in which all the letters of the alphabet are shifted by three letters; thus, A becomes C, B becomes D, and C becomes E, and so on.
Transposition ciphers were easily the most popular type of cipher in the ancient world… but it all came crashing down in the 9th century, when Arab mathematician Al-Kindi discovered the science of frequency analysis. Simply put, frequency analysis looks at how often letters appear in a language, and applies those percentages to a ciphered text. For instance, the most common letter in English is the letter e. If the most common letter in an encrypted English language message is x, chances are good that x represents e. You can then move on to the next most common letter (in English, this is a) and apply it to the second most common letter in the encrypted message. Continue down the line and you’ll eventually decode the message. This can be simplified further by the use of cribs, which are “cheats” that code breakers can use. For example, if you’re trying to crack a message sent by a general to one of his subordinates, you can safely assume that certain words – like “troops”, “attack” or “movement” – are contained in the letter, and you can look for them in the text. This can cut out a lot of the keyspace (the possible combinations) you have to search to decrypt a message.
In this History Blog post, I talked about the various “curses” in the baseball world, especially the “Curse of the Colonel”.
In a nutshell, Japan’s Hanshin Tigers baseball team always seemed to have the same “snakebit luck” as the Chicago Cubs. The Tigers just never seemed to be able to win it all, despite being a rich, major market team with many fans. Back in 1985, however, the team won the Japan Championship Series (Japan’s version of the World Series). In a fit of celebration, a swarm of fans ran to the nearest bridge. As the crowd screamed out the number of a player, a fan resembling him would jump off the bridge and into the river. But there was a problem: a big reason the Tigers won the Series was the bat work of an American player, Randy Bass. And there weren’t any Americans around to jump off the bridge when Randy’s number was called. A few fans took matters into their own hands and ran to the nearest Kentucky Fried Chicken. There they stole the fiberglass statue of Colonel Sanders that stands outside many Asian KFC restaurants. So when Bass’ number was called, the jubilant crowd heaved the statue off the bridge and into the water.
Since then, the Tigers have posted one of the worst records in Japanese baseball. Many were convinced that the Colonel had “cursed” the team. A few fans even pooled money to dredge the river in hopes of finding the statue. Alas, the statue was never found, and the Tigers continued to lose…
But now there’s hope! The statue has been found! You can read all about it at Yahoo! here, but the gist of it follows:
A diver checking for unexploded bombs from World War Two in the river as part of a clean-up found the Colonel’s top half on Tuesday, minus his hands and glasses but still sporting his trademark string tie and grin.
The Colonel’s smile might have widened if it could on Wednesday, when his bottom half was recovered and reunited with the top. “It’s only a statue, but I felt as if I was rescuing someone,” a worker told reporters after the lower half was found.
“When I heard the statue had been found, I felt that history had ended,” Yoshio Yoshida, 75, Hanshin manager at the time, was quoted by the Asahi newspaper as saying. “Recalling 1985, I’d like them to achieve the dream of being Japan No. 1 again.”
First there was radio. Then there was television. Lastly, there was the Internet. All three of these technologies have chipped away at the prominence of newspapers over the years. Where a big city might have once had seven or eight daily newspapers, most places are down to one or two, and even those are struggling. Radio and TV can get critical news out to people much faster than newspapers can, and the Internet has not only made much of the newspapers’ content available for free, sites like eBay and Craigslist have gutted newspapers’ once hugely profitable classified ad sections.
At times, it seems like the only thing newspapers are good for these days are the comic strips. But even these are available online, and the low cost of online publishing means that there are more strips published now than ever before. So it might seem hard to believe, but there was once a time when the few cartoonists printed nationally were held in high regard. Everyone read the newspaper every day – in many cases, people read more than one. And comic strips were not just amusing content, they were a commentary on the times. Just as people of today tune in to The Daily Show for “zeitgeist humor”, people in the early 20th century turned to comic strips.
That’s what makes the feud between Ham Fisher and Al Capp – creators of two of the most popular comic strips in American history – so remarkable. It was, in a very real sense, like two tribes going to war.
* * *
Ham Fisher was, by all accounts, a highly motivated individual. By the age of 20, Fisher had already been a soldier, held public office, and was an editor for a small-town newspaper in Pennsylvania. But Fisher’s first love was comic strips. He created several of his own strips during his teenage years, most of which are lost to history. But one of Fisher’s characters – a simple but virtuous boxer named Joe Palooka, based on a drinking buddy in his hometown of Wilkes-Barre – seemed to hold some promise. Unfortunately, none of the newspapers Fisher contacted were interested in the strip.
Atlanta owes its very existence to the railroads. In 1839, when the city of Savannah was celebrating her 106th anniversary, Atlanta was little more than the dusty crossroads of two old Creek and Cherokee trading roads, one of which still exists today (in more or less its original form) as “Peachtree Street”. There were a handful of trading posts there, and little else.
But that was soon to change, because in 1836 the Georgia legislature had voted to build the Western and Atlantic Railroad to open trade with the Midwest. And in 1837, the future city of Atlanta was chosen to be the site of the line’s depot. A booming city soon grew up around the railroad depot, which proved to be the city’s very lifeline.
But then disaster struck. General Sherman burnt Atlanta to the ground in 1864. Atlanta’s massive railroad depot was, of course, a prime strategic target: just as you always seem to go through Atlanta’s airport when flying these days, back then most goods shipped in the South went through Atlanta, too. And so the Good General made damn sure that it burned to the ground, along with most of the rest of the city.
In the years immediately following the war, Atlanta got by with a few improvised rail depots. But there was never a question that a new depot would be built. And so, in 1869, work began on the Georgia Railroad Freight Depot. Interestingly, for reasons I have yet to learn, the new depot was built in a gully. Remember this, as it will be important later.
The depot did a brisk business. Business was so brisk, in fact, that the area surrounding the depot had become hopelessly congested by the 1910s. There were trains, horses and buggies, pedestrians, and more and more of those newfangled automobiles jockeying for space on Alabama Street. The area became so congested that the city built iron bridges over a few of the streets for automobile traffic.
In the early 1920s, Atlanta architect Haralson Bleckley convinced the city to replace the haphazard iron bridges with a unified system of concrete bridges over all the streets in the area. So instead of Alabama Street having a 5-block long dip in it, the bridges would elevate the road and make it perfectly level. The plan also called for filling in other gaps created by the railroad depot and creating a system of small parks that would connect the new streets for pedestrians. The city approved his plan, and basic construction was completed by the mid 1920s. Unfortunately, none of Beckley’s planned parks were ever built, save one: Plaza Park, which was built in 1943 and later renamed Peachtree Fountains Plaza, which sits at the modern entrance to Underground Atlanta.
One consequence of Bleckley’s plan was that all of the businesses that had been located at the original street level moved up to what was then the second floor. The old storefronts were boarded up and became basement storage. Well, most of them. Some of them became speakeasies during Prohibition. Blues legend Bessie Smith’s “Atlanta Blues” opens with the lines:
Down in Atlanta G.A.
Underneath the viaduct one day
Drinking corn and hollerin’ hoo-ray
Piano playin’ till the break of day
As we all know, Prohibition ended – and with it, the need for speakeasies. And many businesses in the area went under, moved, changed hands, or lost old timers due to retirement. So after a few years, the entire subterranean area – a 12 acre, 5 block stretch of street – was completely forgotten about.
The “Cold War” was a state of undeclared war that existed between the United States and the Soviet Union from the end of World War II until the collapse of Russia’s Communist government in the early 1990s. Unlike a “hot” war, where two sides are actively shooting at each other, the “cold” war was all about readiness, posturing, and brinksmanship. If the Soviets came out with a new tank, the US would develop a missile that could pierce its armor. If the US came out with a submarine that was much quieter than its predecessors, the Soviet Union would develop better sonar for detecting it. If the Soviets sent $10 million worth of arms to a tribe in Africa, the US would send $20 million worth of arms to a competing tribe.
The Cold War was breathtakingly expensive and affected almost every country on earth. Although the US and Soviets never directly went to war, the Cold War did get awfully “warm” at times. In 1983, in fact, the world came to the very brink of a nuclear holocaust. Twice. And for that, you can blame Able Archer.
It all started with the 1980 US presidential election. President Carter (and Presidents Ford and Nixon before him) had pursued a policy of détente – a relaxing of tensions – between the US and the Soviet Union. Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan actively rejected détente. Reagan felt that the previous administrations – Carter’s, especially – had used détente as an excuse to cut military spending. He felt that the United States could not negotiate with the Soviets with a weakened military. He called it “Peace Through Strength”, and it terrified the Soviets.
I spent the first 24 years of my life living in Gwinnett County, Georgia. When I was born, Gwinnett had a population of 72,349. At the time, much of the county resembled Mayberry from The Andy Griffith Show. Everyone knew almost everyone else, and there was a sense of “community” there that I haven’t really felt since.
During the 1980s, however, Gwinnett experienced massive growth. The county frequently placed at or near the top of “America’s fastest growing counties” lists. The county grew so much that the 2010 census estimates its population at 808,167. More people live in Gwinnett County than within the city limits of San Francisco, Memphis, Charlotte, Baltimore, Boston or Seattle. Hell, the Gwinnett school system – the largest in Georgia – has more students (159,258) than Dayton, Ohio (155,461), Springfield, Missouri (154,777) or Salem, Oregon (151,913) have residents. The Gwinnett Arena, originally considered a boondoggle by many area residents, has hosted concerts by Bruce Springsteen, The Who, Depeche Mode, Snow Patrol, Bon Jovi and more. The county has their own East Coast Hockey League team (the Gwinnett Gladiators) and in January of this year, the Atlanta Braves announced that they were moving their AAA club from Richmond (population: 200,123) to Gwinnett.
Gwinnett is big. It’s for real. So why the hell do people still misspell it? To this day, I’ll see “Gwinet”, “Gwinnet”, “Gwinett”, “Gwinnet” or “Gwinnette” on websites and blogs. Just the other day, I was looking at a band’s page on MySpace, only to find that they were playing the “Arena at Gwinnette Center” soon. And it drove me nuts!
As I’ve stated several times on this site, I write the History Blog mainly because I’m fascinated with interesting little stories that have escaped most people’s attention. At first, I wrote about tiny details of large and familiar events – like the Trent affair of the US Civil War. I then switched to smaller mysteries, like the Waldseemüller map – a map with an accurate depiction of South America, created by a man in Germany several years before Europeans had even seen the western side of the continent. Sometimes, however, “history’s mysteries” don’t quite live up to their hype. Take, for example, the case of the “Dyatlov Pass Incident”.
On January 25, 1959, a group of experienced hikers arrived at a hotel in Ivdel, a city in the northern Ural mountains of Russia. The eight men and two women were either students or alumni of Ural Polytechnical Institute, and were led by a man named Igor Dyatlov. The next morning, Dyatlov took the group by truck to Vizhai, the last inhabited place near their destination – a mountain called Otorten. At that time of year, the route the group planned to take to Otorten’s summit was considered “Category III” – the most difficult. Dyatlov and his group weren’t worried though: they all had plenty of experience with winter hiking. Although it would be difficult, the group was certain that everything would be OK.
Dyatlov had made plans to send a telegram to their hiking club at the university when the group returned to Vizhai, and it was expected that that would happen no later than February 12th. When the day came and went, folks weren’t overly worried. After all, it was a treacherous undertaking, and it wasn’t unreasonable to assume that the group might be delayed a day or two. However, when no one had heard from the group by February 20th, concerned relatives finally convinced the university to send out a volunteer search party. After a few days of fruitless searching, the police and army got involved, and within a day or two of that, Russian authorities ordered that planes and helicopters be brought in to assist the search.
On February 26th, searchers finally found the remains of the group’s campsite… and this is where things got weird. The group’s tent was found damaged beyond repair. Two of the group were found close to the camp, dressed only in their underwear. Three more bodies were found near the camp, but in a different location than the first two. These three bodies had more clothes on than the first two, but were still woefully underdressed for the -22F (-30C) weather. They also appeared to be wearing bits of clothes ripped from others that were already dead. The remaining four hikers (one of the men turned back early in the trip for health reasons) weren’t found until May 4th.
Of all the figures in English history, few loom larger than Oliver Cromwell. As “Lord Protector” of England, Cromwell served as England’s chief executive during the Interregnum of 1649–1660 – the only significant period of time since the Romans left England that the island was not ruled by a monarchy. It’s a curiosity, then, that although there are thousands of books written about Cromwell, although every English schoolkid learns about him, and although there’s a huge statue of him outside the Houses of Parliament, Oliver Cromwell has no grave.
Welcome to the mystery of Oliver Cromwell’s head.
It all started with King Charles I. The son of King James I, Charles saw himself as an absolute monarch in the mold of the kings of France. He was on the throne by Divine Right, and no man could tell him what to do. Unfortunately for Charles, there was a group of men who didn’t quite see it that way: the English Parliament.
On June 15, 1215, King John signed Magna Carta at Runnymede. The document was a specific list of grievances the aristocracy had against the crown. By signing it, King John not only agreed to end those specific practices, he established the notion that no one in England – not even the monarch – was above the law. So although future kings like Richard III and Henry VIII might have had ghastly legislation passed, they did so by begging, browbeating, or bribing the Parliament. They didn’t dare think of ignoring it.
Charles I wasn’t nearly as smart. Throughout his reign, he continually tried to take power from the Parliament and give it back to the Crown. Charles seized a small power here, and a little tax there. Parliamentarians protested, but Charles managed to smooth things over… most of the time.
