Although many New York City theaters closed during the influenza pandemic of 1918, Broadway’s Plymouth Theater went ahead with its October 3 premiere of Leo Tolstoy’s Redemption. Frustrated by the audience’s coughing at one performance, lead actor John Barrymore returned to the stage after intermission and threw a “fair-sized sea bass” into the crowd, shouting, “Busy yourselves with this, you damned walruses!”
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Written in Los Angeles in 1955, the song “Memories Are Made of This” became a number-one hit for Dean Martin. It was a surprise success in Europe, spending four weeks at the top of the UK Singles Chart. A German version, performed by Freddy Quinn and recast as “Heimweh” (“Homesickness”), was the most popular German song of 1956. As “Honvágy-dal” (“The Song of Homesickness”) it became the anthem of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.
The first mass extinction on earth occurred around 2.5 billion years ago, when a photosynthesizing bacterium appeared and released so much oxygen into the atmosphere that anaerobic life was largely wiped out. This is often called the Great Oxygenation Event, the Oxygen Catastrophe, or the Oxygen Holocaust.
Having surrendered at the Appomattox Court House earlier that year, Gen. Robert E. Lee in 1865 became the president of Washington College—now Washington & Lee University—where he suggested, “The study of the mother tongue in any country is an important element of polite education, and is moreover valuable for its practical utility and necessary relation to other branches of learning.” He established in 1869 a chair in English language and literature, the first of its kind in the United States.
Corporations, wrote Edward Coke in a 1613 legal decision, “have no souls,” for they are “invisible, immortal, and resteth only in intendment and consideration of the law.” A corporate body, Coke argued, can’t “do fealty, for an invisible body cannot be in person, nor can swear.”
Archaeologists found in a Utah cave as many as seventeen thousand carved sticks, canes, and bone pieces—gambling items used in the thirteenth century by ancestors of the Apache and Navajo. “Seventy to eighty percent of dice games were for women only,” one researcher said about the find, which may have been America’s first casino. “So what do we have here? Women who knew the games of other women.”
In 1995 cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Loftus conducted a study in which she presented to twenty-four people four stories about their childhoods. Three of the stories were true; one was false. Five of the twenty-four people falsely remembered the “lost in a mall” story. “People can be led to remember their past in different ways,” concluded Loftus, “and they even can be led to remember entire events that never actually happened to them.”
Into the early modern period, the word bug referred to a phantom in the dark; a 1535 translation of the Bible made for Henry VIII came to be known as the Bug Bible for its rendering of Psalm 91:5 as “Thou shalt not nede to be afrayed of eny bugges by night.” The word was changed to terrors in later editions, but the original sense still colors the common bedtime warning against letting bedbugs bite.
“Today is my eighteenth birthday!” Alexandrina Victoria wrote in her journal on May 24, 1837. Less than a month later, she was awoken at six o’clock and informed she was queen of the United Kingdom. “I am very young and perhaps in many, though not in all things, inexperienced,” she noted that day, “but I am sure that very few have more real goodwill and more real desire to do what is fit and right than I have.” Her reign, at 63 years and 216 days, is the second longest of the British monarchy.
“The history of the twentieth century should have taught us that it is important to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire,” reads the Statement of Principles for the Project for the New American Century, June 3, 1997. Among the signatories were Dick Cheney, Francis Fukuyama, Dan Quayle, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Jeb Bush—but not George W.
“I don’t believe in miracles, because it’s been a long time since we’ve had any,” Joseph Heller said in an interview in 1988. Some sixteen hundred years earlier, St. Augustine had written, “Men say, ‘Why do not the miracles, which you talk about as having been worked, take place now?’ I might indeed reply that they were necessary before the world believed for the very purpose of making it believe.”
Referring to the printers’ strike that began in St. Petersburg in 1905 and helped to inaugurate the October Revolution, Leon Trotsky wrote, “They demanded a shorter working day and a higher piecework rate per thousand letters set, not excluding punctuation marks. This small event set off nothing more nor less than the all-Russian political strike—that is, a strike which started over punctuation marks and ended by felling absolutism.”
When Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic as a passenger in June 1928, the New York Sun ran an article with the headline MISS EARHARD SPURNS FASHIONS: SHE CARES LITTLE ABOUT CLOTHES, DOES NOT USE LIPSTICK—LIKES TO FENCE AND DRIVE CAR. “Flying is a perfectly natural thing in her opinion,” it read, “and requires no special togs: a dress is as good air equipment as trousers.”
Muscle Shoals, Alabama, site of a huge munitions plant during World War II, had a surplus of ammonium nitrate in 1946. The U.S. Department of Agriculture suggested that the chemical, a primary ingredient in explosives, be used as fertilizer. Industrial production of the resulting synthetic fertilizer led to an explosion in corn yields in the 1950s. A Tennessee Valley Authority representative recounted that “as soon as the need for nitrate explosives fell off, we were ready to convert that to agricultural nitrate.” “We are eating the leftovers of the Second World War,” the environmental activist Vandana Shiva said in a 2005 speech.
Irving Berlin composed most of his songs in F-sharp major; the six sharp notes in the scale meant he could play the black keys of the piano almost exclusively. Eventually, for purposes of technical variety, he had a lever mechanism installed that allowed him to modulate into other keys without changing his playing.