Nearly forty years ago, the Coordination and Planning Division of Exxon Research and Engineering conducted a technical review of how fossil fuels influence climate. The study, which was distributed to Exxon’s top management, advocated for “major reductions in fossil-fuel consumption.” Unless that happened, the study concluded, “there are some potentially catastrophic events that must be considered. Once the effects are measurable, they might not be reversible.”
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The Cincinnati Commercial complained in 1871 about the game of fly loo, a “detestable canker that destroys men’s souls.” Players selected sugar lumps and bet on which would attract a fly first. “Every afternoon from twenty to thirty of the very flower of our mercantile population retire to a private room and under locks and bolts give themselves up to this satanic game,” the article noted, “while the deserted ladies are languishing for a little male conversation below.”
While stationed as a secret agent in Bern in 1917, future CIA director Allen W. Dulles received a phone call from a Russian exile with an urgent message to deliver to the United States. Having already arranged a rendezvous with Swiss twin sisters at a country inn, Dulles demurred, finding out only later that the caller was Vladimir Lenin, who returned to Russia in a sealed train the next day.
In January 1592, playwright Christopher Marlowe was arrested for counterfeiting in the Netherlands. For making coins of pewter, Marlowe was charged with the crime of petty treason, punishable by death. He was eventually sent back to London, where, a little more than a year later, he was stabbed to death in Deptford.
At the start of the French Revolution, the physician Jean-Paul Marat began publishing an antimonarchical journal in which he called the king’s minister of finance “the cruelest adversary of freedom.” In 1790 the Marquis de Lafayette dispatched thousands of soldiers to arrest Marat, even stationing them on rooftops in case Marat, an aviation enthusiast, attempted to escape by balloon. While the legality of the warrant was being disputed, Marat wrote and published a pamphlet mocking these extravagant efforts before making a quiet escape.
“A horrid-looking wretch he is, sooty and scoundrelly in aspect, a cross between the nutmeg dealer, the horse swapper, and the night man,” declared a Stephen Douglas–leaning newspaper of Abraham Lincoln during the presidential race of 1860.
As a result of technological advances and shortages of enslaved workers, water power became used more widely in the Roman Empire around the late third century; the earliest known depiction of a water-powered stone sawmill was produced around this time in Hierapolis. Later, in 371, the poet Ausonius wrote an ode to the Moselle River: “He turns his millstones in furious revolutions and drives the shrieking saws through smooth blocks of marble.”
Zheng Yi Sao, a Cantonese prostitute, married a pirate captain in 1801 and helped him build up his sea empire, so that by 1805 it consisted of four hundred junk ships operated by forty to sixty thousand pirates. In 1810 the Chinese government, rather than continue to suffer losses, offered the pirates amnesty if they were to retire. Zheng Yi Sao accepted and, according to one historian, led the remainder of her life peacefully, “so far as is consistent with the keeping of an infamous gambling house.”
In 1937 the Dewey Commission conducted an investigation into the charges against Leon Trotsky made during Joseph Stalin’s Moscow show trials. “Of what country are you a citizen, Mr. Trotsky?” the commission asked. “I am deprived of my citizenship in the Soviet Union. I am not a citizen of any country,” Trostky replied. “What, if anything, did you do when you were informed of the deprivation of your citizenship?” “I wrote an article about it,” he said. “I am a man armed with a pen.”
“I must admit, ‘the Mitfords’ would madden me if I didn’t chance to be one,” Diana Mitford—the sister who had wed the leader of the British Union of Fascists in 1936 at the house of Joseph Goebbels—wrote at the age of seventy-four in 1985 to her youngest sister, Deborah, who had married Andrew Robert Buxton Cavendish, 11th Duke of Devonshire, in 1941.
After the death of Muhammad in Medina in 632, the Quran was preserved by followers who memorized its contents. Those who can recite from memory its 78,000 words are known as hafiz or hafiza. There are said to be millions today who have completely memorized the holy text. In 2005 Amina Abdul-Majid, a blind sixteen-year-old Somali, became the first girl to win a Quran recitation competition held in Mogadishu.
At the end of his American lecture tour in 1882, Oscar Wilde was given money by a young man who claimed to be the son of a Wall Street banker and who invited him to then play in a game of dice. Wilde ended up losing over $1,000, writing three checks to cover the expense. “I’ve just made a damned fool of myself,” Wilde later confessed to a police captain, having stopped payment of the checks. From a series of mug shots, Wilde identified the swindler: it was notorious banco scammer Hungry Joe Lewis.
In 1639 Puritan settlers in Massachusetts authorized the expulsion of “pauper aliens” in what is thought to be the first case of deportation in the country. Soon after, Virginia and Pennsylvania passed laws heavily restricting “the importation of paupers,” which included criminals and “foreigners and Irish servants.”
When the captain of a French ship landed on the west coast of Australia in 1802 and encountered the local Bunurong people, he stripped down and exposed his genitalia, hoping to dramatize his common humanity for the natives. The Bunurong exchanged curious looks before fleeing in dismay.
In 1864, responding to his friend Victor Hugo’s invitation to visit Guernsey, where the writer was living in exile, the French painter Gustave Courbet wrote, “In your sympathetic retreat I will contemplate the spectacle of your sea. The viewpoints of our mountains also offer us the limitless spectacle of immensity. The unfillable void has a calming effect. I confess, poet, I love terra firma and the orchestration of the countless herds that inhabit our mountains. The sea! The sea with its charms saddens me. In its joyful moods, it makes me think of a laughing tiger; in its sad moods, it recalls the crocodile’s tears and, in its roaring fury, the caged monster that cannot swallow me up.”