After “a certain knight shamefully divulged the intimacies and the secrets” of his lover, André Le Chapelain wrote in his late twelfth-century The Art of Courtly Love, an ad hoc tribunal of noble Gascon women “decided unanimously that forever after he should be deprived of all hope of love, and that in every court of ladies or of knights he should be an object of contempt and abuse to all.”
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After watching a performance of his play Peter Pan with his five-year-old godson, J. M. Barrie asked the boy what he had liked best. “What I think I liked best,” the boy replied, “was tearing up the program and dropping the bits on people’s heads.”
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.
In August 1945 pioneering computer programmer Grace Hopper was working at Harvard University on the experimental Harvard Mark I, an electromechanical protocomputer being used in the war effort. After a circuit malfunctioned, one of her colleagues removed a two-inch-long moth using tweezers. Hopper taped the moth into her logbook and later recalled the first use of a now ubiquitous term: “From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it.”
As a London-based correspondent for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, Karl Marx wrote about Abraham Lincoln’s issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation, “Up to now we have witnessed only the first act of the Civil War—the constitutional waging of war. The second act, the revolutionary waging of war, is at hand.”
In one of the last letters he ever sent, in October 1913, Ambrose Bierce wrote to his niece, “Goodbye—if you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags, please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico—ah, that is euthanasia.” His intention was to see the Mexican Revolution, but the circumstances of his death are unknown.
“By the end of the fifteenth century, when the power of theology was exhausted and the patriarchal understanding of the origin of kingship no longer satisfied people’s appetite for science, politics started to develop as a science,” wrote political theorist Carl Schmitt. “Dictatorship, in particular, is described as a specific arcanum dominationis of the aristocracy. Its purpose is to create an institution that frightens the people into believing that it constitutes an authority against which there is no possibility of provocation…In the state certain events are always necessary that conjure the impression of freedom, simulacra or decorative occasions designed to pacify the population.”
Saint Augustine based his definition of original sin on a misinterpretation of the Greek in Romans 5:12. According to Augustine’s misreading, sin is contracted and passed through the human race like a venereal disease. “We all were in that one man,” he wrote of Adam, who Augustine believed contained the nature of all future men, which was transmitted through Adam’s semen. The human race is therefore a “train of evil,” headed for destruction. The monk Pelagius argued against this concept, known as seminal headship. The Council of Orange accepted Augustine’s doctrine of original sin in 529.
“Branwell—Emily—Anne are gone like dreams—gone as Maria and Elizabeth went twenty years ago. One by one I have watched them fall asleep on my arm—and closed their glazed eyes—I have seen them buried one by one—and—thus far—God has upheld me,” Charlotte Brontë at the age of thirty-three wrote on June 13, 1849.
After the pope refused to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, King Henry VIII separated the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church in the 1530s, initiating a series of property seizures that delivered coal-rich church lands in England to gentry who had it mined and sold to consumers in the cities. Over the next two centuries, the English coal-mining industry ballooned in scale; coal replaced wood as the country’s main energy source and fueled its rapid urbanization.
“Mine is a peaceable disposition,” Heinrich Heine writes in his journals, declaring simple wishes: a humble cottage, some fine trees out front. But “if God wants to make my happiness complete,” he adds, “he will grant me the joy of seeing some six or seven of my enemies hanging from those trees. Before their death I shall, moved in my heart, forgive them all the wrong they did me in their lifetime. One must, it is true, forgive one’s enemies—but not before they have been hanged.”
In his autobiographical novel Boyhood, Leo Tolstoy describes his youthful joy in philosophical abstraction: “I frequently imagined myself a great man, who was discovering new truths for the good of mankind, and I looked on all other mortals with a proud consciousness of my dignity.” His euphoria didn’t last. “Strange to say,” he wrote, “whenever I came in contact with these mortals, I grew timid.” Soon he was “ashamed of every simplest word and motion.”
In May 2020 a preliminary staff report of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York looked at several historical data sets from Germany and concluded that influenza mortality in 1918–20 caused significant societal change in the subsequent decade. Influenza deaths were associated with lower per-capita spending, especially on services consumed by the young, and were correlated with the share of votes for extremist parties in the elections of 1932 and 1933.
Admiral Horatio Nelson was shot on the deck of the HMS Victory by a French sniper during the Battle of Trafalgar. “I do believe they have done it at last,” Nelson told his flag captain. “My backbone is shot through.” On that day, October 21, 1805, the English fleet had taken fifteen enemy ships. A state funeral was held for him in London on January 8, his body having been preserved for nearly two months in a cask of brandy aboard the ship.
In 2014 the Federal Trade Commission charged the operator of Jerk.com with improperly obtaining personal information from Facebook to create 73 million profiles that identified people as “jerk” or “not a jerk” and then offered them the option to change their profiles for $30. According to the FTC, consumers who paid the fee often got nothing in return.