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.
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Color film in the 1950s barely registered dark skin tones; Kodak had developed the product to measure images against the white skin of a model known as Shirley. The company eventually modified its film emulsion, responding to complaints from advertisers promoting wood furniture and chocolate.
At the thirteenth General Conference on Weights and Measures in 1967, one second was redefined as “the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom.” In April of this year, the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, unveiled a new atomic clock to act as the United States’ primary time standard; it will not gain or lose a second in 300 million years.
In the Finnish runic epic Kalevala, Loviatar, the daughter of the god of death, is impregnated by the wind and gives birth to nine diseases: Consumption, Colic, Gout, Rickets, Ulcer, Scab, Cancer, Plague, and an unnamed disease, “the worst of the nine,” who is banished by his mother “to bewitch the lowland people, / to engender strife and envy.”
The American English term wooden nutmeg, meaning “anything false or fraudulent,” dates from 1829, when Connecticut traders were known to place fake wooden nutmegs in batches of real ones to defraud customers.
The story of Juan Ponce de León searching for the Fountain of Youth in Florida in 1513 was fabricated after his death in a chronicle by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, a Spanish courtier who found the explorer to be egocentric, dim-witted, and gullible—and so wished to render him foolish in the annals.
Among some species of North American fireflies, females lie in wait for light emitted by males drifting above. A 2022 study found that 96 percent of male fireflies preferred to attempt mating in darkness. No mating occurred in bright artificial light, under which the researchers observed “males crawling directly past or even over females without initiating mating stage one.” The fireflies were “waiting to mate in dimmer conditions,” a New York Times article suggested, “essentially waiting for a night that never comes.”
In September 1776, fearing illness from night air, John Adams asked Benjamin Franklin to close the window of their room in a New Jersey inn. “I believe you are not acquainted with my Theory of Colds,” Franklin responded, launching into “a harangue upon air and cold and respiration and perspiration” in favor of leaving windows open. “I was so much amused,” Adams wrote in his journal, “that I soon fell asleep and left him and his philosophy together.”
“Why was it the custom for those canvassing for office to do so wearing the toga without the tunic underneath?” the second-century writer Plutarch asks in his Roman Questions, referring to the custom in the Roman republic of candidates campaigning in a state of relative undress. “Was it in order that they might not carry money in the folds of their tunic and give bribes?…Or were they trying to commend themselves to popular favor by thus humiliating themselves by their scanty attire, even as they do by hand shaking, personal appeals, and fawning behavior?”
To better understand the migration patterns of American robins, Georgetown University researchers attached “tiny metal backpacks” to them that use an antenna on the International Space Station to pinpoint the birds’ locations within thirty feet. Martin Wikelski, director of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, described the technology as a harbinger of “an ‘internet of animals’—a collection of sensors around the world giving us a better picture of the movement of life on the planet.”
According to his nephew, Pliny the Elder liked to rise in the middle of the night and study by lamplight. “Admittedly, he fell asleep very easily,” Pliny the Younger wrote, “and would often doze and wake up again during his work.”
In ancient Indian espionage networks, a sattri was an orphan-spy trained from youth in palmistry, magic, omens, and augury.
Using symbolically coded messages hidden in beer barrels, Catholic conspirators communicated with the imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scots, about a plan to kill Elizabeth I. Francis Walsingham, the queen’s spymaster, obtained a message, employed a codebreaker, and found evidence that Mary approved of the assassination. She was beheaded for treason in 1587.
“Animals retain the memory of their experiences and have no need of mnemonic systems,” according to the third-century Roman writer Aelian. “A horse, on hearing the clash of curb chain and the clang of bit, and seeing chest plates and frontlets, begins to snort and makes his hoofs ring as he prances, and is in an ecstasy.”
George Washington completed his second and final term as president in 1797 and moved back to Mount Vernon, where his farm manager, a Scotsman, convinced him to build a whiskey distillery to earn higher profits on his estate. “I make use of no barley in my distillery,” he wrote in 1798. “Rye chiefly and Indian corn in a certain proportion compose the materials from which the whiskey is made.” Having expanded operations by 1799, the year of his death, he owned five stills in a building of 2,250 square feet with a yearly yield of nearly 10,500 gallons. It is considered to have been one of the country’s largest distilleries at that time.