Historical Stuff
The Deadliest Volcano in the World
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you might have noticed I’m a little bit interested in volcanoes. I wrote about Mt. St. Helens and Vesuvius and I’ll probably get around to marking their anniversary again some day, too. To the western world, these are probably the most widely known active volcanoes. The
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French by Spilled Blood
History is a really cool place to wander. You learn all sorts of interesting facts and you can make connections between previously unrelated events, people and places. So what has me excited now? The French Foreign Legion. In a lot of Victorian romances, the disgraced hero or the bad boy would escape their soiled reputation
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All Of Time And The Whole World, Too
All Of Time And The Whole World, Too When you’re writing time travel novels, deciding where and when in history your main characters are going to travel back to can be an overwhelming decision. After all, the author can pick any time in history — that’s about twelve thousands years of human history, right there.
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Lá Fhéile Pádraig
Lá Fhéile Pádraig = “the Day of the Festival of Patrick” — Saint Patrick is the patron saint of Ireland, which is where the wearing of the green comes into it. (Also, green beer. ugh.) Patrick was a Roman British man who was enslaved and taken to Ireland, where he found God. He escaped Ireland
Hoppy Leap Year!
There are approximately five million people with February 29 birthdays. They’re known as leapers. (As distinct from lepers, but that’s a little bit too close for comfort!) It used to be that leapers had issues with insurance companies and banks and other big organizations, who wouldn’t (or couldn’t) recognize February 29 as a legitimate birth
On the blog…Two Years Ago
I’ve been running this blog for a long time. If you include the occasional break from blogging, and the times when my site host shut me down for too much traffic (yes, they can do that), then I’ve been blogging since 2005. Most of the older posts are now articles on the Articles pages. Out
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Year of the Monkey
It’s Chinese New Year today, and this year is the year of the Monkey. The Monkey is the ninth in the 12-year cycle of Chinese zodiac. The Years of the Monkey include 1920, 1932, 1944, 1956, 1968, 1980, 1992, 2004, 2016, 2028… The monkey is a clever animal. It is usually compared to a smart
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While Rome Burned….
I’m pretty sure everyone knows who Nero was — he was the emperor who “fiddled while Rome burned” — although whether he actually fiddled or simply procrastinated while the great fire of Rome razed most of the city to the ground is open to dispute. But everyone pretty much agrees that Nero was a fairly
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A Short-Lived Reign
1066 is a date that tends to stick in my mind. It’s a significant date in British history, because it’s the year of the Battle of Hastings, when the Anglo-Saxons were defeated, and England came under the control of the Normans. This is also the start of the Medieval period. Most of the Anglo-Saxons became
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