Legend regarding the horseshoe as a lucky symbol holds that in the tenth century, while St. Dunstan was working in England as a farrier, the devil entered the forge and demanded his hooves be reshod. During the process, the future saint caused as much pain as he could, and the devil begged him to stop. Dunstan agreed—on the condition that Satan never enter a house where a horseshoe is on display.
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In Britain in 60, Boudicca, queen of the Iceni tribe, led a revolt against the occupying Romans. According to the historian Tacitus, her forces killed seventy thousand people, sacking and burning the cities later known as St. Albans, Colchester, and London. “We must conquer in the line of battle or fall,” she announced before her final charge. “That is the fate of this woman; let men live on as slaves if they wish.”
The choirmaster of the Cologne Cathedral gave sugar sticks to his young singers to keep them quiet during the long Nativity ceremony in 1670. They were shaped like a shepherd’s crook.
In 1387 the physicians to Charles II of Navarre, in order to treat his illness, soaked his sheets in aqua vitae, a distilled wine, and wrapped him in them to enhance the curative power that the liquid was supposed to possess. The sheets were then sewn shut by a maid, who, instead of cutting the final bit of string, set a candle to it. The alcohol-soaked king went up in a blaze and the maid ran away, leaving him to burn to death.
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.
“Those on the right and those on the left you have placed in your lap,” proclaimed an Assyrian prophetess in 680 bc in support of King Esarhaddon, who had defeated his brothers in civil war. Another prophetess promised to “tear apart” those “conniving polecats and rats.”
“As if I swallowed a baby,” said William Makepeace Thackeray about eating his first oyster.
“Just opposite, an island of the sea, / There came enchantment with the shifting wind, / That did both drown and keep alive my ears,” wrote John Keats in Hyperion. It was published in a collection of poems in 1820; Keats died the following year. In 1822 Percy Bysshe Shelley, returning from a visit to Lord Byron, drowned after his schooner, the Don Juan, capsized. His body washed up on the Tuscan shore a few days later. In his pocket was a copy of Keats’ poems.
Hero of Alexandria invented the aeolipile, a primitive steam engine, in the first century. A hollow sphere with elbow-shaped tubes mounted on an axle and suspended over a cauldron of boiling water, the engine likely could not have powered anything. “It should probably be remembered,” wrote historian William Rosen, “as the first in a line of engineering dead ends.”
“I haven’t come here to settle down / I’ve come here to depart,” wrote the thirteenth-century Turkish Sufi mystic and itinerant bard Yunus Emre, who traveled throughout Anatolia preaching Islam by way of memorized couplets. “I didn’t come to create any problems / I’m only here to love…He is my teacher. I am His servant / I am a nightingale in His garden.”
According to film director Joe Swanberg, a significant number of people believe that an obscure 1985 film about mind control was not in fact real, and that they had dreamed the particulars of the Quebecois film. “The Peanut Butter Solution,” wrote Swanberg, “successfully convinced young viewers that they dreamed it rather than watched it.”
On October 30, 1938, a CBS radio announcer presented the 8 p.m. broadcast: “Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air in The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.” After the 23-year-old Welles read an ominous introduction and the “music of Ramon Raquello and his orchestra” played, bulletins followed with reports of Martians crash-landing in New Jersey. Many listeners thought that the Welles-Wells adaptation was news: some people crowded highways trying to flee from aliens; others pleaded with police for gas masks. Welles said at the broadcast’s end that it was only a “holiday offering” in anticipation of Halloween.
A cuneiform tablet dating to around 1950 bc describes residents of the Assyrian merchant colony of Kanesh, situated in what is now central Turkey, resolving conflicts by majority vote. This early example of a protodemocratic decision-making process is a sharp contrast with the consensus-based systems more commonly found in primitive societies, where “the restoration of social harmony is the primary goal,” notes Assyriologist Mogens Trolle Larsen. “This was clearly not a realistic aim for the Old Assyrian merchant society.”
In the fourteenth century the communality of monastic life was on the decline. A 1360s remodel of Westminster Abbey’s infirmary added individual chambers and parlors. Though they were intended only for the “transient sick,” healthy monks soon occupied the spaces permanently, claiming nooks by decorating them with cushions and curtains.
President Warren Harding embarked on a journey to Alaska in June 1923, taking with him his secretary of commerce, Herbert Hoover. “If you knew of a great scandal in our administration,” he asked Hoover, “would you, for the good of the country and the party, expose it publicly or would you bury it?” Hoover urged the president to reveal what would become known as the Teapot Dome scandal, but Harding feared the political fallout. He died of a heart attack in San Francisco two months later.