“When the white man landed on the moon, my father cried,” a young Oklahoma Indian told psychologist Robert Coles in the 1970s. “He was sure Indians were crying up there, and trying to hide, and hoping that soon they’d go back to their earth, the white men.” The boy also spoke to his aunt. “The moon is yours to look at and talk to,” she told him, “so don’t worry.”
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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.”
As editor of the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley once received a letter requesting an autograph of the late Edgar Allan Poe that Greeley might possess from his correspondence. Greeley replied, “I happen to have in my possession but one autograph of the late distinguished American poet Edgar A. Poe. It consists of an IOU, with my name on the back of it. It cost me just $51.50, and you can have it for half-price.”
“History is more or less bunk,” Henry Ford told the Chicago Tribune in 1916. “It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”
Chinese Taoist philosophers Zhuangzi and Hui Shi took a walk on a bridge over the Hao River in the fourth century bc. “The minnows swim about so freely,” said Zhuangzi; “such is the happiness of fish.” Hui Shi responded, “You are not a fish, so whence do you know the happiness of fish?” “You are not I,” Zhuangzi replied, “so whence do you know I don’t know the happiness of fish?”
Thomas Jefferson tried to avoid using servants at dinner parties by placing a dumbwaiter near each seat. According to one society chronicler, he feared “much of the domestic and even public discord was produced by the mutilated and misconstructed repetition of free conversation by these mute but not inattentive listeners.”
A temperance movement “Anti-Saloon Battle Hymn” from 1907 describes the saloon as an “awful, unspeakable monster” that “makes millions of widows and orphans, / and drunkards of millions of men” and asks that “from its shackles, O God, do thou free us, / and for freedom we ever will stand.” In 1914 the song “Emancipation” pleaded for “not one slave” of alcohol to remain in this nation of “true liberty so grand.”
In democratic Athens, writes classicist Victoria Wohl, “the communication between the law courts and the comic stage ran in both directions: each adopted language and themes from the other,” and plays “constituted a trial in which the theatrical audience was the jury. In this sense, comedy functioned as a kind of counter-jurisdiction, where issues of justice and social order could be debated and resolved, all with a wink and a giggle.”
Titus Andronicus is William Shakespeare’s bloodiest play; the body count reaches fourteen. Rounding out the top-three deadliest plays are Richard III (eleven) and King Lear (ten).
In the eighteenth century, a cash-strapped French government began selling rente viagère, in which an investor paid an up-front sum pegged to someone’s life—sometimes the king or the pope—and received returns until death. A group of Genevan bankers diversified their portfolio in the 1770s by buying rente contracts on the lives of thirty wealthy young Genevan girls. The fund gained popularity; by 1789 a significant portion of French debt was owed on the lives of just these “thirty heads.”
In 1982 John Candelaria, a pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates, was given $238 in per diem meal money while on a bus to Wrigley Field from the team’s hotel in Chicago. Candelaria threw his cash out the bus window, a few dollars per toss, much to the surprise of those on the street. “It just seemed like the thing to do,” Candelaria told a reporter.
It is often said that Edgar Allan Poe’s death was the result of the electioneering practice known as cooping. In his Maryland: A Bicentennial History, Carl Bode describes cooping as “the shutting up of men, usually derelicts, in rooms or coops on Election Day and then dragging them from polling place to polling place to cast their votes. To make them more docile while voting again and again, many were drugged or made drunk.” Poe may have been captured in Baltimore by an election gang, drugged, and made to vote in several places. “He was picked up unconscious near one of the rum shops used for voting,” wrote biographer George Woodbury, “and taken to Washington Hospital,” where he died on October 7, 1849.
According to a notoriously unreliable late Roman biography, the emperor Hadrian established special hours in the public baths for exclusive use by the ill. “If we assume that the report is not an invention of the author,” wrote historian Garrett G. Fagan, “it suggests that prior to Hadrian’s ruling, the sick and healthy had bathed simultaneously as a matter of course.”
Thirtieth U.S. president Calvin Coolidge, nicknamed “Silent Cal,” once sat next to a woman at a dinner party who reportedly said to him, “I have made a bet, Mr. Coolidge, that I could get more than two words out of you.” To which he replied, “You lose.”
Lamoignon de Malesherbes chose to defend Louis XVI during his trial of 1792 and 1793; years earlier, as secretary of state, Malesherbes had reported on the corruption in the king’s administration and condemned the imprisonment of French citizens without trial. Both the king and the lawyer were eventually guillotined. “No one is ignorant of the fact that M. de M, after defending the people before King Louis XVI, defended King Louis XVI before the people. I have not forgotten and will never forget these two exemplary actions,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, who was Malesherbes’ great-grandson.