At the 1883 trial of Alferd Packer, who ate five members of his prospecting party in Colorado after the group got lost during a winter trek, the judge was said to have told the convicted, “There was seven Democrats in Hinsdale County, and you’ve ate five of them, God damn you. I sentence you to be hanged by the neck until you is dead, dead, dead, as a warning against reducing the Democrat population of the state.”
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When the British Petroleum oil rig Deepwater Horizon was forced to shut down temporarily because of a gas surge, one engineer tried to persuade his colleagues that a liner was required to secure the pipe. The proposal, which would have cost about $7 million, was rejected by management. “This has been a nightmare well which has everyone all over the place,” the engineer wrote to a colleague. Six days later, on April 20, 2010, the rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico and spilled more than four million barrels of oil before it was capped almost three months later.
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.
In 1903, Mark Twain comforted Helen Keller, who had been accused of plagiarizing her story “The Frost King,” telling her in a letter, “All ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources.” He took a harder line on his own intellectual property, however, campaigning so vigorously for stringent copyright laws that the American Bar Association later recognized him for his efforts.
The first-century Roman writer Gaius Julius Hyginus relates the story of Agnodice, a young Athenian woman who traveled to Alexandria to study medicine. On her return to Athens she disguised herself as a man in order to practice, and was brought before the court of the Areopagus. “You men are not spouses but enemies,” Agnodice’s patients protested, “since you are condemning the woman who discovered health for us.” Around 500 bc, the law forbidding women to study medicine was repealed.
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).
A review of the sitcom The Hank McCune Show in a 1950 issue of Variety described the first known use of a laugh track on TV: “Although the show is lensed on film without a studio audience, there are chuckles and yucks dubbed in. Whether this induces a jovial mood in home viewers is still to be determined, but the practice may have unlimited possibilities if it’s spread to include canned peals of hilarity, thunderous ovations, and gasps of sympathy.”
Two years after being exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974, Nobel Prize–winning writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn settled in a small Vermont town, living there reclusively for some eighteen years. He did however attend a few town meetings and was once spotted marching in a parade to celebrate the bicentennial of Vermont statehood.
“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.”
On November 22, 1963, Aldous Huxley, bedridden and dying, requested on a writing tablet that his wife Laura give him a 100 microgram dose of LSD. As she went to get the drug from the medicine cabinet, Laura was perplexed to see the doctor and nurses watching TV. She gave him a second dose a few hours later, and by 5:20 p.m. he had died. Laura later learned that the TV had been showing coverage of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, who had been pronounced dead at 1:00 p.m. that day.
Having come to the U.S. through Portugal, French pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote and illustrated part of The Little Prince—one of the best-selling works of fiction of all time—in a twenty-two room mansion on Long Island in 1942. “I wanted a hut,” he reflected, “and it’s the Palace of Versailles.”
In 1864, responding to his friend Victor Hugo’s invitation to visit Guernsey, where the writer was living in exile, the French painter Gustave Courbet wrote, “In your sympathetic retreat I will contemplate the spectacle of your sea. The viewpoints of our mountains also offer us the limitless spectacle of immensity. The unfillable void has a calming effect. I confess, poet, I love terra firma and the orchestration of the countless herds that inhabit our mountains. The sea! The sea with its charms saddens me. In its joyful moods, it makes me think of a laughing tiger; in its sad moods, it recalls the crocodile’s tears and, in its roaring fury, the caged monster that cannot swallow me up.”
Referring to the printers’ strike that began in St. Petersburg in 1905 and helped to inaugurate the October Revolution, Leon Trotsky wrote, “They demanded a shorter working day and a higher piecework rate per thousand letters set, not excluding punctuation marks. This small event set off nothing more nor less than the all-Russian political strike—that is, a strike which started over punctuation marks and ended by felling absolutism.”
“I have just had a close escape from the Soviets, and now I’m happy to say I’m back with the fairies (Fascists to you),” Dawn Powell wrote to John Dos Passos in 1937, having attended the American Writers’ Congress along with many avowed communists. “The front part of the speeches was always good, but when the brilliant writer minds summed up, they all spelled bushwa.”
“A horrid-looking wretch he is, sooty and scoundrelly in aspect, a cross between the nutmeg dealer, the horse swapper, and the night man,” declared a Stephen Douglas–leaning newspaper of Abraham Lincoln during the presidential race of 1860.