A Tramp Abroad , by American author Mark Twain, was published in 1880. The book details a journey by the author, with his friend Harris (a character created for the book, and based on his closest friend, Joseph Twichell), through central and southern Europe. While the stated goal of the journey is to walk most of the way, the men find themselves using other forms of transport as they traverse the continent. The book is the fourth of Mark Twain’s six travel books published during his lifetime and is often thought to be an unofficial sequel to the first one, The Innocents Abroad (1869).
In 1880, Queen Victoria signed an order-in-council transferring the Arctic Archipelago to Canada. The transfer was done under the royal prerogative, not needing statutory authority.
Canada then incorporated the islands into the Northwest Territories. Since the Arctic islands included the islands in Hudson Bay, even today there are some islands in the Bay which are close to Ontario and Quebec, but now part of Nunavut territory, which was later split off from NWT.
The Gulag Archipelago is a three-volume non-fiction work, written by Soviet novelist and dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The work is about life in the system of gulags, or forced labor camps, in the Soviet Union, and was informed by interviews and writings from former prisoners, as well as Solzhenitsyn’s own experience as a gulag prisoner.
Solzhenitsyn had to write much of the work in secret, and shortly after it was published in France in late 1973, he was deported from the Soviet Union to West Germany, and stripped of his Soviet citizenship.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, along with his family, moved to the United States in 1976, where he continued to write. His Soviet citizenship was restored in 1990, shortly before the dissolution of the Soviet state. In 1994, he moved back to Russia, where he lived until his death in 2008.
Solzhenitsyn was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature.
There have been three kings of Scotland named Alexander (which is cognate to the Russian name Aleksandr). Alastair and Alasdair are Scottish variants on Alexander.
Alexander Scourby was an actor in the 40s and 50s, best known as the voice of Kraft in TV ads in the 50s and beyond. He got the gig when he was announcer on the Kraft Television Theater, where he did the ads for the show live. He also worked as the announcer for many other shows and audiobooks and recorded a well-regarded audiobook of the King James Bible.
There has never been an English or British king who was the ninth of his regnal name. There have been two who were the eighth: Henry VIII (he of many wives) and Edward VIII (he of one wife, but only after his 1936 abdication).
Anne of Cleves, who was born 500 years ago, was Henry VIII’s wife for just six months, making her the shortest reigning of all his queens. She has gone down in history as the ugly wife–Henry VIII was supposedly so revolted when he first clapped eyes on her that he immediately instructed his lawyers to get him out of the marriage. Despite this, Anne lived the rest of her life in England and became good friends with her step-daughters Mary and Elizabeth, both of whom went on to become Queen of England. In the end, she outlived both Henry and all five of his other wives, dying in 1557.
Herman’s Hermits was a successful band founded in Manchester in 1964. They were also popular in the US following the success of the Beatles during the British Invasion. They were known for several songs, including:
I’m ‘Enry the Eighth I am I am
I’m ‘Enry the Eighth I am
I got married to the widow next door
She’s been married seven times before
And every one was a ‘Enery
She wouldn’t have a Willie or a Sam
I’m her eighth old man called ‘Enery
So ‘Enry the Eighth I am.
The song was written in 1910 for music halls by Brown and Weston - and was sung in a Cockney accent. Harry Champion also had great success with this song before Herman’s Hermits with their lead singer Peter No one.
Either an intentional play on Mr. Noone’s name, or an awesome autocorrect. 
In play:
Hermit crabs are a family of decapod crustaceans, which lack the hard exoskeleton on their abdomens which many other crustaceans have. This forces most species of the family to use scavenged seashells or other items (such as wood, metal cans, or other debris) as a shell, to protect their bodies.
To Your Scattered Bodies Go* is the first novel of the Riverworld Series by Philip José Farmer. The main protagonist is the reincarnated Richard Burton. Other characters include Hermann Goering and Alice Liddell, the original of Alice in Wonderland.
The Alice pack was the standard military issue backpack from 1973 to 1997. Alice is an acronym, ALICE, for All-purpose, Lightweight, Individual Carrying Equipment.
(I still have my Alice pack, from the 1980s)
A Town Like Alice is a novel by Nevil Shute, set in Australia, with flashbacks to war scenes in Malaysia.
John Nevil Maskelyne was an English stage magician in the late 19th/early 20th century. He, like Harry Houdini, used his skills to dispel the notion of supernatural powers. However, he is probably best known for his invention of the first modern pay toilet in the late 19th century. His door lock for London toilets required the insertion of a penny coin to operate it, hence the euphemism to “spend a penny”.
Richard Potter was the first professional magician born in the United States. Born in Massachusetts in 1783, the black son of a slave toured the eastern United States between 1811 and 1834, performing his act which included magic illusions, hypnotism and ventriloquism. He became quite successful and purchased a 200 acre farm near Andover, New Hampshire, where he grew peas, rye, and flax, and kept herds of cattle and pigs. But he continued to tour and was one of Boston’s most popular performers into the 1820s. Upon his death in 1834, he was buried upright, according to his wishes, in a small cemetery on his farm in Andover.
The Massachusetts Bay Colony was established in 1628. Its claimed territory extended theoretically as far west as the Pacific Ocean.
The Pacific Ocean covers approximately 59 million square miles and contains more than half of the free water on the planet. The Pacific is by far the largest of the world’s ocean basins; in fact, all of the world’s continents could fit into the Pacific basin.
The Pacific Coast League was a minor baseball league, which operated from 1903 until 2021.
The PCL was classified as a AAA league (the highest level of the minor leagues) for much of its existance, and as there were no major league teams west of St. Louis prior to 1958, the PCL became the premier baseball league in the western U.S.
However, the move of the Giants and Dodgers to California in 1958, along with the growth in nationally televised baseball games, led to the PCL’s decline.
From the Wright Brothers’ first successful powered flight in Kitty Hawk, N.C. in 1903 to the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon in 1969 was less than 66 years. Pieces of fabric and wood from the Wright Flyer went to the Moon’s surface with astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin and then returned safely with them to Earth: Wright Brothers National Memorial - Wikipedia
The Flexible Flyer was a sled that was first marketed in 1889. It got its name because of the flexible steel runners, which allowed the sled to be steered, a major improvement over the toboggan sleds in the 19th century. It’s still being manufactured today.