Several of the flags carried by regiments of the Irish Brigade during the American Civil War (invariably green, and often showing the Irish heraldic harp) carried inscriptions, in Gaelic, of the phrase “They never shrank from the clash of spears.” President John F. Kennedy, in his June 1963 visit to his ancestral homeland, presented an Irish Brigade flag to the Oireachtas, the Irish parliament, when he addressed it.
The Irish Brigade was initially made up of three Regiments from New York and two from Massachusetts, mostly from the cities and heavily Irish (what gave it away?). It served in the Eastern theater (mostly with the Army of the Potomac) and of all Union army brigades, it suffered more combat dead than any other during America’s Civil War.
The word “Massachusetts” is an Algonquin Indian word which roughly translates to “large hill place” or “at the great hill.” The word is believed to specifically refer to the Great Blue Hill in Milton, Massachusetts, which is an ancient volcano that was last active over 400 million years ago.
John Milton was blind when he wrote his epic poem Paradise Lost. He would compose sections of 25 to 30 lines late at night when the house was quiet, memorizing them, and would dictate them to one of several scribes (or amanuenses) in the morning. If they were late, he would say that he was like a cow that “wanted to be milked”.
Among Milton’s amanuenses were authors Andrew Marvell and Cyriack Skinner. His three daughters also assisted him; though he taught them to read Latin and Greek so that they could read to him, he did not teach them the meaning of the words or provide other education for them, and their relationship with him was strained.
Italian is the official language of Vatican City, and replaced Latin as the official language of the Synod of Bishops in 2014. However, The Holy See, the entity with authority over the Vatican state, still uses Latin as its official language.
The “Romance languages” are a group of languages which evolved from Vulgar Latin between the third and eight centuries CE. The most widely-spoken Romance languages are Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, and Catalan.
Automatic teller machines of the Vatican Bank in Vatican City include a Latin-language option on their screens.
Ladino is a Romance language spoken by Sephardic Jews, mostly in Israel. It is sometimes is considered a dialect of Spanish. It is an archaic form of Castilian Spanish, mixed with elements of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic, spoken by descendants of the Spanish Jews expelled from Spain in 1492.
It was also in 1492 that Granada, the last Muslim stronghold in Spain, fell to the forces of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. In fact, booty taken from the Moors, who were defeated at Granada, was used to partially finance Columbus’ expedition across the Atlantic.
In the U.S., the Ford Granada was a luxury sedan model which was offered from 1975 until 1982. The Granada started out as a compact sedan, but the second-generation model (1981-1982 model years) was a mid-sized sedan.
The U.S. version of the Granada borrowed its name (but not its construction) from an “executive car” (full-size) model which Ford offered in Europe from 1972 until 1994.
1975 was the first of only two full calendar years of Gerard R. Ford’s Presidency; the next year, in which he presided over celebrations of the United States Bicentennial but was defeated in his campaign to be elected in his own right, was the second. Having taken office on Aug. 9, 1974, upon the resignation of his predecessor Richard M. Nixon, Ford left office on Jan. 20, 1977, upon the inauguration of his successor, Jimmy Carter. Ford and Carter later became good friends once both left office.
Gerald Ford is the only US President who was not elected to either the Presidency or Vice-Presidency. Ford was the first person to be nominated by the President and confirmed by the Congress as Vice-President under the 25th Amendment. Ford’s Vice-President, Nelson Rockefeller, was the second.
Edsel Ford was the only child of Model T maker Henry Ford and ran the automobile company named after his father from 1919 until his death in 1943. As president, he developed the more fashionable Model A in 1927. Edsel also founded the Mercury division and was responsible for the Lincoln-Zephyr and Lincoln Continental. He also introduced important features, such as hydraulic brakes, and greatly strengthened the company’s overseas production.
Sadly, he is best remembered for the 1950’s Ford Edsel, perhaps the greatest failure of a new car in US History.
Edsel Ford’s middle name was Bryant. He was only 49 when he died, of metastatic stomach cancer.
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Ford Prefect, the alien friend of Arthur Dent in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, took his name from an inexpensive British car (he’d initially thought that automobiles were Earth’s dominant lifeform). The joke was lost on many American fans of the book, radio program and movie, as the Ford Prefect was never introduced in the U.S.
English novelist Douglas Adams began his career writing for television. Adams wrote (and appeared in) several sketches for Monty Python’s Flying Circus (being one of only two people outside of the Python troupe to receive a writing credit for the series), and wrote several episodes of Doctor Who.
In his two on-screen TV appearances on Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Douglas Adams played a masked surgeon, “Dr. Emile Koning,” and a “pepperpot,” a middle-aged, middle-class matron, in the Mr. Neutron sketch.
The “Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus” had its start in 1871, when P.T. Barnum agreed to lend his name and know-how to a circus that had been created by Dan Castello and William Cameron Coup. Ten years later, the circus merged with a competitor circus which had been started by James Cooper and James Anthony Bailey. The Ringling Brothers started a circus in 1884 and purchased the Barnum and Bailey circus in 1907. The final act of the “Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus” was on May 21, 2017.
William J. Clinton and George W. Bush both lost their first political campaigns when they ran for Congress: the Democrat Clinton for the US House of Representatives from Arkansas in 1974, and the Republican Bush for the House from Texas four years later. Bush would succeed Clinton as President of the United States in 2001.
Bill Clinton’s birth name was William Jefferson Blythe III; his father, William Jefferson Blythe Jr., died in an automobile accident before his son’s birth. Clinton’s mother married Roger Clinton Sr. when her son was a few years old.