The state line between the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and Wisconsin is defined by the Montreal and Menominee rivers and a line that connects them. The Montreal flows northward and drains into Lake Superior, while the Menominee flows in a southeasterly direction and empties into Lake Michigan.
Otto Preminger’s 1959 film Anatomy of a Murder depicts a murder trial in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The film starred Jimmy Stewart, Lee Remick, George C. Scott, Ben Gazzara, and Eve Arden, with a score by Duke Ellington. It is considered to be among the best film depictions of a trial ever made.
The film was based on a 1958 novel of the same title, written by a Michigan Supreme Court justice, John D. Voelker, under the pen name of Robert Traver; Voelker based the novel on a 1952 murder case in the Upper Peninsula, on which he was the defense attorney.
*The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp * is one of Rembrandt’s early masterpieces; he was 26 and it was his first major commission in Amsterdam. The dissection can be dated to 31 January 1632: the Amsterdam Guild of Surgeons, of which Tulp was official City Anatomist, permitted only one public dissection a year. The corpse is Aris Kindt, who was convicted for armed robbery and sentenced to death by hanging on the same day of the scene
Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano was the first European to explore the Atlantic coast of North America between Florida and New Brunswick in 1524, including New York Bay and Narragansett Bay. Sailing on the French ship La Dauphine, he landed on New Amsterdam in what is today New York state, in 1524 and named it New Angoulême. The Dutch established a strong colony and fort on what they named New Amsterdam in the early 1600s, and by 1665 the British invaded, demanded the Dutch to surrender, and renamed New Amsterdam to New York after king Charles’ brother James, the Duke of York.
“Dauphin” was the title given to the heir apparent to the throne of France. The title is also the French word for “dolphin;” the coat of arms of the Dauphin of France featured a dolphin.
The last monarch to rule France was Napoleon III, nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte. He ruled from 1852 through 1870. He was overthrown during the Franco-Prussian War, and France has been ruled since then by a succession of republican governments.
The Napoleonic Civil Code was established in 1804 by Napoleon Bonaparte emphasized a clearly-written and accessible set of laws, but it also abolished divorce by mutual consent, and it also established the supremacy of the man over his wife or children. Women had less rights than a minor male child.
Napoleon Bonaparte was probably around 5 feet 6 inches tall, which is the equivalent of the French measurement “5 pieds 2 pouces”. The impression that he was unusually short was fostered by the British cartoonist James Gillray (1756-1815), whose caricatures were so popular and influential that at the end of his life Napoleon said that Gillray “did more than all the armies of Europe to bring me down.” Gilray’s cartoons called Napoleon “Little Boney”, and depicted him as small, raging and boastful—like a child throwing a temper tantrum.
A pied-à-terre (French for “foot on the ground”) is a term used to refer to a small residential unit (typically an apartment or condo) in a large city, which is some distance away from the owner’s primary residence, and is usually a secondary/part-time residence for the owner. Pieds-à-terre are common in certain cities, such as Paris, London, Hong Kong, and Manhattan.
In physical geography, a piedmont is a region of foothills for a mountain range. In Latin, Pedemontis, i.e., ad pedem montium, literally means “at the foot of the mountains”.
In the eastern US, The Piedmont is the uplifted foothills region along the Appalachian Mountains in the eastern states ranging from New Jersey and Pennsylvania in the north to Alabama and Georgia in the south. In Colorado and Wyoming there is a piedmont along the Front Range of the southern Rocky Mountains. Italy’s Piedmont is a region in the northwest, along the Alps.
The city of Piedmont CA, near Oakland, is named after Italy’s Piedmont region.
The geography of the state of North Carolina is often described as three distinct landforms: the Coastal Plain, the Piedmont Plateau, and the Appalachian Mountains.
The oldest state university in the USA is the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It was established in 1789.
Vivian Howard is a native of Deep Run, North Caroina, a small town in the state’s coastal plain, where she grew up on her family’s farm.
Howard trained as a chef in New York City, but then moved back to North Carolina with her husband to start a restaurant in Kinston, NC, called Chef & the Farmer. Howard is best-known for A Chef’s Life, the PBS documentary / cooking series which she developed, based on her experiences running a restaurant and preserving the culinary traditions of the South. The series has won a Peabody Award and a James Beard Foundation Awared.
The 1935 Broadway production of The Petrified Forest starred Leslie Howard, an established star, and Humphrey Bogart, an actor in his first leading theatrical role, as gangster Duke Mantee.
For the 1936 film, Warner Brothers wanted Edward G. Robinson as Duke; but Howard, whose contract gave him final script control, told the studio that he would not appear in the movie version without Bogart as his co-star. The film made Bogart a star, and he remained grateful to Howard for the rest of his life.
In 1952, Bogart and Lauren Bacall named their daughter Leslie Howard Bogart in honor of Howard, who had been killed in a plane crash when the German air force shot down his BOAC flight from Lisbon to Bristol during World War II.
The largest petrified trees in the world are in the Petrified Forest in Sonoma, California.
There are 57 known species in the Somoma genus of beetles, all native to western North America. Fourteen of them were first described by entomologist Michael L. Ferro in a paper 2016.
According to the Smithsonian, beetles are known to include some 350,000 species, and are therefore the largest group of animals on earth.
The last original VW Beetle, #21,529,464 was assembled and immediately retired on July 31st, 2003, in Puebla, Mexico, at the Volkswagen de Mexico manufacturing plant. The Beetle now resides on display at Volkswagen’s Auto Museum in Wolfsburg, Germany.
The Love Bug, a Disney film about an intelligent Volkswagen Beetle, was the second-highest grossing film in the U.S. in its release year of 1969, outperformed at the box office only by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
In the 1999 Car of the Century competition, to determine the world’s most influential car in the 20th century, the Ford Model T came in first, followed by the Morris Mini, and the Citroën DS. The Volkswagen Beetle came fourth.