The first man recognized by modern historians as King of England is Egbert, a Saxon who ruled from 827 to 839. After returning from exile at the court of Charlemagne in 802, he regained his kingdom of Wessex. Following his conquest of Mercia in 827, he controlled all of England south of the Humber. After further victories in Northumberland and North Wales, he is recognised by the title Bretwalda (Anglo-Saxon, “ruler of the British”. A year before he died aged almost 70, he defeated a combined force of Danes and Cornish at Hingston Down in Cornwall. He is buried at Winchester in Hampshire.
Sarah Winchester, born in 1839 in New Haven, Connecticut and died in 1922 in San Jose, California, was the wife of William Winchester of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. He died in 1881 of tuberculosis and she was the heiress to his estate and held a 50% share in the company. William was the only son of Oliver Winchester, who manufactured the Winchester repeating rifle. Oliver Winchester died in 1880, one year before his son William’s death in 1881. Oliver Winchester was the largest stockholder in an early company belonging to Horace Smith and Daniel Wesson of Norwich, Connecticut.
When William Rufus (William II) died in a hunting accident in the New Forest, his younger brother, Henry, travelled quickly to Winchester, seized the royal treasury, and declared himself to be king.
The Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, also described as clades Variana (the Varian disaster) by Roman historians, took place in the Teutoburg Forest in Germany in AD 9, when an alliance of Germanic tribes ambushed and decisively destroyed three Roman legions and their auxiliaries, led by Publius Quinctilius Varus. The anti-Roman alliance was led by Arminius, who had acquired Roman citizenship and received a Roman military education, allowing him to personally deceive the Roman commander and foresee the Roman army’s tactical responses.
Despite several successful campaigns and raids by the Roman army in the years after the battle, they never again attempted to conquer Germanian territory east of the Rhine River. The Germanic victory against the Roman legions in the Teutoburg forest had far-reaching effects on the subsequent history of both the ancient Germanic peoples and on the Roman Empire. Modern historians have regarded Arminius’ victory as “Rome’s greatest defeat” and one of the most decisive battles in history.
U.S. Navy small-boat and barge crews helped the U.S. Army cross the Rhine River in the last days of World War II in Europe. The famous “Bridge at Remagen” or Ludendorff Bridge collapsed ten days after being unexpectedly captured from its Wehrmacht defenders.
After the Varian disaster east of the Rhine, Emperor Augustus was reportedly heard to say on several occasions: “Quinctilius Varus, give me back my Legions!” (“Quintili Vare, legiones redde!”).
The last of Augustus’ descendants to reign as Emperor was Nero, his great-great grandson.
Queen Elizabeth can traditionally claim to be a descendant of the god Wotan, via Cerdric, the legendary first King of Wessex.
Thomas Hardy created the fictional county of Wessex for his novels. The actual definition of “Hardy’s Wessex” varied widely throughout his career, and was not definitively settled until after he retired from writing novels. When he created the concept of a fictional Wessex, it consisted merely of the small area of Dorset in which Hardy grew up; by the time he wrote Jude the Obscure, the boundaries had extended to include all of Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, Hampshire, much of Berkshire, and some of Oxfordshire, with its most north-easterly point being Oxford (renamed “Christminster” in the novel).
Comedian and actor Thomas Daniel “Tim” Conway was the guest host of one of the most infamous network TV programming catastrophes ever: Turn-On, a counter-cultural sketch comedy show on ABC that was derided as a ripoff of NBC’s Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. Turn-On’s first episode was shown on Wednesday, February 5, 1969, at 8:30pm eastern. Unlike Laugh-In the show “focused almost exclusively on sex as a comedic subject”, using various rapid-fire jokes and risqué skits but no laugh track.
Turn-On bombed completely because of its poor quality, lack of humor, and its progressive sexual content that left audiences feeling awkward. Some TV stations refused to return to the show after the first commercial break. The show was canceled midway through its only episode, the only episode that ever aired. Cleveland TV station WEWS sent ABC network management an angry telegram: “If your naughty little boys have to write dirty words on the walls, please don’t use our walls. Turn-On is turned off, as far as WEWS is concerned.”
The controversy led ABC to later reject a pilot written by Norman Lear, stating that the lead character was “foul-mouthed, and bigoted”, out of fear that it might anger its affiliates again. CBS liked it, picked it up as All in the Family, and began airing it in 1971. All in the Family ran from 1971 to 1979. In September 1979, a new show, Archie Bunker’s Place, picked up where All in the Family had ended. That sitcom lasted another four years, ending its run in 1983.
Norman Lear was the executive producer for the failed TV show The Powers that Be, which starred David Hyde Pierce and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as father and son Theodore and Pierce Van Horne. Both actors went on to star in more successful TV shows (Frasier and 3rd Rock from the Sun).
“Norman” was a #3 hit for Sue Thompson in 1961. It was written by John D. Loudermilk,
Game show creator, producer and host Chuck Barris wrote the Freddy Cannon hit “Palisades Park,” a tribute to New Jersey’s Palisades Amusement Park. Released by Swan Records as a B-side to “June, July and August,” “Palisades Park” broke in when a Flint, Michigan radio DJ played it by mistake. It peaked at #3 on the Billboard Hot 100 June 23, 1962, the biggest hit of both Barris’s songwriting and Cannon’s recording careers.
Mons Meg is a medieval bombard located at Edinburgh Castle, Scotland. It was built in 1449 on the orders of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy and sent by him as a gift to King James II of Scotland in 1454. The bombard was employed in sieges until the middle of the 16th century, after which it was only fired on ceremonial occasions. It was on one such occasion in 1680 that the barrel burst, rendering Mons Meg unusable.
Mons Meg has a calibre of 510 mm, making it one of the largest cannons in the world by calibre.
The Tsar Cannon, on the grounds of the Moscow Kremlin, is the largest cannon ever cast (although it’s technically a mortar), with a caliber of 35 inches, although it was never used in war. The barrel is decorated with relief images, including an equestrian image of Tsar Fyodor Ivanovich.
In Russian names, the -ovich suffix means “son of” and always consists of the person’s father’s name plus the suffix. Thus, Fyodor, the son of Ivan Ivanov, would be named Fyodor Ivanovich Ivanov.
Women take the suffix “-ovna” added to their father’s name and an “-a” is added to the family name. Thus, Valentina, daughter of Vladimir Tereshkov, is named Valentina Vladmirovna Tereshkova (until marriage).
The Vladimir Tiara is one of the more spectacular pieces in the jewellery collection of Queen Elizabeth II. It was purchased by Queen Mary from Grand Duchess Elena Vladimirovna of Russia for a price of £28,000 (approximately £1,091,300 in 2015 values). Grand Duchess Elena Vladimirovna (known after her marriage as Princess Nicholas of Greece) had inherited it from her mother Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna, wife of Grand Duke Vladimir. The tiara had been smuggled out of Russia by Albert Stopford, a British art dealer, during the 1917 revolution.
Advocates of Scottish independence promised before last fall’s referendum that Queen Elizabeth II would remain Queen of Scotland even if Scotland broke with the rest of the United Kingdom, despite the republicanism of many Scots who otherwise favored indpendence. The proposal failed.
Between 1908 and 1917, the French composer Claude Débussy worked on an opera called La chute de la maison Usher. The libretto was his own, based on Poe’s short story The Fall of the House of Usher. At Débussy’s death the work was unfinished, however. In recent years completions have been attempted by two different musicologists.
An usher is a person charged with watching an entrance and guiding people to seats. The word is ultimately derived from the Latin word for a door, “ostium”, via Norman-French “usser.”