The Gold Rush was a Charlie Chaplin film set in the Klondike gold rush. One of the scenes shows Chaplin joining a long line of people climbing a mountain. While is seems like a joke today, it’s actually based on the situation in the Chilkoot Pass, the main path to the gold fields.
The 2011 Bradley Cooper/Robert De Niro film Limitless was, through an inexplicable oversight by the Academy, not nominated for a single Oscar.
The US Military Academy at West Point is the oldest continuously-operating Army post in the United States. Benedict Armold’s act of treason was his attempting to sell the fort to the British.
Little is known about the first Pope Benedict, who reigned for four years, from 575 to 579. He was succeeded by Pelagius, the second and last Pope to bear that name.
The Avignon Papacy was the period from 1309 to 1377, during which seven successive popes resided in Avignon (in today’s France) rather than in Rome. This situation arose from the conflict between the Papacy and the French crown.
Following the strife between Philip IV of France and Pope Boniface VIII, and the death of his successor Benedict XI after only eight months in office, a deadlocked conclave finally elected Clement V, a Frenchman, as Pope in 1305. Clement declined to move to Rome, remaining in France, and in 1309 moved his court to the papal enclave at Avignon, where it remained for the next 67 years. This absence from Rome is sometimes referred to as the “Babylonian Captivity of the Papacy”. A total of seven popes reigned at Avignon; all were French, and they increasingly fell under the influence of the French Crown. Finally, on September 13, 1376, Gregory XI abandoned Avignon and moved his court to Rome (arriving on January 17, 1377), officially ending the Avignon Papacy.
The first pope to change his name was a fellow named Mercury, elected in 533, who didn’t think it was a good idea to be named after a Roman god so he became John II.
The family shrine in a Roman house was called the lararium after the Lares, two minor deities fathered by Mercury and the nymph Lara, who had been muted for revealing one of Zeus’s affairs to Hera.
“Lara’s Theme” is the generic name given to a leitmotif written for the Omar Sharif film Doctor Zhivago (1965) by composer Maurice Jarre. It played whenever Zhivago thought of his lover Lara (Julie Christie) Soon afterward, it became the basis of the song “Somewhere, My Love”.
Julie Christie was born in India, and Doctor Zhivago was filmed in part in Finland and in Alberta, Canada.
In 2004, Julie Christie made a brief cameo appearance in the third Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, playing Madam Rosmerta.
Julie Christie was a best friend of Sharon Tate, who was murdered in 1969 by the Charles Manson ‘family’.
On January 26th, 1969, Richard Nixon took the Oath of Office and succeeded Lyndon B. Johnson as the 37th President of the United States.
Richard Nixon
Lyndon Johnson
Andrew Johnson
John Tyler
These are the only four men to have served in both offices of the Executive Branch and also in both houses of Congress.
When Abraham Lincoln was in his one term in Congress he was a great admirer of fellow Whig Congressman Alexander Stephens from Georgia who was his senior by one term (and was more than a foot shorter than the gentleman from Illinois). Lincoln admired his brilliance and impromptu eloquent oratory. When they met again at the Hampton Roads Conference and it became clear there was no peace they could make that the Confederacy would agree too, Stephens relied on his old friendship with Lincoln to ask that his nephew be freed from a Union P.o.W. camp (which he was) and then went straight home to his plantation in Georgia to await the inevitable collapse of the Confederacy and his own arrest. When Federal troops arrived to arrest him they found him with his bags packed and ready to go. Stephens later served another term in the United States Congress.
'Twas January 20, 1969.
In play:
The participants of the 1865 Hampton Road Conference met on the River Queen, a steamboat charted by the U.S. War Department. It had formerly been a ferry serving the islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. The conference is briefly depicted in the Oscar-winning Spielberg movie Lincoln.
The US War Department was originally created to operate the US Army. It operated the US Navy as well, until the creation of the Navy Department in 1798. It operated land-based air forces until the creation of the Air Force Department in 1947.
In 1949 it was renamed the Department of Defense.
On September 11, 2001, exactly 60 years after the groundbreaking ceremony for the Department of Defense’s headquarters of the Pentagon, American Airlines Flight 77 was hijacked and flown into the Western side of the building, killing 189 people including the five hijackers. This was the first significant foreign attack on the capital’s governmental facilities since the burning of Washington during the War of 1812.
The defeat on 24 August 1814 of American Forces at the Battle of Bladensburg allowed the British to burn Washington, D.C. It has been called “the greatest disgrace ever dealt to American arms” and “the most humiliating episode in American history”. President James Madison was almost captured, and the Burning of Washington proceeded that night.
Charles II once commented that his brother James’ mistresses were so ugly that he wondered if they had been assigned to James by his confessor as penance for some outrageous sin.
Robert Heinlein’s sci-fi novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress tells about the revolt of Luna, a lunar colony, in the year 2076 against their being ruled from Earth.