Thank you. 
Corundum, at 9.0 Mohs, can scratch just about every other mineral. Corundum is mined in Zimbabwe, Russia, Sri Lanka and India.
Zimbabwe, when it was known as Rhodesia in the 1970s, was on the list of countries that Americans were banned from traveling to. Cheerfully welcomed by Rhodesia, but banned by the US government from going there, and subject to arrest when returning home. It was a criminal offense for American stamp collectors to have any Rhodesian stamps (even used ones) in their stamp collection.
In 2014 a British Guiana postage stamp was sold for $9.5M. It set the world record for an aucyion of a single postage stamp. John du Pont had bought that same stamp in 1980 for $935,000. This is the same John du Pont that murdered Olympic wrestler Dave Schulz in 1996. du Pont was convicted in 1997 and died in prison in 2010.
John Banner 1910 – 1973), born Johann Banner, was an Austrian film and television actor. He is best known in the USA for his role as Master Sergeant Schultz in the situation comedy Hogan’s Heroes. Banner was born to Jewish parents in Vienna, Austria-Hungary. In 1938, when he was performing with an acting troupe in Switzerland, Adolf Hitler annexed Austria to Nazi Germany. Banner emigrated to the United States, where he rapidly picked up English. According to fellow Hogan’s Heroes actor Robert Clary, “John lost a lot of his family” to the Holocaust.
Banner’s recurring co-star Howard Caine, who played Gestapo Major Hochstetter, was born Howard Cohen in Tennessee and was a Columbia graduate. He was also considered one of the nation’s greatest banjo players, winning first place at many competitions and working more frequently as folk singer and banjo player than as an actor, and was regarded as an expert on Appalachian folk music. Raised in a Jewish family, he and his wife were very New Age in their personal beliefs and after his death she appeared on talk shows claiming to be in constant communication with his spirit.
The Gestapo was organized in 1933, as a descendant of the Prussian Secret Police, which predated the unification of what is now Germany, and was was specifically organised to suppress political dissent in the wake of the 1848 Revolutions which spread across Germany. Gestapo is a portmanteau made up from Geheime Staatspolizei.
The German Revolution of 1848 was one of several revolutions in Europe. It remains the most widespread revolutionary wave in Europe that saw mostly democratic changes away from feudal systems also in Italy, France, Denmark, Hungary, Sweden, Switzerland, Poland, Belgium, and Ireland.
Brussels Airport is an international airport northeast of Brussels, the capital of Belgium. In 2015, more than 23 million passengers arrived or departed at Brussels Airport, making it the 21st busiest airport in Europe.
And sadly, the target of the lastest terrorim attack in Europe.
About 45 miles west of Brussels is Flanders Field American Cemetery, in Wortegemseweg. 368 soldiers rest there, most of whom died liberating Belgium in WWI. It was dedicated in 1937 and is part of the ABMC, the American Battle Monuments Commission. The ABMC is an agency of the federal government that manages America’s overseas, military cemeteries from World War I and World War II. ABMC administers, operates and maintains 25 permanent American military cemeteries and 27 federal memorial, monuments and markers, which are located in 16 foreign countries.
“In Flanders Fields” is one of the best known poems written during the First World War, by Canadian Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae. When a friend of his died, McCrae performed the burial service himself, and noted how poppies quickly grew around the graves of those who died at Ypres. This is commemorated in the poem:
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead
The National World War One Museum and Memorial in Kansas City is the nation’s only national museum dedicated to WWI.
As shown on their web page (Plan Your Visit | National WWI Museum and Memorial), the entrance includes a glass bridge over a field of (silk) poppies. There is one poppy for each life lost in the war.
In Canada, people wear little artificial poppies in the 10 days leading up to November 11. At the national Remembrance Day ceremony in Ottawa, it’s become customary that at the end of the ceremony people come forward and put their poppies on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
The world’s first official observance of Armistice Day was in Buckingham Palace on 11 November 1919. WWI hostilities ended at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918.
Kin Alfonso the Eleventh ruled over much of Spain for 37 years. He was the king of Castile, León and Galicia upon his father’s death in 1312, when Alfonso XI was not yet two years old. Several disputes ensued over who would hold regency, which were resolved in 1313. He was the firs Spanish king to successfuly expand the territory to include Gibraltar, where he died in 1350.
Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States during World War I, is the only President buried within Washington, D.C. city limits. His tomb is inside the Washington National Cathedral and bears the arms of the United States, New Jersey (of which he was governor) and Princeton University (of which he was president). The flags of the United States and of Princeton are displayed nearby.
ETA: Wilson was elected President in 1912, 600 years after Alfonso the Eleventh first took the throne.
Woodrow Wilson was an adept orator. He wrote his own speeches, earning him the nickname of “The Phrasemaker.” One of his quotes is,
Lazarus Long is a fictional character featured in a number of science fiction novels by Robert A. Heinlein. Over two thousand years old in some of his novels, Long (born Woodrow Wilson Smith). He has appeared in five Heinlein books: Methuselah’s Children, Time Enough for Love, The Number of the Beast, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, and *To Sail Beyond the Sunset *(1987), along with a book of his sayings, called “The Notebooks of Lazarus Long.”
Woodrow Wilson has 14 quotes of his sayings in the current edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations"-- the same number as Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney combined.
Doctor Woodrow Wilson: Ph.D. To date, Woodrow Wilson is the only President to hold a doctorate.
There is no evidence that Woodrow Wilson praised Birth of a Nation by saying it was history written with lightning (a quote often ascribed to him), though he definitely made statements and favored legislation that would be shockingly racist by today’s standards. He definitely had memories of being a southerner in the Civil War, among them seeing the shackled Jefferson Davis given a ‘march-of-shame’ in Augusta, Georgia when he was put on the boat that took him to Fort Monroe.