Flora MacDonald was living on the island of Benbecula in the Outer Hebrides when Bonnie Prince Charlie took refuge there after the Battle of Culloden. Hse hid him and assisted in his escape, which earned her some time in the Tower of London, before she was released under the Act of Indemnity in 1747.
On September 17, 1849, Harriet Tubman made her first escape from slavery in Maryland. She became famous for aiding the rescues of other slaves through the so-called “Underground Railroad.” With the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Law by the federal Congress the next year, authorities in the northern states were required to apprehend former slaves and return them to their southern owners.
William Tubman was the FDR of Liberia. He died in office in his sixth term, in 1971, after serving 27 years as president of what was then one of only two independent countries in Africa.
On January 3, 1848, Joseph Jenkins Roberts was inaugurated as the first President of Liberia, having been born free in Norfolk, Virginia. In 1828 the 19-year-old Roberts married an 18-year-old woman named Sarah. They had an infant child whom they took with them when they went to Liberia sponsored by the American Colonization Society. Both Sarah and the child died in their first year in the colony. In 1872 Roberts began another presidential term, this time as the seventh President.
The War of** Jenkins**’ Ear was a conflict between Britain and Spain that lasted from 1739 to 1748, with major operations largely ended by 1742. The seeds of conflict began with the separation of an ear from captain Robert Jenkins following the boarding of his vessel by Spanish coast guards in 1731, eight years before the war began.
The Wife of Bath in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales has had five husbands; the fifth is Jankyn, or, in modernized English versions, Jenkin or Johnny. The name “Jenkin” or “Janken” is seen in use in England as early as 1086 as a diminutive of the English form of John.
On November 29, 1739, the settlement of Portobello in present-day Panama was taken by a British fleet during the War of Jenkins’ Ear.
United Flight 1739 flies from Orlando to Cleveland.
There have been several adaptations of Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando: in 1989 director Robert Wilson and writer Darryl Pinckney collaborated on a theatrical production. A film adaptation was released in 1992, starring Tilda Swinton as Orlando. Another stage adaption by Sarah Ruhl premiered in New York City in 2010. In 2016, composer Peter Aderhold and librettist Sharon L. Joyce premiered am opera based on the work at the Braunschweig State Theater.
On March 28, 1941, Virginia Woolf drowned herself by filling her overcoat pockets with stones and walking into the River Ouse near her home in Rodmell. Her body was not found until April 18.
On April 18, 1775, Paul Revere and William Dawes rode from Charleston, Massachusetts to warn the citizens that “The British are Coming”. However, Revere and Dawes were stopped and detained by British calvary outside of Lexington and the warning to Concord (where the colonists had a large amount of military supplies) was carried by Samuel Prescott.
The American rock band Paul Revere and the Raiders was forned in Boise Idaho by Paul Revere Dick in the early 60s. Dick owed a restaurant in Caldwell, Idaho, and the idea for the band formed when he met his co-founder, who was working at a bakery where Dick purchased his buns.
Idaho potatoes are technically any potato grown in Idaho, but they are usually Russet potatoes, large and starchy with brown skin and white flesh. Because of their high starch content, Idaho potatoes are good for baking and mashing as well as making French fries and potato chips. In contrast, among the best varieties for boiling for potato salad are Yellow Finn, Yukon Gold, and red potatoes. Their high moisture content will give them a more pleasant texture when cold, and their waxier flesh holds up better to chopping and to tossing with dressing than drier, more mealy potatoes, like Russets.
Russet is a dark brown color with a reddish-orange tinge, made by combining orange and purplw pigments, is not named after the potato, but the name of the color derives from russet, a coarse cloth made of wool and dyed with woad and madder to give it a subdued grey or reddish-brown shade. By the statute of 1363, poor English people were required to wear russet.
Russet is the academic color associated with forestry.
Dyes such as those that forn Russet date back to antiquity.
Woad is native to the Middle East and the Mediterranean from which it spread into Europe and where it has been in use as a dye plant since Neolithic times. Textiles dyed with woad were found in Viking ship burials like the Oseberg ship in Norway and the Celtic chieftains graves in Hallstatt, Austria. The famous Bayeux tapestry has several shades of blue dyed with woad.
Madder produces one of the most light-fast of natural dyes and has been in use for thousands of years. Archaeologists found traces of madder dye in linen in Tutankhamen’s tomb and in wool discovered in Viking burial grounds.
The Bayeux War Cemetery with its memorial includes the largest British cemetery dating from the Second World War in France. There are 4,648 graves, including 3,935 British and 466 Germans. Most of those buried there were killed in the invasion of Normandy.
On May 15, 1997, in dedicating the Laos Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery, the Clinton administration first admitted to participation by US military forces in the Laotian Civil War that ended 22 years previously. This admission implicitly acknowledged that the US had lied for decades in denying any combat operations by its forces took place in Laos during the Vietnam War.
Present day Laos traces its historic and cultural identity to the kingdom of Lan Xang Hom Khao, which means “Kingdom of a Million Elephants Under the White Parasol.”
Queen Mother Ntfombi, Ndlovukati of Swaziland is the mother of King Mswati III. In 1986, when he turned 18, Makhosetive was crowned King Mswati III. Upon becoming king, as was the custom, he declared his mother to be the Indlovukazi (a title roughly corresponding to Queen Mother, literally translated as Great She-Elephant) and, as such, Joint Head of State.