I would hope that it’s the only U.S. university designated as the Tuskegee Institute National Historic Site by the National Park Service. If there were several, that might get confusing.
The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment was an infamous clinical study conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the U.S. Public Health Service. The purpose of this study was to observe the natural progression of untreated syphilis in rural African-American men in Alabama under the guise of receiving free health care from the United States government. 600 impoverished African-American sharecroppers from Macon County, Alabama were enrolled. Of these men, 399 had previously contracted syphilis before the study began, and 201 did not have the disease. The men were given free medical care, meals, and free burial insurance for participating in the study, and they were told that the study was only going to last six months but it actually lasted 40 years.
The 40-year study was controversial for reasons related to ethical standards. Researchers knowingly failed to treat patients appropriately after the 1940s validation of penicillin was found as an effective cure for the disease they were studying. Revelation in 1972 of study failures by a whistleblower led to major changes in U.S. law and regulation on the protection of participants in clinical studies. Now studies require informed consent, communication of diagnosis, and accurate reporting of test results.
The Milgram experiment was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram. They measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience. Participants were led to believe that they were assisting an unrelated experiment, in which they had to administer electric shocks to a “learner”. These fake electric shocks gradually increased to levels that would have been fatal had they been real.
The US ten cent coin does not have any inscription indicating its value, with neither the word ten nor the number 10 appearing on its face. The only indicator of its intrinsic value is “one dime”. Very few Americans know that, but now you do. Similarly, the 25 cent coin lacks that expression in either words or numerals, but the words “quarter dollar”.
Mont Coin, in the Savoy Alps of France, is close to Treicol in Beaufort — the namesake for Beaufort cheese, a cheese related to Gruyère. Gruyère cheese is named after Gruyères, Switzerland. A crane (bird) is on the coat of arms of Gruyères. Gruerius, the legendary founder of Gruyères, captured a crane and chose it as his heraldic animal, inspiring the name Gruyères. In French, crane is “grue”.
Henry VII’s hereditary claim to the throne was through the Beaufort line, descendants of John of Gaunt by his mistress Katherine Swynford. Although John later married Katherine, the taint of illegitimacy clung to their line. Because the illegitimacy made Henry’s claim dubious, he was clear in his proclamation after Bosworth that he was claiming the throne by right of conquest.
Upper Whitewater Falls is a waterfall in North Carolina on the Whitewater River. At 411’ it is the highest cascade in the eastern USA. Upper Whitewater Falls is about 75 miles west of Spartanburg South Carolina.
The Wright Brothers of Dayton, Ohio chose the Outer Banks of North Carolina for their aviation experiments after writing to the U.S. Weather Bureau. The high winds, soft sands and isolation offered by the Kitty Hawk area were all to the Wrights’ liking.
Wilbur and Orville Wright were actually only two of five Wright brothers (and two sisters), the children of Milton Wright, a bishop in the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, and Susan Koerner Wright. The other siblings who survived to adulthood were brothers Reuchlin and Lorin, both of who chose steady middle-class careers, and sister Katherine, who threw herself into Wilbur and Orville’s aviation enterprise, and married only late in life.
Orville and Wilbur Wright’s first flight was on 17 December 1903 when Orville flew about 120 feet in 12 seconds — about 7 MPH. That flight was captured in a famous photograph. Each Wright brother made two flights that day, and the final flight, by Wilbur, covered about 850 feet.
Orville and Wilbur Wright only flew together once: on 25 May 1910 they took a six-minute flight piloted by Orville with Wilbur as his passenger. On that same day, Orville took his 82-year-old father, Milton, on a seven-minute flight.
The last scene of David McCullough’s best-selling 2015 history book The Wright Brothers has Orville taking his father up for his first flight, and the Bishop hanging on tight but saying excitedly, “Higher, Orville! Higher!”
Bishop, California is named after Samuel Addison Bishop, a settler in the Owens Valley. Samuel Addison Bishop fought as a first sergeant in the Mariposa Battalion of the 1850s Mariposa War between California miners and Native Americans, and later was a banker and a founder of the streetcar system in San Jose.
Ebenezer Scrooge invites Bob Cratchit to review his family affairs over a bowl of smoking bishop, a type of mulled wine, punch or wassail popular in Victorian England, including port, red wine, lemons or Seville oranges, sugar and spices such as cloves. Other variations of drinks known collectively as “ecclesiastics” included:
Smoking Archbishop made with claret
Smoking Beadle made with ginger wine and raisins
Smoking Cardinal made with Champagne or Rhine wine
Smoking Pope made with burgundy
Eben-Ezer is the name of a location that is mentioned by the Books of Samuel as the scene of battles between the Israelites and Philistines. Its location has not been identified in modern times with much certainty, with some identifying it with Beit Iksa, and others with Dayr Aban.
In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., the US Supreme Court ruled for the first time to recognize a for-profit corporation’s claim of religious belief. The ruling allowed closely held for-profit corporations to be exempt from a regulation its owners religiously object to. It is limited to closely held corporations, companies owned either by non-governmental organizations or by a relatively small number of shareholders or company members which does not offer or trade its company stock (shares) to the general public on the stock market exchanges, but rather the company’s stock is offered, owned and traded or exchanged privately.
For such companies, the Court’s majority directly struck down the contraceptive mandate, a regulation adopted by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) requiring employers to cover certain contraceptives for their female employees, by a 5-4 vote. The judgment was issued by Associate Justice Samuel Alito.
In his “Pale Fire”, Vladimir Nabokov references a newspaper clipping, “Yanks Edge Sox On Chapman’s Homer”, attributing it to a simple mixup in type setting intended for the literature pages. Nabokov’s intent was to show that the writer was too unaware of baseball to recognize it as a legitimate irony.
