Texas is nicknamed “The Lone Star State” to signify its former status as an independent republic, and as a reminder of the state’s struggle for independence from Mexico. The “Lone Star” can be found on the Texas state flag, on the Texan state seal, and on the helmets of the Dallas Cowboys, who play in the NFL.
Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico, born Archduke Maximilian of Austria, ruled from 1864-1867. France, eager to turn Mexico into a satellite state, searched for a suitable figurehead to serve as the nominal emperor of Mexico, so Napoleon III invited Maximilian to establish a new pro-French Mexican monarchy. After French armies withdrew from Mexico in 1866, his empire collapsed, and he was captured and executed by the Mexican government, which then restored the Mexican Republic. He was only 34.
When the Spaniards first arrived at the Yucatan Peninsula, they asked what the place was called, and the locals answered “Yucatan”. In the local language, Yucatan means “I don’t understand you”, but the Spaniards thought they replied with the name of the place.
The Peninsula Players, based in Door County, Wisconsin, are the oldest resident summer theater company in the U.S. The company began performances in 1935, with Noel Coward’s Hay Fever.
The largest peninsula in the world is the Arabian Peninsula at 1,250,006 square miles.
The Peninsula Hotels is a chain of luxury hotels operated by Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels. The first hotel, at the southern tip of the Kowloon Peninsula overlooking Victoria Harbour, opened in 1928 and now stands as the oldest in Hong Kong.
‘Peninsula’ derives from two Latin words, paene and insula, and means ‘almost an island.’ Other English words derived from paene include ‘antepenultimate’ which means ‘next to the next to the last.’
Lynn Ahrens met Stephen Flaherty at the BMI Workshop in 1982 and they started working together the following year. Their first produced musical was a children’s musical, The Emperor’s New Clothes for Theatreworks USA. Their first professionally produced musical together was Lucky Stiff, which premiered Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in April 1988. Their next musical was Once on This Island, which premiered on Broadway in 1990 and which was nominated for eight Tony Awards.
Carol Burnett’s breakthrough role was off-Broadway in the 1959 production of Once Upon a Mattress, based on the fairy tale “The Princess and the Pea”. She played Princess Winnifred while Jack Gilford played King Sextimus The Silent.
William the Silent, Prince of Orange (Willem de Zwijger) started the Eighty Years War which eventually led to Dutch independence. He is now called ‘Father of the Fatherland’ by the Dutch. The national anthem of the Netherlands is about him.
Dutch independence came at the expense of Spain. Dutch Christmastime tradition says that St. Nicholas lives in Madrid, Spain and every year he chooses a different harbour to arrive in The Netherlands, so as many children as possible get a chance to see him. Children are told that his servants, the Black Peters (Zwarte Pieten), keep a record of all the things they have done in the past year in a big book. Good children will get presents from Sinterklaas, but bad children will be put in a sack and the Zwarte Pieten take them to Spain for a year to teach them how to behave!
Soldier of Orange (Dutch: Soldaat van Oranje) is a Dutch musical production, based on the true story of World War II resistance hero Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema, who wrote a book that was made into a movie.Producer Fred Boot obtained the rights to turn the story into a musical in 2005, after meeting Hazelhoff Roelfzema the year before.
Edwin de Vries wrote the musical script. American duo Tom Harriman and Pamela Philips Oland was responsible for composition and lyrics. Dutch actor and composer Frans van Deursen translated the lyrics from English into Dutch.
Das Boot (which means “The Boat” in German) is a 1981 German submarine film. It was both a theatrical release and a 1985 TV miniseries.
The film is set during World War II and follows German U-boat U-96 and its crew as they patrol in the Battle of the Atlantic. It depicts both the excitement of battle and the tedium of the hunt, and shows the men as ordinary individuals who try to do their best for their fellow shipmates and their country.
Run Silent, Run Deep was a submarine movie starring Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster. It was based on the novel by Navy Captain Edward Beach. It also had the debut of an unknown actor by the name of Don Rickles.
Maybe… and maybe not: Yucatán - Wikipedia
In play:
The same German submarine replica used in Das Boot was also used in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
AFAIK, the first submarine movie (of many) to depict a trapped sub sending dead bodies out the torpedo tubes to falsely indicate that it had been sunk was the British WWII production We Dive at Dawn, starring John Mills and Eric Portman. The film closes with the captain, watching operations at Scapa Flow, commenting “One goes in, another one goes out, just like running a ruddy bus service.”
Only once in history has one submarine deliberately sunk another submerged submarine. During WWII, on 09 February 1945, the Royal Navy submarine HMS Venturer attacked and sank German U-boat U-864 in the North Sea — the only incident of its kind where one submarine has sunk another submarine in combat while both were at periscope depth.
The sinking of USS Scorpion was one of four mysterious submarine disappearances in 1968, the others being the Israeli submarine INS Dakar, the French submarine Minerve and the Soviet submarine K-129. She was the second of two US nuclear submarines to be lost, after USS Thresher in 1963. Since the US Navy implemented the package of design and manufacturing features called SUBSAFE in the wake of the Thresher loss, no submarine with the full set of SUBSAFE features has been lost.
The House of Slaves (Maison des Esclaves) and its Door of No Return is a museum and memorial to the Atlantic slave trade on Gorée Island, 3 km off the coast of the city of Dakar, Senegal, the westernmost city in Africa.
The importance of the site and its impact on the slave trade is highly disputed. Boubacar Ndiaye, the museum’s longtime curator, claimed that there is evidence that the building itself was originally built to hold a large numbers of slaves, and that as many as 15 million people passed through this particular Door of No Return. It has become an major tourist attraction and notable world leaders include the Maison des Esclaves on their state visits: Pope John Paul II, Nelson Mandela, and Barack Obama have all made high-profile stops.
Meanwhile, some historians have made claim that only 26,000 enslaved Africans were recorded having passed through the island. Historian Ana Lucia Araujo has stated “it’s not a real place from where real people left in the numbers they say”.
Four First Ladies of the United States have earned advanced college degrees.
Pat Ryan Nixon - Graduated from USC with a Bachelor of Science degree in merchandising,[1] together with a certificate to teach at the high school level, which USC deemed equivalent to a Master’s degree.
Hillary Rodhem Clinton - Juris Doctor degree from Yale
Laura Welch Bush - Master’s degree in Library Science at the University of Texas at Austin
Michelle Robinson Obama - Juris Doctor degree from Harvard