Edith, daughter of Earl Godwin, was the wife of King Edward the Confessor. The marriage was childless, leading to the disputed succession on Edward’s death between her brother, Harold Godwinson, and William of Normandy.
In 2005, an American Basketball Association team, the Baltimore Pearls, was named in honor of NBA legend Earl Monroe.
James Monroe, fifth President of the United States, was the last president who was a Founding Father, the third President to die on July 4th, and the fourth president from Virginia.
Sir Mackenzie Bowell, fifth Prime Minister of Canada, was the second and last PM who sat in the Senate rather than in the House of Commons.
Philip Wallach Blondheim changed his name to Scott Mackenzie and had a one hit wonder with “San Francisco (Flowers in Your Hair).” He chose Mackenzie from the middle name of his friend John Phillip’s daughter, Laura Mackenzie Phillips. She later went on to success with the TV show One Day At A Time.
Eli Wallach – who turned 98 last month! – appeared with Steve McQueen, Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable in their final completed films, The Hunter (1980) for McQueen and The Misfits (1961) for both Monroe and Gable. He also appeared with McQueen in the latter’s first successful film, The Magnificent Seven (1960).
Martha Kent’s maiden name in the original Superman continuity was Clark.
Fort Kent, Maine, on the Saint John River, is the northern terminus of US Route 1, which extends to Key West, Florida. The town was built around a blockhouse built for the Aroostook War, which led to the Webter-Ashburton Treaty that finalized the US-Canada border.
Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, former colonel of the 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry and hero of Little Round Top, attended planning meetings for the 50th anniversary Gettysburg commemoration in early 1913, but was too ill to attend the event itself later that summer.
Wilt Chamberlain hated the nickname “Wilt the Stilt” and preferred to be called “The Big Dipper.”
Wilt Chamberlain’s nickname “The Big Dipper” was inspired by his friends who saw him dip his head as he walked through doorways.
The Big Dipper is composed of the seven brightest stars in the constellation Ursa Major (or Great Bear).
“Follow the Drinking Gourd” (an African term for the Big Dipper) is an American folk song first published in 1928, and popularized by The Weavers. Folklore has it (possibly wrongly) that fugitive slaves in the United States used it to guide their northward journeys, and the song was spread to plantations in the South by a conductor of the Underground Railroad called Peg Leg Joe.
An Underground Railroad sculpture in Oberlin, Ohio shows railroad tracks leading down to the ground. Oberlin was a major stop for escaping slaves in the years before the Civil War.
James Fairchild, a math professor at Oberlin, hid a fugitive slave named John Price in his home until Price could be sent to safety in Canada.
The Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio opened in 1963 with 17 charter enshrinees. Of those charter enshrinees, two were quarterbacks, Sammy Baugh and Dutch Clark, and one was a safety, Don Hutson. Hutson’s major accomplishments on the field were as a split end, and he also was a placekicker.
The Swiss canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden granted women the right to vote on local issues only in 1990.
The hero and heroine of Robert Harris’s 1992 alternative-history novel Fatherland, an SS criminal investigator and an American journalist, make a brief visit to a Swiss bank to learn more about Nazi crimes.
The Finnish Patriotic People’s Movement was that country’s equivalent of the Nazi party, though they did differ in one important respect: they believed that the country was made strong by the mixing of different races, not by the purity of one race.
Toronto City Hall is composed of two curved towers, one shorter than the other.
The reason one tower is shorter is that the architect, Viljo Revell, was from Finland.
One day, when the first tower had been built and the second tower was still under construction, someone called out to the architect: “What part of Sweden do you come from?”
Indignantly, he yelled, “I’m Finnish!”
So the workers obediently downed tools and that was that. 