Browsing: Beth Michaels

A Brief History On October 24th, 1537, in a cruel twist of fate, Queen Jane Seymour died of complications following childbirth after having just 12 days earlier provided Henry VIII with his much longed-for son and heir. Digging Deeper There is a popular rhyme that people can memorize to remember the fates of Henry VIII’s six wives: divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived. Jane, the only one of his wives to bear that name (the rest were either “Catherines” or “Annes”), was the one who died.  If she had not died, however, she would have been the one who survived, as…

A Brief History The first record of dressing up in costumes on Halloween in North America goes back to 1911 when a newspaper in Kingston, Ontario reported how the neighborhood children were “guising.”  It was not until the 1930s, however, that companies began mass-producing Halloween costumes for commercial sale.  Early costumes were scary in nature and were often of vampires, werewolves, ghosts, mummies, witches, etc.  Later costumes moved on from the ghoulish characters and expanded to include non-scary figures ranging from superheroes to cowboys and Indians to fairy princesses to athletes to animals.  In recent years, it has become a popular trend for women to…

A Brief History On October 15th, 1917, the famous exotic dancer and courtesan Mata Hari was executed by firing squad after having been found guilty of espionage.  Digging Deeper In our three previous articles from this series, we have already listed 31 women famous for being naked or who, at one point in their lives, had famously been naked.  In this article, we again examine 10 more such ladies.  These lists on History and Headlines are different from conventional naked ladies lists in that the main prerequisite for being considered for these is less the actual nudity itself and more its social, cultural or historical significance.   For the latest installment…

A Brief History On October 8, 2014, the latest iteration of American Horror Story debuts with series regular Jessica Lange portraying a character based on a real-life actress of early twentieth-century cinema! Digging Deeper According to E Online and Entertainment Weekly, the persona of Lange’s character was molded after Marlene Dietrich who ranked fourth on History and Headlines’s list of German-speaking actresses of the early years.  American Horror Story: Freak Show (AHS: FS) is set in Florida in the early 1950s, around the time when Dietrich starred in such American and British films as Stage Fright (1950), No Highway in the Sky (1951) and Rancho Notorious (1952). Other aspects of the show also drew inspiration from reality.  First,…

A Brief History On September 22, 1692, eight people convicted of witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials were executed by hanging.  The trials took place between February 1692 and May 1693 and resulted in the execution of twenty people, most of them women.  Contrary to the common belief that witches were typically burned, most of those condemned in Salem and the surrounding areas died by hanging. Digging Deeper As in our previous article on 10 Things History Got Wrong about Women, this article explores 10 more common misconceptions involving women in history.  These misconceptions may be due to legend, malicious gossip,…