A Brief History On September 10, 1960, the final event of the Summer Olympics held in Rome, Italy, was the scene of the first Sub-Saharan African (Black) to win an Olympic Gold Medal. Abebe Bikila of Ethiopia won the prestigious Olympic Marathon race (about 26.2 miles long) and won it in high fashion, that is, barefoot! Digging Deeper Only 126 lbs, this slim 5’11” runner was 28 years old when he ran his historic race, and for good measure he won the Olympic Gold Medal in the Marathon in the 1964 Olympics as well. The course of events that led…
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A Brief History On August 9, 1930, the voluptuous Betty Boop made her big screen debut in the animated cartoon, Dizzy Dishes. Featuring a gorilla patron at a restaurant and singing cats, Betty was portrayed as a sort of dog-woman (Poodle) in this cartoon, prior to her “evolution” to purely human form. She went on to become an All-American icon, a character certainly associated with the United States by Americans and others alike. Here we list 10 such characters that are identified as uniquely American. (Apologies to Rocky and Bullwinkle, Woody Woodpecker, Yogi Bear and to Tom and Jerry, et…
A Brief History Inferno (Italian for “Hell”) is the first part of Dante Alighieri’s 14th-century epic poem Divine Comedy. It is followed by Purgatorio and Paradiso. It is an allegory telling of the journey of Dante through Hell, guided by the Roman poet Virgil. In the poem, Hell is depicted as nine circles of suffering located within the Earth. Allegorically, the Divine Comedy represents the journey of the soul toward God, with the Inferno describing the recognition and rejection of sin. Digging Deeper: Inferno by Dante Alighieri, translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Canto I Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself…
A Brief History “Fragment of a Novel” (1819) is an unfinished vampire horror story written by Lord Byron (1788–1824). The story, also known as “A Fragment” and “The Burial: A Fragment”, was one of the first in English to feature a vampire theme. The main character was Augustus Darvell. John William Polidori (1795–1821) based his novella The Vampyre (1819) on the Byron fragment. The vampire in the Polidori story, Lord Ruthven, was modelled on Byron himself. The story was the result of the meeting that Byron had in 1816 with Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) where a “ghost writing” contest was…
A Brief History “The Vampyre” is a short work of prose fiction written in 1819 by John William Polidori (1795–1821). The work is often viewed as the progenitor of the romantic vampire genre of fantasy fiction. The work is described by British educationalist Christopher Frayling (born 1946) as “the first story successfully to fuse the disparate elements of vampirism into a coherent literary genre.” This work was published before January 1, 1923 and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago. Digging Deeper: The Story Extract of a Letter from Geneva “I breathe…