A Brief History This weekend, two epic films set during Greco-Roman history vie for box office dominance: 300: Rise of an Empire (total worldwide gross as of March 10, 2014: $132,850,000) set during the Greco-Persian Wars and Pompeii (total worldwide gross as of March 10, 2014: $78,168,000) set during the height of the Roman Empire, but how accurate are they historically speaking? Digging Deeper: 300: Rise of an Empire Quite a bit of well put together articles have addressed the factual accuracy and inaccuracy of 300 (see for example here and here), but less has been written about the prequel/sidequel/sequel…
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A Brief History On March 7, 1274, Saint Thomas Aquinas died having not completed his masterpiece, the Summa Theologiæ, in which he defines evil as the absence or privation of good. Tragically, numerous men and women have walked our Earth demonstrating few if any “good” qualities. This article lists these most evil examples of humans in chronological order by their dates of birth. A few quick things to keep in mind before reading this list: First, this article is a work in progress in that it only links to people featured in greater detail in existing articles on History and…
Dear readers, in March of 2014, we posted an article about Colt’s revolver, but what are some more famous pistols in history? Read on to find out the top ten! The order is not important, but their fame and renown is. Television, movies, books and popularity use all factor into fame and notoriety with pistols. What pistols and revolvers would come to your mind as famous? (Or infamous, as the case may be?) 10. Smith & Wesson J-Frame (.38 S&W Special) The snub nosed .38 all the detectives used to carry in the movies from the 1940’s to the 1980’s…
A Brief History In another article, we featured an interesting fact of Adolf Hitler (Adolf Hitler only became a naturalized German citizen on February 25, 1932.) Here we list 10 more little-known facts about one of history’s most evil men! Digging Deeper 10. Hitler was a vegetarian and frequently had gas! Irritable bowel syndrome, syphilis and heart problems may also have ailed him. 9. Hitler had been a corporal during World War I, was decorated for bravery and wounded by poison gas. (No connection to the above!) 8. Hitler’s father was illegitimate, originally given the last name of Schicklgruber and later changing it to Hitler (or Hiedler,…
A Brief History On February 14, 1349, the city of Strasbourg, France was the scene of a St. Valentine’s Day massacre 150 times worse than the more famous Chicago incident! Digging Deeper Digging deeper, we find Strasbourg at the time an independent Imperial City located in the region now known as Alsace on the French-German border. Lest you think anti-Semitism was something invented by the Nazi’s in World War II, pogroms against people practicing the Jewish faith go back a long time, even before the earliest settlement of Strasbourg in 12 B.C. In 1349, only a year after an epidemic of…