A Brief History On January 1, 1773, the all familiar hymn “Amazing Grace” was performed for the first time at a church service in England. Digging Deeper Digging deeper, we find what is generally considered to be the most familiar, best loved, all around greatest hymn based on music of unknown origin. The words, however, came from John Newton, a cleric who wrote them years before with the inspiration coming from his time on a slave ship threatened by fierce weather. The prospect of imminent death elicited the beautiful words we know today, and in them he claims to have…
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A Brief History On December 31, 1993, transgender person Brandon Teena was raped and murdered. Teena’s tragic life and death served as the inspiration for the 1999 major motion picture Boys Don’t Cry, starring Hillary Swank. Digging Deeper Digging deeper, we find 21-year-old biologically female Brandon Teena living as a man in Nebraska. Having been born a girl and named Teena Brandon, Brandon exhibited transgender tendencies as an adolescent and despite her mother’s denial and consternation continued to progress that way through high school, ending up expelled only 3 days before graduation. Living as a man under the transposed name,…
A Brief History On December 30, 1977, serial killer Ted Bundy escaped from jail and went on to continue his killing spree. Digging Deeper Digging deeper, we find this murderous psychopath had actually escaped once before! In June of 1977, having been jailed for assault and kidnapping (getting a sentence of only 1 to 15 years) Bundy was facing a murder charge and escaped from a window at the courthouse in Aspen, Colorado, running free for 6 days before being recaptured. The second escape was from an actual jail in Glenwood Springs, Colorado despite possibly only having to serve a…
A Brief History On December 29, 1916, possibly the most cracked clergyman of all time finally met his doom, having been poisoned, shot, and drowned, thereby rivaling Blackbeard for the claim of bearded bad-ass who most went out “like a boss”! Digging Deeper Digging deeper, we find the last royal court of Russia in the middle of turbulent times indeed, tangled in the morass of the First World War (or, at the time, The Great War) and the country on the brink of revolution. In addition to the horrible political situation, the royal family (Romanov) of Czar Nicholas II had…
A Brief History Is December 26th the Most Wacked Date in History? So many disasters occurred we can not even include them all! Digging Deeper Digging deeper, we find our cracked odyssey starting in 1846 in the Sierra Nevada mountains, where the Donner Party, close to death from starvation and freezing, resorts to cannibalism to survive! At least they apparently waited for their food to die on its own and did not murder each other. In 1862, the U.S. conducted its largest mass hanging ever, when 38 Native Americans are hanged from a single scaffold! Incredibly, it could have been worse! …