Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a poet and an opium addict. One day in 1797, he went to sleep under the influence, after having read about Kubla Khan’s palace at Zanadu. When he awoke, he began to feverishly copy down a poem he had dreamed. It began with the famous line: Read more…
Litter bearers (also called “stretcher bearers”) don’t get enough credit. Possibly the most famous litter bearer was Ernest Hemingway during the Spanish Civil War. This sketch by combat artist Howard Brodie (see the previous picture post for more information on him). His words at the bottom say it all for Read more…
In the middle of his dramatic victory in the Battle of Trafalgar, Admiral Horatio Nelson was shot by a French sniper and mortally wounded. Nelson was carried below deck while the battle raged. The captain of the HMS Victory was able to come visit Nelson as he lay dying. Nelson Read more…
Howard Brodie was a combat artist for the Army when he was sent to the island of Guadalcanal. He sketched this drawing for Yank magazine. Brodie depicts five tired infantrymen on the march. Brodie wrote on the drawing “the stench of dead Japanese was nauseating”. You see a dead Japanese Read more…
Mozart once bet fellow composer Haydn that he could not play a piano composition that Mozart had written that day. Haydn accepted the bet and sat down at the piano with the music in front of him. He started out well, but then reached a part of the composition Read more…
The painting is called “Sub at Sea” by Adolf Bock. It is a u-boat in the Atlantic in WWII. U-boats like this one sank 175 warships and 2,825 merchant ships in the Battle of the Atlantic. The most successful u-boat commander was Otto Kretschmer who sank 47 ships in 15 Read more…
In his book Utopia, Thomas More wrote that before they married, couples should see each other naked so they would avoid disappointment. One day, a friend named Sir William Roper asked More for the hand of one of his daughters in marriage. When Roper mentioned More’s piece of advice about Read more…
In 1814, during the War of 1812, British Admiral Cockburn (yes, that was his name) was determined to embarrass the Americans by attacking their capital. He was also interested in revenge for the sack of York in Canada. He brushed aside a force of militiamen (with President Madison witnessing in Read more…
In 1632, Galileo published his Dialogue on Two Chief World Systems which supported the Copernican theory that the sun was the center of the Universe and the Earth moved around it. The book caught the attention of the Inquisition which summoned Galileo to Rome for trial. Under threat of torture, Read more…
This is a picture of the Battle of Lake Erie in the War of 1812. An American fleet led by Oliver Perry defeated a British fleet for control of the lake. It did not look good in the early part of the battle as his flagship the Lawrence (named after the captain Read more…