This 1867 gunnery manual contains a surprising claim:
I don’t know whether it’s accurate. In On Killing (2014), Lt. Col. Dave Grossman writes, “The obvious conclusion is that most soldiers were not trying to kill the enemy,” but that conclusion is disputed. More here.
A recent survey of London school children has shown that youngsters between the ages of five and seven have forgotten so many of the attributes of peacetime living that they will have a hard time adjusting themselves to normal conditions again.
Most of the children, when questioned about such things as street lights or foods like bananas, stared suspiciously at the teacher and indicated plainly that they did not believe in their existence.
— New York Times, June 1943
(Shown a seashell, one boy replied, “That’s no shell. Shells come out of guns.”)
Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.
— Emerson, “The American Scholar,” 1838
(Daniel Dennett: “A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.”)
In 1865, Iowa lithographer W.H. Pratt wrote out the text of the Emancipation Proclamation in carefully varied density to produce this result.
How is it with those who imagine that there are antipodes opposite to our footsteps? Do they say anything to the purpose? Or is there any one so senseless as to believe that there are men whose footsteps are higher than their heads? Or that the things which with us are in a recumbent position, with them hang in an inverted direction? That the crops and trees grow downwards? That the rains, and snow, and hail fall upwards to the earth? And does any one wonder that hanging gardens are mentioned among the seven wonders of the world, when philosophers make hanging fields, and seas, and cities, and mountains?
— Lactantius, Institutiones Divinae, 303
At the time of its completion under Hadrian, the Pantheon in Rome had the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome.
It still does. It’s held that record for nearly 2,000 years.
The Tyrians having been much weakened by long wars with the Persians, their slaves rose in a body, slew their masters and their children, took possession of their property, and married their wives. The slaves, having thus obtained everything, consulted about the choice of a king, and agreed that he who should first discern the sun rise should be king. One of them, being more merciful than the rest, had in the general massacre spared his master, Straton, and his son, whom he hid in a cave; and to his old master he now resorted for advice as to this competition.
Straton advised his slave that when others looked to the east he should look toward the west. Accordingly, when the rebel tribe had all assembled in the fields, and every man’s eyes were fixed upon the east, Straton’s slave, turning his back upon the rest, looked only westward. He was scoffed at by every one for his absurdity, but immediately he espied the sunbeams upon the high towers and chimneys in the city, and, announcing the discovery, claimed the crown as his reward.
— Charles Carroll Bombaugh, Gleanings From the Harvest-Fields of Literature, 1869
John Owen, one of the last veterans of the French and Indian War, lived to be 107 and posed for this photograph shortly before his death in 1843.
That makes him one of the earliest-born humans ever to be photographed. He was born in 1735.
In November 1943, as they planned a summit meeting, FDR wired Churchill to suggest that Cairo might be too dangerous a location. Churchill responded:
SEE ST. JOHN, CHAPTER 14, VERSES 1 TO 4.
These verses read:
They met in Cairo.
In 1582, as the Catholic world prepared to adopt the new Gregorian calendar, German pamphleteers lampooned the strife that attended the change:
The old calendar must be the right one for the animals still use it. The stork flies away according to it, the bear comes out of his hole on the Candlemas day of the old calendar and not of the Pope’s, and the cattle stand up in their stalls to honor the birth of the Lord on the Christmas night of the old and not of the new calendar. They also recognize in this work diabolical wickedness. The Pope was afraid the last day would come too quickly. He has made his new calendar so that Christ will get confused and not know when to come for the last judgment, and the Pope will be able to continue his knavery still longer. May Gott him punish.
“Inanimate objects were not so stubborn.” An Italian walnut tree that had reliably put forth leaves, nuts, and blossoms on the night before Saint John’s day under the old regime dutifully adopted the new calendar and performed its feat on the correct day in 1583. A traveler wrote, “I have today sent a branch, broken off on Saint John’s day, to Herr von Dietrichstein, who no doubt will show it to the Kaiser.”
(Roscoe Lamont, “The Reform of the Julian Calendar,” Popular Astronomy 28:1 [January 1920], 18-32.)
