Having lost both his legs at the Second Battle of Bull Run, James Tanner had settled into life as a government stenographer in the Ordnance Department in Washington, D.C., when on April 14, 1865, he was suddenly summoned to the building next to his boarding house, where Abraham Lincoln lay dying. Between midnight and 1:30 a.m., using shorthand, he recorded the accounts of those who had witnessed the assassination, and, he said later, “in fifteen minutes I had testimony enough to hang Wilkes Booth, the assassin, higher than ever Haman hung.” Here’s a sample, the statement of actor William Henry Hawk, who had been performing at Ford’s Theatre that night:

I was on the stage at the time of the firing & heard the report of the pistol. My back was towards the Presidents box at the time. I heard something tear & somebody fell & as I looked towards him he came in the direction in which I was standing & I believe to the best of my knowledge that it was John Wilkes Booth. Still I am not positive that it was him. I only had one glance at him as he was rushing towards me with a dagger & I turned and run & after I run up a flight of stairs I turned and exclaimed ‘My God that’s John Booth.’ I am acquainted with Booth. I met him the first time a year ago. I saw him today about one o’clock. Said I ‘how do you do Mr. Booth’ and he says ‘how are you Hawk.’ He was sitting on the steps of Fords Theatre reading a letter. He had the appearance of being sober at the time. I was never intimate with him. He had no hat on when I saw him on the stage. In my own mind I do not have any doubt but that it was Booth. He made some expression when he came on the stage but I did not understand what.

Tanner’s notes are known as the Tanner Manuscript — you can read them at the Internet Archive.

In 1893, intrepid Englishwoman Mary Kingsley decided to visit West Africa, where she collected beetles and fishes, negotiated the Ogowé River rapids in a canoe, and climbed the Great Cameroon. One evening she was forging through some underbrush when she found herself “in a heap, on a lot of spikes, some fifteen feet or so below ground level, at the bottom of a bag-shaped game pit.”

It is at these times you realise the blessing of a good thick skirt. Had I paid heed to the advice of many people in England, who ought to have known better, and did not do it themselves, and adopted masculine garments, I should have been spiked to the bone, and done for. Whereas, save for a good many bruises, here I was with the fulness of my skirt tucked under me, sitting on nine ebony spikes some twelve inches long, in comparative comfort, howling lustily to be hauled out. The Duke came along first, and looked down at me. I said, ‘Get a bush-rope, and haul me out.’ He grunted and sat down on a log. The Passenger came next, and he looked down. ‘You kill?’ says he. ‘Not much,’ say I; ‘get a bush-rope and haul me out.’ ‘No fit,’ says he, and sat down on the log. Presently, however, Kiva and Wiki came up, and Wiki went and selected the one and only bush-rope suitable to haul an English lady, of my exact complexion, age, and size, out of that one particular pit. They seemed rare round there from the time he took; and I was just casting about in my mind as to what method would be best to employ in getting up the smooth, yellow, sandy-clay, incurved walls, when he arrived with it, and I was out in a twinkling.

Of her Rudyard Kipling said, “Being human, she must have been afraid of something, but one never found out what it was.”

(From her 1897 book Travels in West Africa.)

In 1921, when someone complimented Warren G. Harding on a particularly fine speech, he said, “The best thing I ever wrote was an obituary for my dog. I felt that, and anybody can write when he feels very strongly upon his subject. Some day I’ll find a copy of that tribute to my dog and you’ll agree with me that it was good.”

He had published the piece while editing the Marion, Ohio, Star. Managing editor George Van Fleet retrieved the obituary from the newspaper files and sent a copy to the White House. Here it is:

Edgewood Hub in the register, a mark of his breeding, but to us just Hub, a little Boston terrier, whose sentient eye mirrored the fidelity and devotion of his loyal heart. The veterinary said he was poisoned; perhaps he was — his mute suffering suggested it. One is reluctant to believe that a human being who claims man’s estate could be so hateful a coward as to ruthlessly torture and kill a trusting victim, made defenseless through his confidence in the human master, but there are such. One honest look from Hub’s trusting eyes was worth a hundred lying greetings from such inhuman beings, though they wore the habiliments of men.

Perhaps you wouldn’t devote these lines to a dog. But Hub was a Star office visitor nearly every day of the six years in which he deepened attachment. He was a grateful and devoted dog, with a dozen lovable attributes, and it somehow voices the yearnings of broken companionship to pay his memory deserved tribute.

It isn’t orthodox to ascribe a soul to a dog — if soul means immortality. But Hub was loving and loyal, with the jealousy that tests its quality. He was reverent, patient, faithful; he was sympathetic, more than humanly so, sometimes, for no lure could be devised to call him from the sick bed of mistress or master. He minded his own affairs, especially worthy of human emulation, and he would kill or wound no living thing. He was modest and submissive where these qualities were becoming, yet he assumed a guardianship of the home he sentineled, until entry was properly vouched. He couldn’t speak our language though he somehow understood, but he could be and was eloquent with uttering eye and wagging tail, and the other expressions of knowing dogs. No, perhaps he had no soul, but in these things are the essence of soul and the spirit of lovable life.

Whether the Creator planned it so, or environment and human companionship have made it so, men learn richly through the love and fidelity of a brave and devoted dog. Such loyalty might easily add lustre to a crown of immortality.

The flag of Guyana was designed by a college student. In 1960, as that country was emerging from British colonial rule, Whitney Smith, then a 20-year-old undergraduate at Harvard, wrote to independence leader Cheddi Jagan and asked what flag the new country had chosen. Jagan told him no decision had been made and asked him for ideas. Smith designed a flag, got his mother to sew it, and sent it in, and Guyana adopted it, with some slight modifications.

Smith went on to create the journal Flag Bulletin; found the Flag Research Center; design flags for the Saudi Navy, Bonaire, and Aruba; organize the First International Congress of Vexillology (and coin that term); help to found the North American Vexillological Association and the Flag Heritage Association; and write The Flag Book of the United States, Flag Lore of All Nations, and more than 250 flag histories for the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

“I’m a monomaniac, that’s clear,” he told People magazine. “But I’m more fortunate than most people because I have something that infuses my whole life. I relate flags to everything.”

The balcony of Woolsey Hall at Yale has one extra-wide seat: Carpenters enlarged it to accommodate William Howard Taft, who returned to his alma mater after losing his re-election bid for the presidency in 1912.

Most of the seats in Woolsey measure 18″ x 17″; Taft’s measures 25″ x 20″. He once convinced an usher to admit him by leading him to the customized chair — he told another patron, “I lost my ticket, but was fortunately able to establish my identity by the breadth of my beam and the corresponding breadth of this seat.”

English geographer Halford Mackinder’s 1914 paper “The Geographical Pivot of History” helped to found the study of geopolitics. In it, he described his Heartland Theory, in which the world’s land surface was divided into the “World-Island,” meaning Europe, Asia, and Africa; the “offshore islands,” including Britain and Japan; and the “outlying islands,” including the continents of North America, South America, and Australia. At the world’s center lies the Heartland, stretching from the Volga to the Yangtze and from the Himalayas to the Arctic.

In 1919 he reduced his theory to three startlingly stark statements:

Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland.

Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island.

Who rules the World Island commands the World.

He thought the “pivot area” was impregnable to attack by sea and thus capable of building a land power that could conquer the world.

“No mere academic theoretician, Mackinder injected his Heartland thesis into the 1919 Paris Peace Conference that followed World War I,” write Mark Monmonier and George Schnell in Map Appreciation. “He recommended buffer states in Eastern Europe to prevent any nation(s) from gaining control of the Heartland, especially through a German-Soviet alliance. The conference’s subsequent creation of independent states from territories that had been parts of Austria-Hungary, Germany, or Russia varied little from Mackinder’s proposal and included Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (along the Baltic Sea) and Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia (extending from the Baltic to the Adriatic).”

In a letter written home from the Western Front in May 1915, 2nd Lt. Alexander Gillespie of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders describes a striking midnight experience:

Presently a misty moon came up, a nightingale began to sing … It was strange to stand there and listen, for the song seemed to come all the more sweetly and clearly in the quiet intervals between the bursts of firing. There was something infinitely sweet and sad about it, as if the countryside were singing gently to itself, in the midst of all our noise and confusion and muddy work; so that you felt the nightingale’s song was the only real thing which would remain when all the rest was long past and forgotten. …

So I stood there, and thought of all the men and women who had listened to that song, just as for the first few weeks after Tom was killed I found myself thinking perpetually of all the men who had been killed in battle — Hector and Achilles and all the heroes of long ago, who were once so strong and active, and now are so quiet. Gradually the night wore on, until day began to break, and I could see clearly the daisies and buttercups in the long grass about my feet. Then I gathered my platoon together, and marched back past the silent farms to our billets.

Another front-line soldier, J.C. Faraday, noticed the same effect. He wrote to the Times in July 1917, “You will have a terrific tearing and roaring noise of artillery and shot in the dead of night; then there will be a temporary cessation of the duel, with great quietness, when lo! and behold and hear! Hearken to his song! Out come the nightingales, right about the guns … And another kind of love music is introduced to our ears and souls, which does us good. Think? It makes you think — and beautiful thoughts come along to relieve you from the devilment of war and the men who cause it.”

(From Stephen Moss, A Bird in the Bush: A Social History of Birdwatching, 2013.)