It’s dangerous to make history. Schoolchildren learn that Oliver Cromwell overthrew the British monarchy, but they’re less often told of the grisly price he paid.

Three years after his death of malaria, Cromwell’s body was dug up and underwent a “posthumous execution” for treason by the restored monarchy: It was hanged, drawn and quartered, decapitated and thrown into a common pit, and the severed head was mounted on a pole and displayed outside Westminster Abbey for four years, until 1685.

Even that wasn’t enough. The head passed among various owners for 275 years; it wasn’t buried until 1960, on the grounds of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.

And Cromwell was only the most prominent of the regicides of Charles I. Three others were also “punished” posthumously, and those still alive were imprisoned or chased out of England.

Letter from a California resident to an officer of Bodie, a gold-rush boom town, circa 1881:

Kind and Respected Cir:

I see in the paper that a man named John Sipes was attacted and et up by a bare whose kubs he was trying to get when the she bare came up and stopt him by eating him in the mountains near your town.

What I want to know is did it kill him ded or was he only partly et up and is he from this plaice and all about the bare. I don’t know but he is a distant husband of mine. My first husband was of the name and I supposed he was killed in the war, but the name of the man the bare et being the same I thought it might be him after all and I ought to know if he wasn’t killed either in the war or by the bare, for I have been married twise since and there ought to be divorse papers got out by him or me if the bare did not eat him up. If it is him you will know by him having six toes on his left foot.

He also had a spreadagle tattooed on his front chest and a anker on his right arm which you will know him by if the bare did not eat up these sines of it being him.

Find out all yu kin about him without him knowing what it is for, that is if the bare did not eat him all up. If it did I don’t see as you kin do anything and you needn’t to trouble. Please ancer back.

She added a postscript: “Was the bare killed?”

Letter from Jeannette Linn to Santa Claus, Dec. 21, 1899:

Dear Santa, I thought I would drop you a few lines and tell you a few things what I want. Well, I want a pair of skates, because I think by the time Christmas comes it will be frozen up. And for another thing, I want a pair of leggings so that it will keep my feet warm and I want them so that they will come up above my shoe-tops, and I want a little slate like those that have pictures of cats and rabbits and dogs on and like those that are almost like a slate, and if it don’t cost too much I would like a large doll, so large that it would look about four years old. I will tell you where to find it. If you look in the basement of the Arcade on the place where the dolls are, you will see a large doll with real long curly hair and it is jointed and it is as pretty as I am. And I don’t think I want much, but dear Santa, I know that I want more than you can afford to give, for there are more little boys and girls and they want something too. But I would like to have so much a nice tricycle that would cost three dollars and that is too much, I think, to pay for anything, but that is really the price of it because I saw the price on it and it said $3.00 as plain as this letter is written and I think it is written pretty plain.

She finished: “Well Santa, I must close because it is getting late and I think if I don’t close you will not bring me anything. I have got as much as I can think of.”

The Uffington White Horse was cut out of the turf on a hill in southern England, exposing the chalk beneath.

Some say it’s really a dragon — the figure is 3,000 years old.

Now remembered chiefly for establishing Rhodes scholarships, South African diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes left an alarming provision in his will — he hoped to take over the world:

To and for the establishment, promotion and development of a Secret Society, the true aim and object whereof shall be for the extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom, and of colonisation by British subjects of all lands where the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labour and enterprise, and especially the occupation by British settlers of the entire Continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the Valley of the Euphrates, the Islands of Cyprus and Candia, the whole of South America, the Islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan, the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire, the inauguration of a system of Colonial representation in the Imperial Parliament which may tend to weld together the disjointed members of the Empire and, finally, the foundation of so great a Power as to render wars impossible and promote the best interests of humanity.

“I contend that we (the British) are the finest race in the world,” he once wrote, “and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race.”