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Complete Pandemonium in Heaven: The Great Tangshan Earthquake in 1976 and China's Cultural Revolution

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  Tian is a word in Mandarin Chinese that is most closely analogous to the English word Heaven.  The word Tian in both Taoism and Confucianism is used to represent the metaphysical, celestial realm, and it is believed that Tian directly influences the Di, or earthly realm, of time and space inhabited by human beings.   In traditional Chinese culture it was believed that rulers governed due to a “Mandate from Heaven” where they were able to control what happened on earth only because of a balance in the Heavens.  Accordingly, traditional Chinese belief systems hold that if there is a natural disaster, or some other calamitous event on earth, then it must be due to disorder in the Heavens or Tian .  When such a natural disaster occurs, traditionally, it would undermine the authority of earthly rulers. At exactly 3:42 in the morning on July 28, 1976 the Heavens above China were thrown into utter pandemonium when the most deadly and destructive earthquake in the world in the last five-h
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Baseball's Dark Prince: Hal Chase the New York Yankees First Superstar and the Game's Most Degenerate Gambler

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  The first superstar of the New York Yankees--then called the New York Highlanders until around 1913-- Hal Chase, was never formally banned from professional baseball despite his reputation as the game’s biggest gambler, game fixer, womanizer and immoral drunkard at a time when the sport was filled with gamblers, game-fixers, womanizers and immoral drunkards.  The man that many in the press somewhat derisively called “Prince” Hal, after Falstaff’s young drinking buddy in Shakespeare’s series of King Henry plays was never convicted, at least not on paper in a court of law anyway, of any wrongdoing. But Hal Chase’s decorated playing career, in the Major Leagues and his infamous notoriety as a gambler among sportswriters and fans, ended not with a conviction but with an anticlimactic unwritten agreement by everyone in professional baseball to mark and avoid the talented first baseman in 1919 after he had spent fifteen seasons as one of the game’s finest players on the baseball diamond.
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Frost on Her Soul: History's Most Infamous Female Executioner and the Lore and Legend of Lady Betty

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  Sometime in the 1780’s, just after America had won its hard fought independence from Great Britain, a young Irishman returned home after several years abroad fighting with George Washington’s Continental Army. He had gone to the rebellious colonies several years before as little more than a boy, seeking to escape grinding poverty and an overbearing and mentally unstable mother back home in County Roscommon, Ireland.  While in America he had fought bravely; saved all of his money and grown into a man. Elizabeth Sugrue, the returning soldier’s estranged mother, was destitute and desperate.  Her husband, a hard-scrabble, abusive alcoholic and subsistence farmer had died unexpectedly several years before; her son had left home as a runaway for parts unknown and she had taken to drinking, petty theft and prostitution to survive.  She ran a boarding house in Roscommon city, which as all local residents knew, was in actuality little more than a thinly disguised brothel. An unknown and wel
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