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Showing posts from January, 2023

Avenging His Cruelty: The Story of Nathaniel Gordon the Only American to be Executed for the Crime of Slave Trading on the High Seas

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  Under a sweltering equatorial sun, shackled around the neck and chained one to another at the ankles, on August 7, 1860 over 900 enslaved Africans were forced aboard the slave ship Erie docked near the mouth of the Congo River in west Africa. The imprisoned human cargo that had been kidnapped and sold into slavery, mostly children and young women, were led onto the ship at gunpoint and under the watchful eye of a thirty-four year old American slave trader originally from Portland, Maine (quite a distance from what would become the Confederate States of America) named Nathaniel Gordon. Writing for Scribner’s Magazine over forty years later in 1900 when mentioning the infamous slave trader Nathaniel Gordon in his scholarly article entitled, “The Slave Trade in America” historian John R. Spears would say of Gordon’s cargo aboard the Erie that, “Only 172 were men and 182 were women…Gordon preferred to carry children because they could not rise up to avenge his cruelties.” And life

I am No Traitor and I am Ready to Die: The Murder of an Archbishop that Shocked the Medieval World in 1170

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  December 29, 1170 Canterbury Cathedral. Four heavily armed and armored knights dismount their horses outside the large oak and iron reinforced doors that lead into the heart of the church. They burst inside with swords drawn and shout, “Where is Thomas Becket, traitor to King and country?” The man named Thomas Becket who the four knights are so zealously seeking is the Archbishop of Canterbury Cathedral.  He is just over fifty years of age and he is a devout and holy monk whose piety and patriotism, up until that very moment at least, have always been without question.  In the years immediately following his death, Pope Alexander III will canonize Thomas Becket Archbishop of Canterbury Cathedral and make him a Saint and a Martyr.  He will go on to be one of the most widely revered and adored Saints in all of Europe during the High Middle Ages--but all of that remains, for the time being anyway, in the not too distant future. For now, four heavily armed knights are looking to kill Tho

Before the Ball Dropped: Celebrating New Year's Eve in 19th Century New York City at Trinity Church

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  On December 31, 1907 editor of the New York Times Alfred Ochs organized a New Year’s Eve celebration in front of his newspaper’s renowned headquarters at Times Square in midtown Manhattan. Thousands gathered that frigid winter’s night to watch a ball drop down a specially designed flagpole at 11:59 p.m. to welcome in the new year of 1908.   Millions of people from around the world have gathered at almost exactly that same spot every year for one-hundred and fifteen years to do almost exactly the same thing ever since. Though the ball itself has been updated many times over the course of the last century in accordance with advances in lighting technology-- the original ball was made of wood and iron and was covered in incandescent filament “Edison”light bulbs, and the current ball that will be dropped to welcome in 2023 in front of an estimated 1.1 million people is made entirely from Waterford Crystal and is covered in  over 32,000 LED lights--the actual event of watching a ball dr