William Miller was not like other preachers. He served in the War of 1812 as a captain and saw combat. Rockets, mortars, and bullets rained around him killing people here, wounding them there but Miller exited the war without so much as a scratch.

When he returned home to Vermont after the war, his father and sister both passed in rapid succession. This troubled Miller greatly. The death that he had seen in the war had followed him home and it raised many questions that he did not have the answers to.

In the mind of Miller, then a deist…

Bacon’s Rebellion broke out in 1676, a century before the fateful revolution that would deprive Great Britain of her largest North American colonies. The uprising was led by a man named Nathaniel Bacon who had managed to unite the underclass of society against the sitting governor, William Berkeley.

Bacon used his popularity with the disparate classes of people who were beholden to the landholding elite, including indentured servants, slaves, and peasant farmers to unite them under one banner. The result horrified the British elite.

One of the biggest areas of contention for the angry lower class was the elite’s treatment…

The Eastern Front was the bloodiest theater of warfare in human history. The years long battle between the armies of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union’s Red Army resulted in tens of millions of total casualties. Those numbers are well known and well documented. What is not as well known is the material butcher bill that highlighted how devastated the Soviet Union was after the war.

White it is almost unfathomable to hold the casualty numbers in focus, when you add in the list of damages to things such as farms, hamlets and railroad stations it becomes an impossible task.

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Baseball season is upon us once more and it is easy to get wrapped up in recent history and present day controversies. While we dither about electronic strike zones, whether or not the Astros cheated their way into a title or if the shift is true to the spirit of the game it is sometimes easy to forget that the game of baseball is old. Really, really old.

Baseball cards have been around since the mid-19th century and were often shipped in packs of cigarettes and later packs of gum.

In the spirit of the newly minted 2021 baseball season…

The longest word in the English dictionary is comprised of forty five characters. That is unbearably long for a word, any word. But as we all know, proper nouns are not included in the dictionary.

The longest name for any place in the world is made up of far more characters than a mere forty five. Our place’s name is made up of a whopping eighty five characters. That is nearly double the length of the longest word to be found in the English dictionary. So what is this awe inspiring name? And what kind of place bears it?

The name

In 2008, spectators in Tehran, Iran gathered to witness the completion of a world record. In front of them lay, what was supposed to be, the world’s largest sandwich. It had been meticulously laid out in a local park in the predawn hours and was awaiting some final details before the measurements could be taken. As the sandwich grew in size, so did the interest from local people. In a city of nearly nine million people, the construction of a gigantic sandwich was going to draw hungry eyes.

The (alleged) measurements

So how big was the world record sandwich? The length of the…

We’ve all seen the hat before. It is black, has a conical upward piece with a flat top. The brim is round and wide. On the front there is adorned a simple buckle. This is the typical pilgrim hat. It makes its appearance every year in primary schools, Thanksgiving celebrations and depictions of the earliest years of European settlement in North America. So what is the deal with this odd looking hat?

In 1837, at the age of 23, Hong Huoxiu failed the Chinese state civil service examinations for the third time. It was a crushing failure. Hong Huoxiu had been born into a poor Hakka family in southern China with very few prospects. Despite his poor rural upbringing, Hong had shown great interest in scholarship and teaching from a young age and his parents had striven to provide him with ample opportunities to succeed as a Chinese civil servant.

In order to be accepted into the prestigious ranks of the bureaucracy, one had to first pass the rigorous civil service examinations…