September 29, 1953 – Wandsworth Prison – London, England: Alfred Hinds sat in his cell, dejected and despondent. His two-day trial had been a farce. After not allowing five of Hinds’s key witnesses to testify, the judge sentenced him to 12 years in prison for armed...
May 27, 1936 – Salinas, California: John Steinbeck reluctantly pinned the letter to his editor Elizabeth Otis. “My Irish Setter pup, Toby, left alone one night made confetti of my manuscript. I was pretty mad, but the poor little fellow may have been acting...
1956 – St. Louis, Missouri: Calvin Peete was in terrible pain. The 12-year-old had fallen out of a tree at his grandmother’s house and landed on his arm. The x-ray showed his left elbow was fractured in three places. The physician recommended surgery, but there was no...
1902 – Portland, Oregon: Bobbie LeTourneau’s father told him, “OK, you’re determined to amount to nothing, so I’m going to let you quit school.” He found his 14-year-old seventh grader a job as an iron molder apprentice at the East Portland Iron Works hoping that...
The French luxury steamship SS Ville du Havre sailed from New York for Paris on November 15, 1873 with 313 passengers and crew. At 2:00 am on November 22nd, while in the mid-Atlantic, the ship was almost broken in half when rammed broadside by the Scottish ironclad...
In 1834, although he had signed a contract with his publisher to produce a general history of the French revolution, the philosopher John Stuart Mill discovered that he was too busy with other commitments to tackle the work. So instead of writing the book himself,...
