Melanie King 
The Great Escape is one of history’s most famous prison breaks. Seventy-six Allied airmen made an audacious bid for freedom from Stalag Luft III, a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp, during the Second World War. The Nazis built this maximum-security camp 100 miles from Berlin, intending for it to be escape-proof. It was designed to house captured … Read more
Roman Emperor Constantine I issued a decree declaring Sunday a civil day of rest. He called Sunday the ‘venerable day of the sun’. The impact of this decree ensured that markets and public offices were closed on Sundays, though rural populations were permitted to work in their fields. Sunday was sacred to Christians as the … Read more
ON THIS DAY: 22 February 1915 – Sarah Bernhardt, the ‘Divine Sarah,’ had her right leg amputated at the age of 71 in the Hôpital de la Pitié-Salpêtrière in Paris, France. Sarah, born Henriette-Rosine Bernard, was a French stage actress and one of the most famous and influential performers of the 19th and early 20th … Read more
ON THIS DAY: 13 February 1806 – Frederic Tudor’s Ship, Favorite, Departs Boston Harbour for Saint Pierre, Martinique — to sell ice! Frederic Tudor was only 23 years old, the son of a Boston State Senator. He had come up with the bold idea of transporting ice 1,550 miles to the tropical island of Martinique, … Read more
Empress Anna of Russia forced Prince Mikhail Alekseevich Golitsyn to marry a Kalmyk servant and spend his wedding night in the infamous ice palace she had commissioned on the frozen Neva River in St. Petersburg. Anna was the daughter of Czar Ivan V, known as ‘Ivan the Ignorant’ due to severe health issues, including partial … Read more
One of the deadliest earthquakes in recorded history, the Shaanxi earthquake, struck China’s Shaanxi province. It had a magnitude of between 8.0 and 8.3, and resulted in the deaths or displacement of an estimated 830,000 people. At least 100,000 died directly from the quake, while a further 730,000 either perished in the ensuing famines or … Read more
A strange new piece of men’s apparel went on display in Marshall Field’s department store in downtown Chicago. In 1887 a Boston company had introduced the ‘jockstrap’ to protect ‘jockeys’ riding bicycles — a relatively new invention — along the city’s cobbled streets. Now, in 1935, the ‘Jockey brief’ was introduced by another firm, Coopers … Read more
An English journal, The Annual Register, which chronicled events around the world, reported ‘a very odd affair’ at the Convent of the Capuchins in Ascoli Piceno in Italy. After the monks chastised their cook ‘a little too severely’, he took revenge by mixing opium into the sauce for their supper and, when they were fast … Read more
ON THIS DAY: 18 December 1912 – Amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson presented members of the Geological Society in London with a reconstructed skull, fragments of which had been discovered, he claimed, in a gravel pit south of Ashdown Forest in East Sussex. Dawson was backed by respected palaeontologist Arthur Smith Woodward from the British Museum, … Read more
Ada Lovelace, a mathematician and pioneering computer programmer, was born as the only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron) and Anne Isabella Milbanke. Her parents’ marriage was unhappy, and Byron separated from his wife just a month after Ada’s birth. As a child, Ada was often sickly, but her mother strongly … Read more