Some historians might place Nelson A. Miles, George Armstrong Custer or George Crook in contention for the greatest Indian fighter of the American West.

But it would be difficult to sustain their records against General Ranald Mackenzie's accomplishments- either in the number of major combat engagements or in their battle successes. However, because he died pathetically insane, history has treated Mackenzie as a tragic figure rather than a heroic one.

The way that Mackenzie died contains none of the glamour portrayed in paintings of Custer atop a windswept Montana hill, the last man standing with pistol in hand grandly facing a horde of Indian warriors in a glorious death.

"One of America's most remarkable soldiers, Mackenzie is a forgotten hero." On January 19, 1889 Brigadier General Ranald Slidell Mackenzie died in the home of a cousin on Staten Island. Mackenzie had been involuntarily retired nearly five years earlier, subsequent to a board tribunal of the U.S. Army which had found him insane. He lived in growing isolation and increasing debility over the next five years, and regressed into childishness and what today would be known as dementia.

McKenzie ranged all over my part of the world. He likely passed within a few blocks of where my house now sits, He was an excellent soldier in the Civil War, and did a great job in the Panhandle, forcing the Indians onto the Reservation.

The ethics of that are up for debate, but he did his job.

I believe there is suspicion that McKenzie had syphilis, which would explain the dementia.

King Herod the Great

Herod did exactly that, and consolidated his rule ruthlessly. Seeking a better dynastic match, he sent away his first wife Doris and married Mariamme.

Although Herod was deeply in love with her, the union proved disastrous for Mariamme and her family. He executed Hyrcanus, who was not only her grandfather, but a former high priest and mentor. When he was compelled to name her youthful brother high priest, the teenager died in suspicious circumstances. Eventually, he suspected Mariamme of disloyalty and executed her too. Her mother betrayed her, but later ran afoul of Herod and was slain as well.

As Herod slaughtered his in-laws, he also mounted extensive construction projects across Judea, including the rebuilding of the Temple.

"It was recognized as an astonishing architectural feat in Herod's own lifetime," Goodman said. "You can still see, if you go down to the [Wailing Wall] and look at the excavations at the Southern Wall, quite a lot of remains of Herod's Temple." And, he said, "other Jewish architecture appears from that time, the great building in Hebron, the Tomb of the Patriarchs, the Cave of Machpelah."

Yet, Goodman said, "Most of his buildings were palaces and fortresses," including in Masada, Jericho and "the great palace in Jerusalem where the Jaffa Gate is now… All these great buildings don't say anything Jewish at all. They're about him. In terms of architecture, they're Roman and Hellenistic Greek rather than Jewish."

For many years, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, "Polly", an African grey parrot, kept patrons at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, in Wine Office Court, off Fleet Street, entertained and amused with expletive-laden outbursts, and, in so doing, achieved international celebrity and cult status.

Polly took up residence at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese around the year 1895, and so famous did he become that, when he eventually shuffled off this mortal coil, in October, 1926, he didn't end up pushing up daisies, but, instead, was, quite literally, nailed to the perch and placed on display in a glass case behind the bar of the hostelry he had ruled over for so many eventful years.

He looks harmless enough, but, this parrot was once so famous for its colourful outbursts that, following his death, on October 30th, 1926, newspapers the world over carried obituaries to mark his demise; and headlines, such as, "Famed Polly, Wicked Bird Passes Out", and, "International Expert In Profanity Pegs Out", announced his demise to a grief-stricken world.

However, Polly was possessed of other talents as well as being able to swear like a trooper.
He could, for example, entertain customers with his spot-on imitations of the fighting cats in Wine Office Court.
"Rats", "Scotch", "Puss", and "Hurry up with the pudding" were other well known words and phrases that issued forth from his beak.

His imitation of the popping of a cork, followed by the "glug, glug, glug" of the wine being poured, was another of his famous party-tricks - and one that he repeated so many times on armistice day, 1918, that he actually fainted from the exertion.

Link

Not really history, but interesting and funny:

To play golf in Germany, most golfers must possess a license called a "Platzreife" before they can get on the green. To get a license, you can expect to pay at least $300 for a five-day course that involves several hours of training each day. Then you must pass a series of tests.

Custer, a life-long Democrat like his father, applied for West Point through his Republican congressman but made the mistake of telling him he was a Democrat. The father of his then girlfriend, wanting to get him out of his daughter's life and who was a friend of the congressman, intervened and got Custer accepted.

HIs status as the goat of the second class of 1861 is well known but surprisingly his lowest grades were, in of all things, Cavalry Tactics. Like US Grant, he excelled in Horsemanship.

Lincoln was pretty tall..

Extremely well known fact

Can you imagine the stench in that group?

I feel gross and stinky after 2 days of camping. I can't imagine being out in the woods for months on end.

I think I'll keep my Iraq deployment over what those Civil War soldiers went through.

ReloadAg said:

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I feel gross and stinky after 2 days of camping. I can't imagine being out in the woods for months on end.

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When everyone stinks, no one does.

I dunno if this is all true but it is seemingly funny/true enough to share;

Quote:

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They used to use urine to tan animal skins, so families used to all pee in a pot & then once a day it was taken & sold to the tannery. If you had to do this to survive you were "piss poor."
But worse than that were the really poor folk who couldn't even afford to buy a pot; they "didn't have a pot to piss in" & were the lowest of the low.

The next time you are washing your hands & complain because the water temperature isn't just how you like it, think about how things used to be. Here are some facts about the 1500s.

Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May, and they still smelled pretty good by June. Since they were starting to smell, however, brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor. Hence the custom today of carrying a bouquet when getting married.

Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women, and finally the children. Last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it … hence the saying, "Don't throw the baby out with the Bath water!"

Houses had thatched roofs-thick straw-piled high, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof, resulting in the idiom, "It's raining cats and dogs."

There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house. This posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings could mess up your nice clean bed, therefore, a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over the top afforded some protection. That's how canopy beds came into existence.

The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt, leading folks to coin the phrase "dirt poor."

The wealthy had slate floors that would get slippery in the winter when wet, so they spread thresh (straw) on floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they added more thresh until, when you opened the door, it would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entrance-way, subsequently creating a "thresh hold."

In those old days, they cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that always hung over the fire.. Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They ate mostly vegetables and did not get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes stew had food in it that had been there for quite a while, and thus the rhyme, "Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old."

Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them feel quite special. When visitors came over, they would hang up their bacon to show off. It was a sign of wealth that a man could, "bring home the bacon." They would cut off a little to share with guests and would all sit around and "chew the fat."

Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with high acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food, causing lead poisoning death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous.

Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or the "upper crust."

Lead cups were used to drink ale or whisky. The combination would sometimes knock the imbibers out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial.. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up, creating the custom of holding a wake.

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They used to use urine to tan animal skins, so families used to all pee in a pot & then once a day it was taken & sold to the tannery. If you had to do this to survive you were “piss poor.”
But worse than that were the really poor folk who couldn’t even afford to buy a pot; they… pic.twitter.com/skMxhvpLFv

— 🐰𝒦𝒾𝓈𝓈 𝑀𝓎 𝐵𝓊𝓃𝓈... 𝐼 𝒶𝓂 𝒫𝒶𝓂 🇺🇸🐰 (@PAMsLOvE) April 6, 2024

Ah, the good ol' days! In particular I don't think the summary of 'wake' is accurate, but the wiki version is interesting/amusing.

During the Civil War gunpowder was very scare in the Confederacy. And after resorting to almost every means to makeup the shortage, the authorities finally hit upon urine as a source of supply.

According, the following advertisement appeared in the Alabama Sentinel published in Selma, Alabama:

The ladies of Selma are respectfully requested to save the chamber lye gathered around their premises and barrels will be sent around to gather up the lotion

Signed,

Jonathan Haralson, Agent,
Nitre and Mining Bureau.
Confederate States Army


Whereupon a Southern wag made up the following verses:

John Haralson! John Haralson!
You are a funny creature;
You've given to this cruel war
A new and curious feature.
You'd have us think, while every man
Was born to be a fighter,
The women, bless the pretty dears
Should save their pee for nitre.

John Haralson! John Haralson!
Where did you get the notion
To send barrels around our street
To fill them with that lotion?
We thought the girls work enough
With making shirts and kissing:
But now you put the lovely dears
To patriotic pissing.

John Haralson! John Haralson!
Pray do invent neater
And a somewhat less immodest way
Of making your saltpetre.
The thing is so very odd,
Gunpowder like and cranky,
That when a woman lifts her skirt
She shoots another Yankee!"

It became popular ribald song called John Haralson set to the tune of O Tannenbaum (or Maryland, my Maryland).

Was doing some light reading on the Fallschirmjager forces of WW2, as one does of course, and discovered they were in fact part of the Luftwaffe. I know I had read that before many times but never really connected it in my head what that actually meant. Which started me down a short rabbit hole.

The Luftwaffe had ground divisions during the war. No joke actual fighting formations designed for ground combat and something like 20ish were fielded by wars end. Though of course the later ones were incredibly understrength and existed mostly on paper like many of the units did at the end. Goring wanted fighting forces that answered to him and were not as conservative as the Wehrmacht in offense. Kinda wild but ok. And Goring got them. And they generally sucked, being airmen used as grunts. But the cream of the crop was the Goring Panzer division. Yes, Herman Goring had a personal panzer division. It fought itself to pieces and was mostly wiped out by the end. His nephew was killed while fighting for it.

I consider myself fairly well educated on the 20th century conflicts but learned today there were dedicated Luftwaffe ground divisions outside the paratroopers. I consider it mind blowing as I really feel like I should have come across that much sooner than I did with my level of interest in the war.

As I have learned more and more over the years, I am really starting to get the picture that the Luftwaffe was just a solid mess from front to end as a whole, despite the reputation they have.

Myles Keogh's horse Comanche is often cited as the sole survivor of Custer's Last Stand but there was another survivor horse with an even more incredible story.

When John Gibbon's men arrived on the battlefield, they found another gray horse near the river. As a gray horse, he would have belonged to a trooper in Company E. The soldiers named him Nap and tried to catch him but he was too skittish to catch. When Gibbon and the 7th cavalry survivors left to return to the Yellowstone River, Nap shadowed the column. After arriving at the Yellowstone, The soldiers lost contact with Nap.

Several months later Nap showed up at Ft. Abraham Lincoln, where Custer began his campaign against the Lakota, a journey of 300 miles! This time the soldiers caught him and Nap lived out his life giving rides to the children of soldiers at the post.

"The U.S. Cavalry preferred solid colored horses, including grays, and the horses would be of the same color for each unit. This helped the commanding officers identify troopers under their command during the confusion of battle."

87Flyfisher said:

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"The U.S. Cavalry preferred solid colored horses, including grays, and the horses would be of the same color for each unit. This helped the commanding officers identify troopers under their command during the confusion of battle."

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Awesome. Never heard that.

That Time Two Luxurious Ocean Liners Fought an Intense Naval Battle


In September 1914, just after the outbreak of WWI, the German navy cruiser Cap Trafalgar hid its figure and flew under a false flag, pretending to be the British armed merchant HMS Carmania. The goal was to lay in wait for other British ships, lure them in close, then fly the German flag and wreak havoc.

It worked. On September 14, off of Trindade Island, Brazil, she was soon face-to-face with … the actual HMS Carmania.

Cap Trafalgar and Carmania were both converted ocean liners with orders to raid enemy shipping. Carmania's skipper knew the Cap Trafalgar was operating in the area, though he may not have known the German ship was disguised as his own.

Carmania took 79 shots, causing 304 holes, nine dead, and 26 wounded. Cap Trafalgar fared much worse, even though she took fewer hits. Hit by 73 shots and having 380 holes, the ship began to list to the starboard and sank 10 minutes after the captain gave the order to abandon ship.

Rare photo of the event:

The Great (Little) Train Robbery

In the summer of 1970, a couple of masked bandits pulled off the last known train heist in Texas at Brackenridge Park. (San Antonio) The passengers were held at gunpoint, and the thieves made away with $500, car keys, checkbooks and credit cards (though they were later imprisoned).