Storytime Tapestry Newsletter

The newsletter devoted to spreading love and cultural awareness around the world.

Announcing a new column

Storytime Tapestry is proud to present:  History at a Glance by Dean Perchik

deanperchik@earthlink.net

November 1 – Part 2

November

© 2007 Dean Perchik                                                               deanperchik@earthlink.net

[1] Dostoevsky’s first book, entitled Poor Folk, was published in 1845, to unanimously glowing reviews.

[1]The Petrashevsky Circle was a discussion group which focused on Western philosophy and had been organized by Mikhail Petrashevsky

[1] A kartoga camp is one that applies a system of penal servitude in a prison farm.

[1] It was John, Duke of Berry that commissioned the medieval breviary The Book of Hours.

[1] When not flying, Pil?tre de Rozier was a chemistry and physics teacher.  In June of 1783, he had witnessed the first balloon ascent by the Montgolfier brothers.

[1] King Louis XVI was present at the balloon’s first ascent.

[1] The air that carried the balloon aloft was heated by a wood stove, the fire being fed by wood and brandy

[1] Carter opened Tut’s tomb with Lord Carnovan, who had provided funding for Carter’s search.  In addition to being ridiculously wealthy, George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon, was also ridiculously patient.  Carnovan had begun funding Carter’s expeditions in 1907.

[1] On November 23, 1901, the shareholders of the New York Kerosene Oil Engine Company, Feodor Hirsch, James W. Eaton and George R. Moran, filed with the New York County Clerk a Certificate of Increase of the Capital Stock of the company, adding Augustus A. Low, scion of the Low family, as a partner.  In the fullness of time, this company would design a new internal combustion engine and build a 38-foot boat to install it in.  In an effort to generate publicity for this new engine, which had a power rating of 10hp, the boat’s builder, William C. Newman, and his sixteen-year old son sailed from New York to England.  Their reaching Europe would mark the first transatlantic crossing in a vessel powered solely by an international combustion engine.

[1] de Dunois accompanied Joan of Arc when the French forces were relieved at the siege of Orl?ans in 1429.

[1] Heber Springs, Arkansas was the municipality hit the hardest, with 51 known deaths in that town alone.

[1] Alice Pleasance Liddell, Lewis Carroll’s niece, was the inspiration for the character Alice.  When Liddell was 80 years old, on a visit to New York, she met Peter Llewelyn-Davies, who was one of the boys who inspired J. M. Barrie to write Peter Pan.

[1] The current lighthouse is the fourth one, the others all having been destroyed by a variety of means.

[1] I wish to state unequivocally that my father was not the keeper of the Eddystone Light.  He did not marry a mermaid one fine night.  From that union there did not come three.  I categorically deny that there was a porpoise.  There was no porgy and the other was certainly not me.

[1] I am adult enough, though just barely so, to recognize that love comes with a price tag attached to it.  As Mick Jagger and Keith Richards sagely observed in Hang Fire: “Marrying money is a full-time job, I don’t need the aggravation I’m a lazy slob.”  I wonder however what ?40 was worth in 1582 because that is what William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway paid for a marriage license on the 28^th in that year.