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On Wednesday, April 23, renowned poet, playwright and snappy dresser, William Shakespeare, will turn 450 years old. 

Whether a fan or not, you probably use many of his phrases on a regular basis — maybe without even knowing.

We created a list of 13 popular, albeit strange, sayings The Bard coined. In fact, we say or write some of them so often, they've become clichés.

1. "Green-eyed monster"

Meaning: jealousy.

In "Othello," Iago describes jealousy as a monster which devours its source.

"Oh, beware, my lord, of jealousy!
It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock
The meat it feeds on" (Act 3, Scene 3).

In this case, Iago uses romance as an example. He thinks a man would rather know his wife is cheating than suspect her without proof.

2. "In a pickle"

Meaning: a difficult or uncomfortable situation.

In "The Tempest," King Alonso asks his jester, Trinculo, "How camest thou in this pickle?" (In other words, "How did you get so drunk?")

The inebriated Trinculo responds, "I have been in such a pickle since I saw you last ..." (Act 5, Scene 1).

Trinculo's drinking does cause trouble for him, which gives the modern use its meaning. Shakespeare's original intent makes sense though, as many pickling processes require alcohol.

3. "The world is your oyster."

Meaning: being in a position to take advantage of life's opportunities.

In "The Merry Wives Of Windsor," Falstaff refuses to lend Pistol any money. Pistol retorts, "Why, then the world's mine oyster, which I with sword will open" (Act 2, Scene 2).

Since Falstaff won't help Pistol financially, he vows to obtain his fortune using violent means.

We've dropped the angry undertones for modern use.

4. "Catch a cold"

Meaning: to get sick.

In "Cymbeline," one of Shakespeare's lesser-known plays, Iachimo says to Posthumus Leonatus, "We will have these things set down by lawful counsel, and straight away for Britain, lest the bargain should catch cold and starve ..." (Act 1, Scene 4).

In other words, if the deal takes too long, it will fall apart. This created the idea of "cold" causing an unwanted event, like illness, for the first time.

5. "It's all Greek to me."

Meaning: that something is indistinguishable or incomprehensible.

In "Julius Caesar," when Cassius asks Casca what Cicero said, Casca responds, "But, for mine own part, it was Greek to me" (Act 1, Scene 2).

Cassius didn't understand because he doesn't speak Greek. The phrase has obviously become not so literal. 

6. "Love is blind"

Meaning: an inability to see shortcomings in a lover; doing crazy things when in love.

In the "The Merchant Of Venice," Jessica disguises herself as a boy just to see her beloved, Lorenzo. Needless to say, she feels a little silly but simply has to see him.

"But love is blind, and lovers cannot see
The pretty follies that themselves commit ..." (Act 2, Scene 6)

7. "Wild goose chase"

Meaning: a hopeless and never-ending pursuit.

In "Romeo and Juliet," Romeo makes a play on words comparing his shoe to his penis, and Mercutio just can't compete with Romeo's wit. He tells Romeo to stop joking, but Romeo implores his friend to continue — an impossible feat in Mercutio's mind.

Mercutio says, "Nay, if our wits run the wild-goose chase, I am done, for thou hast more of the wild-goose in one of thy wits than, I am sure, I have in my whole five" (Act 2, Scene 4).

8. "A heart Of gold"

Meaning: a very kind or honorable person.

In "Henry V," King Henry disguises himself as a commoner, and Pistol, unaware of the King's true identity, speaks to him. When the King asks if he considers himself a better man than the king, Pistol says, "The king's a bawcock, and a heart of gold, a lad of life, an imp of fame ..." (Act 4, Scene 1).

Today, however, we say someone "has" a heart of gold, not that he or she "is" one. 

9. "Break the ice"

Meaning: to start conversation.

"And if you break the ice, and do this feat,
Achieve the elder, set the younger free ..." (Act 1, Scene 2).

In the "The Taming Of The Shrew," Baptista Minola has two daughters: a sassy one and a modest, beautiful one — the younger daughter. He refuses to let any suitors even speak to his younger daughter until his older daughter marries. Tranio (as Lucentio) suggests that another man marry the older daughter, so he can try to win the younger one's affection. But first, he must "break the ice"— maybe a reference to heart.

10. "Laughing stock"

Meaning: a person subjected to ridicule.

In "The Merry Wives Of Windsor," Doctor Caius says to Sir Hugh Evans:

"Pray you let us not be laughing-stocks to other men's humours;
I desire you in friendship, and I will one way or other make you amends" (Act 3, Scene 1).

Here, Doctor Caius thinks the two will make fools of themselves if they fight — exactly what people want and expect. They should end the conflict and save their reputations instead.

11. "Wear your heart on your sleeve"

Meaning: to express your emotions openly, especially when others notice without much effort.

In "Othello," Iago says he'll "wear my heart upon my sleeve. For daws to peck at: I am not what I am" (Act 1, Scene 1).

The phrase most likely stemmed from jousting matches in the Middle Ages. Knights would wear tokens (such as scarfs) from their ladies tucked into the sleeves of their armor. But the first recorded use appears in Shakespeare's play.

12. "Dogs of war"

Meaning: soldiers; the brutalities that accompany war.

In "Julius Caesar," Mark Antony says to Brutus and Cassius, "Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war ..." (Act 3, Scene 1) shortly after Caesar's assassination.

Here, Mark Antony predicts that Caesar's ghost will come back, with help from the goddess of vengeance, to start a massive war in Italy.

He continues, "This foul deed will stink up to the sky with men’s corpses, which will beg to be buried" (Act 3, Scene 1).

Thus, the phrase today, either referring to soldiers or brutality in general, carries a serious connotation.

13. "Method to his madness"

Meaning: Someone's strange behavior has a purpose.

In "Hamlet" Polonius says as an aside, "Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t"(Act 2, Scene 2).

Just before this, Hamlet randomly pretends to read a passage from his book that makes fun of the elderly. Polonius, an old man, doesn't fully understand the jab but knows Hamlet has some "method" behind this "madness."

SEE ALSO: 12 Famous Quotes That People Always Get Wrong

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Fifty years ago yesterday, the World’s Fair opened in Flushing Meadows Park in Queens, N.Y. The event was a watershed moment for 1960s America, which was still putting the assassination of President Kennedy in the past. Though the Vietnam War and resulting social upheaval were only just getting underway, the fair exhibited the nation's postwar optimism of a bright, technological future. 

Spanning two six-month seasons from April 1964 to October 1965, the fair was full of space-age futurism, newfangled technologies, and more than its share of controversy. 

In honor of the anniversary, we’ve collected these photos from the fair: 

The 1964-1965 fair was the third major World’s Fair to be held in New York City. The theme of the '64 fair was Peace Through Understanding and was symbolized by a 12-story stainless-steel model of the Earth called the Unisphere. It was built by U.S. Steel. Admission to the fair was $2 for adults (those 13 and older), equivalent to about $15 in today’s dollars. Les Poupées de Paris was a wildly popular puppet show at the fair. After a review complained about the risqué nature of the show, tickets sold out for weeks.By the time the fair closed in 1965, 51 million people had attended the exposition. It was well below the projected attendance of 71 million. The New York State Pavilion, designed by Philip Johnson, was a key attraction. Pictured here are the flying-saucer-like observation towers, designed to evoke the Space Age.The fair was the only World’s Fair not to be sanctioned by the International Exhibitions Bureau (BIE). Despite the fact that New York had hosted the World’s Fair 25 years earlier, a group of New York businessmen led by master urban planner Robert Moses spearheaded the effort for a new fair in the hopes that it would create an economic boom in the city.Moses attempted to gain the approval of the BIE in Paris but was rebuffed because of a number of unorthodox requests that he determined were necessary to make the fair profitable. Moses wanted to charge nations rent for exhibiting at the fair, and wanted the fair to run for two six-month seasons, despite BIE stipulations that only one season was allowed.

After Moses blasted the BIE in the French press, the agency asked that member nations not participate in the New York fair. As a result, many major countries, such as England and France, opted out. Smaller countries took advantage with large exhibits.

This recreation of a Belgian village became one of the highlights after fairgoers went crazy over a couple selling Belgian waffles.The Swiss Sky Ride gave riders panoramic views of the fairgrounds and Manhattan. In the foreground, from left, are the pavilions of the United Arab Republic (a short-lived union between Egypt and Syria), Lebanon, and China. In the background are the anthill-shaped pavilion of Jordan and the multi-arched Moroccan pavilion on the right.Corporations ended up hosting some of the largest and most elaborate exhibits. At the Futurama II exhibit by General Motors, visitors took a ride into the future on individual seats on a track, accompanied by narration. The GM ride included numerous scenes of the near future including a weather station underneath the Antarctic ice shelf where technicians live and predict the weather.Other scenes included a laser-assisted demolition of a jungle to create a superhighway, and a trip to the moon with lunar crawlers and commuter space ships, shown here.The city-of-the-future scene shows airports in Midtown, high-speed "bus trains," moving sidewalks, and "super-skyscrapers."The General Motors pavilion was massive. In addition to the Futurama ride, the pavilion included exhibitions that showed the variety of research conducted by GM, including home appliances and this experimental car.Chrysler attempted to compete by unveiling what at the time was groundbreaking technology — a turbine-powered car. The Chrysler Turbine Car was called the "jet car" because the engine was similar to one used in a jet. Other parts of the Chrysler exhibition included a massive turbine engine that fairgoers could walk through and a simulated assembly line. Forty years before the advent of Skype, AT&T's Bell Labs premiered the Picturephone at the fair. Attendees were invited to video-chat with a caller in a special exhibit at Disneyland in California. The product never ended up catching on because of the high price tag and small size of the picture. Nuclear energy was still a crowning achievement of the U.S. at the time. The Atomic Energy Commission's Atomsville, U.S.A., exhibit touted the benefits of nuclear-produced electricity. As the children pedal the bicycles, lights on the panel in front are activated by a generator. The exhibit indicated how long they would have to pedal to equal the energy in 1 pound of uranium fuel: 30 years of nonstop pedaling. The U.S. pavilion was designed with the theme Challenge to Greatness to show what a "free people can compete in a free society." Exhibits included "The Voyage to America," a film tribute to immigrants' journeys to America, "The Great Society," showing U.S. advances in science, the arts, and world peace, and "American Journey," a moving grandstand showing 472 years of American history. The fair closed on Oct. 21, 1965. It was considered a failure, after it failed to meet attendance projections or repay its financial backers their investment. Most of the fair was completely demolished within six months, and the remaining pavilions have slowly succumbed to neglect. Here, the fair is lighted at night.

NOW WATCH: This Former Corporate Lawyer Now Makes Lego Art

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Google introduced today a feature that lets you step back in time to earlier versions of its collected Street View data. You can now visit places in Street View as early as 2006, comparing them to what locations look like today.

The Verge reports the option was derived from the tsunami that struck off the coast of Japan in early 2011, devastating the country.

According to The Verge:

In the aftermath [of the tsunami], Google set out to preserve imagery it had captured prior to the disaster, including original Street View recordings that became an unintended time capsule. The company made a one-off site called Memories for the Future that let viewers see certain areas before and after the devastation. It was an unusual site considering Google’s standard operating procedure: a feverish pace of updates that erased the old with the new and never looked back.

Here's how the new time travel option works.

When you visit a place in Google Street View, there will be a little clock in the top left corner:

Clicking on the clock will allow you to choose a year (dating back to 2006) and an updated image will show that same location as it was in whatever year you chose.

You can scroll between photos taken in different years. You'll always get the best image Google has available, as algorithms are in place to weed out blurry photos or pictures taken in bad weather.

This GIF shows the construction of the Freedom Tower in New York City:

Here's a shot of New Orleans' 9th Ward after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. The image in the left hand corner shows that same street 8 years ago:

The AP reports that some Street View pictures posted through the years have "upset people who were captured in activities or visiting places that they wanted to keep private."

Google now blurs the images of people who contact the company asking to be shielded from Street View, even if it's just because they don't like the way they look in the photo.

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For the sixth year in a row, President Obama has failed to acknowledge the Armenian genocide — something he promised to do as both a senator and presidential candidate. While his statement Thursday invoked the Armenian term for the atrocity, Meds Yeghern, it avoided the word "genocide" entirely.  

Obama might have avoided this term so that he doesn't offend Turkey, which sits on much of the same land as the former Ottoman Empire, where the genocide against the Armenians occurred.

"[Obama] has made unambiguous statements as a senator and in his presidential campaign to fully recognize the genocide ... But he has avoided using the actual word for obvious reasons: pressure from Turkey, whom the U.S. considers an important ally," Rouben Adalian, director of the Armenian National Institute, told Business Insider.

Considered one of the first mass killings in the 20th century, the Armenian genocide took the lives of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians living in present-day Turkey. It occurred in two phases: enslaving and massacring able-bodied males and deporting women, children, and the elderly to the Syrian Desert to die of thirst and starvation.

The Young Turks, a Turkish nationalist party in the Ottoman Empire, perpetrated the killings. These radical leaders wanted a separate Turkish state, free of Armenians and other ethnic or religious minorities. While Turkey didn't technically exist during the genocide, many refer to the Ottoman Empire as the Turkish Empire because Turkish groups founded the territory, of which a large part became their present-day country. 

The genocide officially began on April 24, 1915, now a day of worldwide commemoration. Then, the Turkish government arrested more than 200 Armenian community leaders and sent them to prison, where the majority were summarily executed. Even earlier, though, reports of the Young Turks torturing and enslaving Armenians began circulating.

That first wave of killings lasted until 1918. At the end of World War I, peace took hold for little more than a year. In 1920, the Turkish Nationalists — who opposed the Young Turks but shared a common ideology — began persecuting the Armenians once more. The second period of the Armenian genocide lasted until 1923.

Despite the escalating war, the international community responded almost immediately. In May 1915, Great Britain, France, and Russia all warned the Young Turks of the repercussions for their crimes against humanity. A strong public outcry took place in the U.S., and the victorious Allies eventually demanded that the Ottoman government prosecute the Young Turks. Relief efforts to save Armenian refugees from starvation sprouted all over the globe.

From a Turkish perspective, the Armenians formed militias to help Russia advance into Anatolia, an area of the Ottoman Empire where Armenians were a minority. By February 1915, the local Muslim and Armenian populations engaged in fierce conflict. Not only did Armenians commit similar atrocities on Turkish Muslims, but historical documents from the Ottoman Empire show no large-scale plans for genocide, according to the Stanford University Turkish Student Association.

Today, the Turkish government refuses to label the event as a genocide. In a statement Wednesday, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan used words like "inhumane" and "establishing compassion," The Globe and Mail reported. But Erdogan, like Obama, didn't use the word "genocide."

"I have consistently stated my own view of what occurred in 1915, and my view has not changed," Obama said today. As a senator and a presidential candidate, he labeled the event a "genocide" multiple times. But as soon as Obama took office, that word disappeared from his statements.

Currently, 21 countries have passed legislation officially acknowledging the killings of the Armenian people during World War I as a genocide, according to the Institute. Even House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi "embraced the truth,"as her statement today urged others to do. Most importantly, virtually all the Armenian communities worldwide stem from survivors of this genocide.

"The worldwide occurrences of these mass atrocities is incredibly worrisome ... [Obama's acknowledgment] is an important step because it would hold government leaders responsible for their actions, especially when there have been gross violations of human rights," Adalian said.

Update: We added information to this post to include a Turkish perspective on the conflict.

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Seventy-five years ago today, the World's Fair came to New York, and with it came one of the world's first official time capsules. 

Called "Dawn of a New Day," the 1939 Fair adopted a future-focused theme, which would become standard in subsequent World's Fairs.

Electric giant Westinghouse took the theme to heart. The company created one of the most ambitious time capsules ever: a 7 1/2-foot tube, filled with items from the current era, for a part of its display. The capsule will remain sealed until the year 6939 — 5,000 years after its creation — along with its sister capsule made in 1964. 

Although not the first to make a time capsule, Westinghouse was one of the first to approach it scientifically, locking items in a non-corrosive and considerably hard metallic alloy called Cupoloy, created especially for the exhibit. The compound was 99.4% copper, 0.5% chromium, and 0.1% silver.

The Westinghouse model might have drawn inspiration from the Crypt of Civilization —  a swimming-pool-sized time capsule sealed until 8113. Its creator, Thornwell Jacobs, started building in 1936, three years before Westinghouse. But he didn't close the room until 1940. 

The contents of the Westinghouse capsule include small, common items, like men's and women's grooming tools and children's toys; various textiles and materials used in manufacturing and technology; miscellaneous items, such as money and seeds; a microfilm essay; and a newsreel. Read the full list here »

The capsule also included a "Book of Record," which outlines its contents and purpose. The book describes the "key to English" to preserve our modern language and also asks that future generations translate it into whatever new tongues the future holds.

Westinghouse chose to bury the capsule in New York City not only because of the fairgrounds but also because the metropolis will likely become a place of interest for future generations, much like Athens, Rome or Troy now. Lowered 50 feet into the ground using a steel tube, the capsule now rests under Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens.

And there it will stay for another 4,925 years — though the Senator John Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh, Penn. displays replicas of both the 1939 and 1965 capsules. These pictures from the museum show what the 1939 capsule contains. 

Read the full story in this eBook from the Internet Archive.

SEE ALSO: 15 Gorgeous Retro-Future Photos From The 1964 World's Fair

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It is a commonplace for children to be taller than their parents, but four generations ago this wasn’t the case. A recent study of soldiers around the age of 20 who enlisted in the army during World War I revealed an average height of five feet six inches (168cm). Today the average for young men is five feet ten inches (178cm).

A gain of four inches seems a lot. But it is not unique to Britain; similar gains have been found in a range of western countries even though the timing differs. Over a slightly earlier period the Danes and the Spanish grew by about five inches while the French, the Italians and the Swedes grew by around four inches.

Yet in the longer span of history this is quite unprecedented. Economic historians have uncovered evidence on heights all the way back to the middle ages in order to chart what they call the biological standard of living. Across the generations there were ups and downs in height, but there is nothing like the four-inch gain of the past century.

If adult height reflects nutrition during childhood then we have a sensitive indicator of living standards. The 20th century saw dramatic improvements in diet. The quantity of food intake increased and its quality improved, as incomes rose faster than ever before. But in some countries economic historians have found that during the early stages of industrialisation average heights fell at the same time as income per capita increased. The most debated case is the US in the three decades before the civil war – this has become known as the “antebellum puzzle”. So income and height don’t always move in lockstep. But, as in earlier times, the correlation between trends in height and income is far from perfect.

Something else is at work: exposure to infection. Repeated infection during infancy and childhood slows growth as nutrition intake declines or is used by the body to fight disease. Predominant among these illnesses are respiratory infections, notably pneumonia and bronchitis, and gastro-intestinal infections, especially diarrhoea and dysentery.

The key factor here is the urban environment. Sanitary reforms improved the quality of water supply and the disposal and treatment of sewage. In urban districts horses disappeared from the streets and pigs from backyards. Equally important was the reduction in overcrowding and improvement in the quality of housing, as the slums were gradually cleared.

How do we know this? Our World War I servicemen hold some important clues. Those that grew up in localities with high infant mortality (a clear marker of the disease environment) tended to be shorter as adults. And we can confirm that the disease environment was worse the more households were overcrowded and the more industrial the district. In the heaviest industrial areas the servicemen were shorter by an inch. This effect would have faded as heavy industry declined and what remained became less toxic.

By tracing their families in the 1901 census we can also see the household circumstances of the servicemen when they were growing up. This reveals that those from middle class families were taller and those with more siblings were shorter. The latter reflects a trade-off between the quantity of children and their average quality in terms of health. This too was a source of height gain, as average family size fell from five in Victorian times to just two by the 1930s.

Did medical improvements also play a part? There is less hard evidence for this but access to better medical treatments, and to medical services for children, expanded only modestly until after World War II. Yet basic knowledge about nutrition and hygiene did percolate down the hierarchy of class and income. One hint of this – given that higher socioeconomic classes tend to have more education – is that in areas where parents (particularly mothers) were more educated the servicemen were taller.

Over the 20th century dramatic advances in education combined with smaller families meant significant improvements in the nurturing of children. These influences are hard to identify precisely, but they probably contributed more to increases in height, health and longevity than was previously believed.

For more science news, analysis and commentary, follow us on @ConversationUK. Or like us on Facebook.

Tim Hatton does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

SEE ALSO: Mesmerizing Animation Shows How Much Healthier The World Has Become

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Seventy-five years ago today, the World's Fair came to New York, and with it came one of the world's first official time capsules. 

Called "Dawn of a New Day," the 1939 Fair adopted a future-focused theme, which would become standard in subsequent World's Fairs.

Electric giant Westinghouse took the theme to heart. The company created one of the most ambitious time capsules ever: a 7 1/2-foot tube, filled with items from the current era, for a part of its display. The capsule will remain sealed until the year 6939 — 5,000 years after its creation — along with its sister capsule made in 1964. 

Although not the first to make a time capsule, Westinghouse was one of the first to approach it scientifically, locking items in a non-corrosive and considerably hard metallic alloy called Cupoloy, created especially for the exhibit. The compound was 99.4% copper, 0.5% chromium, and 0.1% silver.

The Westinghouse model might have drawn inspiration from the Crypt of Civilization —  a swimming-pool-sized time capsule sealed until 8113. Its creator, Thornwell Jacobs, started building in 1936, three years before Westinghouse. But he didn't close the room until 1940. 

The contents of the Westinghouse capsule include small, common items, like men's and women's grooming tools and children's toys; various textiles and materials used in manufacturing and technology; miscellaneous items, such as money and seeds; a microfilm essay; and a newsreel. Read the full list here »

The capsule also included a "Book of Record," which outlines its contents and purpose. The book describes the "key to English" to preserve our modern language and also asks that future generations translate it into whatever new tongues the future holds.

Westinghouse chose to bury the capsule in New York City not only because of the fairgrounds but also because the metropolis will likely become a place of interest for future generations, much like Athens, Rome or Troy now. Lowered 50 feet into the ground using a steel tube, the capsule now rests under Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens.

And there it will stay for another 4,925 years — though the Senator John Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh, Penn. displays replicas of both the 1939 and 1965 capsules. These pictures from the museum show what the 1939 capsule contains. 

Read the full story in this eBook from the Internet Archive.

SEE ALSO: 15 Gorgeous Retro-Future Photos From The 1964 World's Fair

Join the conversation about this story »

More than a century before "Her," computers with human voices wore dresses and had relationships with men.

Yes, computers used to be people who computed or calculated complex mathematical processes. Men sometimes worked as computers, often as an intermediate career step, but women dominated the profession.

The first time the term "Computer" appeared in the "New York Times" was in May 2, 1892; the ad by the US Civil Service Commission stated: "A Computer Wanted. [...] The examination will include the subjects of algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and astronomy."

Edward Charles Pickering of the Harvard Observatory famously hired a bunch of women to process astronomical data. The Harvard Women, also known as Pickering's Harem, included significant astronomers like Henrietta Swan Leavitt, whose insights about luminosity allowed astronomers to measure the distance between the Earth and faraway galaxies.

Here are the Harvard Women in action:

Human computers played a prominent role in scientific research through World War II, but when it came to the insanely complex calculations related to nuclear fission they were becoming impractical.

Daniel Yergin's "The Quest" describes the moment when human computing finally gave way to electronic computing:

The advent of the computer, in historical terms, owes much to a chance meeting on a railroad platform near the army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland during World War II. A young mathematician caught sight of a world-famous figure—at least world famous in the worlds of science and mathematics. His name was John von Neumann. “With considerable temerity” the mathematician, Herman Goldfine, started a conversation. To Goldfine’s surprise, von Neumann, despite his towering reputation, was quite friendly. But when Goldfine told von Neumann that he was helping develop “an electronic computer capable of 333 multiplications per second,” the conversation abruptly changed “from one of relaxed good humor to one more like the oral examination for the doctor’s degree in mathematics.”

...

Until then, computers were not machines but a job classification: “computers” were people who did the tiresome but essential calculations needed for surveying or for calculating the tides or the movements of heavenly bodies. But von Neumann had been questing after something like a mechanical computer in order to handle the immense computational challenge he and his colleagues had faced while working on the atomic bomb during World War II. At the secret Los Alamos, as they struggled to figure out how to transform the theoretical concept of a chain reaction into a fearsome weapon, they had “invented modern mathematical modeling.” But they needed the machines to make it practical.

Immediately after the encounter on that station platform, von Neumann used his authority as a top-flight scientific adviser to the war effort to jump into this nascent and obscure computer project and promote its development. By June 1945 he had written a 101-page paper that became “the technological basis for the worldwide computer industry.” He started designing and building a new prototype computer in Princeton at the Institute for Advanced Study.

SEE ALSO: The 21 most important names in computing history you've never heard of

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In 1993, Nelson Mandela and Frederik Willem de Klerk won the Nobel Peace Prize for their tireless work ending apartheid in South Africa. Mandela had recently spent 27 years behind bars for his political views.

Just a year later, he achieved an enormous victory for racial equality, becoming the first black president of South Africa as well as the first official elected there in multiracial polling.

His inauguration speech became a point of worldwide pride, and people started quoting it — incorrectly.

We've all heard the reference:

"Our deepest fear is not that we are weak. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world ... As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."

But this quote doesn't appear in any of his three public inauguration speeches, according to the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory.

"As far as I know, [Mandela] has never used the quote in any of his speeches, and we have catalogued about 1,000 thus far," Razia Saleh, an archivist at the foundation, said.

In reality, self-help guru Marianne Williamson wrote this passage in her 1989 spiritual best-seller, "A Return To Love." The last line of the quote misattributed to Mandela — "As we are liberated from our own fear ..."—  Williamson actually used to end her book. Somehow, the Internet credited two different passages from her to Mandela. She's even acknowledged the mistake.

"Several years ago, this paragraph from 'A Return To Love' began popping up everywhere, attributed to Nelson Mandela's 1994 Inaugural Address. As honored as I would be had President Mandela quoted my words, indeed he did not. I have no idea where that story came from, but I am gratified that the paragraph has come to mean so much to so many people," Williamson wrote on her website. 

Brian Morton puts it best in The New York Times:

"Picture it: Mr. Mandela, newly free after 27 years in prison, using his inaugural platform to inform us that we all have the right to be gorgeous, talented and fabulous, and that thinking so will liberate others," he wrote.

Pretty ridiculous.

SEE ALSO: 12 People Who Shouldn't Have Won The Nobel Peace Prize

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Beards are back in style— but this isn't the first time they've made a comeback.

In the 18th century, "men were almost entirely clean-shaven,"writes Alun Withey, a medical historian at the University of Exeter. "The face of the enlightened gentleman was smooth, his face youthful and his countenance clear, suggesting a mind that was also open."

Growing a beard was a rebellious act, reserved for outcasts and renegades.

All that changed in the 19th century, when, Withey writes, "the beard came back into fashion with remarkable swiftness." Beards became trendy, in part, because they signified the Victorian ideal of rugged manliness.

But that wasn't all: "By 1850, doctors were beginning to encourage men to wear beards as a means of warding off illness."

Withey, citing the work of Christopher Oldstone-Moore, explains the reasoning behind this peculiar medical advice:

The Victorian obsession with air quality saw the beard promoted as a sort of filter. A thick beard, it was reasoned, would capture the impurities before they could get inside the body. Others saw it as a means of relaxing the throat, especially for those whose work involved public speaking. Some doctors were even recommending that men grew beards to avoid sore throats.

In fact, in an 1892 letter to the Gloucester Chronicle, a man named William Johnston claimed that he grew out his beard for health reasons — with great results, he adds — and that the trend caught on like wildfire, all throughout the Gloucester area.

Here is Johnston's letter, presented in an 1894 volume with the theory that Gloucester beards actually set a more widespread trend:

I believe that I was the first individual of the city of Gloucester (and perhaps in the county) to grow the beard and moustache. I was induced by my medical man, the late Mr J.P. Hearne, about 42 years ago, to give up shaving and let my beard and moustache grow. I had been a terrible sufferer for a good many years with very sore throat. I was just getting the better of a very severe attack when the old doctor remarked to me 'Johnston, I advise you to give up shaving and let your beard and moustache grow, which, if you do, I believe you will not suffer again with such bad sore throat.'

I took his advice, and have not had a sore throat since, and it was the opinion of many of my friends and acquaintances in Gloucester that the moustache and beard was a great improvement to my looks and added immensely to the dignity of my countenance, so much so that a great many of them began to cultivate the beard and moustache, and amongst them a very prominent druggist (Mr Tucker) and woolen draper (Mr F.C.Newman) and within a very few years beards and moustaches were cultivated by hundreds in Gloucester and neighbourhood, and are now almost universal.

Unfortunately for shaggy-faced men of the modern era, there is little evidence to support the advice of Johnston's "medical man."

One recent study in Behavioral Ecology points out that "hair on the face and body are potential localized breeding sites for disease-carrying ectoparasites." And a London dermatologist told The Guardian that since "facial hair is more likely to trap bacteria and food... there is actually more chance of infection with a beard than a clean-shaven face."

Growing beards to ward off colds isn't recommended, at least until more specific research is done.

Still, while the actual immune benefits of beards are hazy at best, the perception of thick facial hair as a sign of healthiness seems to have persisted. A 2013 study in Evolution and Human Behavior found that while women see heavy stubble as the most attractive facial hair option, men with full beards are seen as the healthiest — and the most manly.

SEE ALSO: Beards Are Only Attractive When Not Everyone Has One

Join the conversation about this story »

In 1904, 110 years ago Thursday, the Olympics came to the U.S. The games, only in their third session, were basically a disaster.

St. Louis, the city hosting the event, failed to draw much participation, with the games featuring competitors from only 12 other countries. They even  had to wear their own uniforms.

On top of that, the selection of sports was strange. Some were blatantly racist — while others endangered competitors and overlooked cheating.

In 1901, Pierre de Coubertin, considered the father of the modern Olympics, wrote to President Theodore Roosevelt, urging him to preside over games in the U.S. Originally, Chicago won the bid from the International Olympics Commission, but Roosevelt rallied for St. Louis, the host of the World's Fair that same year.

The 1904 World's Fair celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase. The two events became tied together, and unfortunately, the fair, with its own line-up of sporting events, overshadowed the games.

The Russo-Japanese War also put a damper on the festivities. The tensions kept many European competitors from attending.

The memory is from 14 years ago, but it stings like it was yesterday.

“I think he’s a famous old actor,” I said, during a game I play with friends where you have to get your team to say a name you’re reading on a slip of paper that they can’t see.

“Humphrey Bogart!” one person yelled out.

“Charlie Chaplin. Marlon Brando!” another hollered.

My heart sank as I looked at the words “Henry Kissinger” written on the paper I was holding. I was in a “I somehow don’t know who this incredibly famous person is and I’m about to be horribly exposed for it” situation. There’s no feeling quite like it.

But wipe that f---ing grin off your face, because here’s the thing about famous historical people—there are a lot of them. And you learn about these people in a variety of ways—school, parents, books, articles, movies, etc.—but the system isn’t airtight. Throughout your life, you fill in more and more of the gaps, but no matter who you are, you have some embarrassing gaps somewhere. I can sum it up like this:

There are some names in everyone’s Danger Zone. Beware the Danger Zone. To break it down further, here’s where you can fall when it comes to a famous name:

Zone 1 is by far the most dangerous, and as you get older, there are fewer and fewer big names there (I was 18 during the Kissinger Catastrophe—18-year-olds tend to have a lot of big names in Zone 1). But most people reach full adulthood with a still-crowded Zone 2, and names that are referenced all the time should ideally not be in Zone 2.

Today, we’re going to focus on a 10 absurdly famous, almost mythic people (much more famous than Kissinger) who are yet in a lot of people’s Zone 2 (and maybe even a few in Zone 1)—when you finish the post, they should all be in your (and my) Zone 3, and you’ll be safe. I got to this list by surveying friends and readers about which huge names they were ashamed to know very little about, and these are some names that came up again and again.

As you read, you’ll come across some that are already in your Zone 3 or 4, and you’ll be surprised they’re even on the list. But remember, everyone’s different life experience leaves them with their own unique set of gaps—where you have gaps is typically a random crapshoot—and some of the names you know very little about will seem totally obvious to someone else. Let’s get going:

1. Alexander the Great

Lived: 356 – 323 BC

In 11 words: Strapping man’s man world conqueror who greatly expanded Greek civilization

His main thing: When Alexander was 20, his father, King Philip II of the Greek kingdom of Macedon, was assassinated by one of his bodyguards. Philip II had had military ambitions to expand his kingdom into Persia, and Alexander inherited an army ready for battle. But no one had any idea what this kid’s deal was—turns out power had just been handed to one of the most prolific conquerors in history. For the next 12 years, Alexander would accomplish his father’s ambitions and go far beyond—into Egypt and as far East as present-day Pakistan. The crazy thing is he was just getting started—his stated expansion goal was “the ends of the world and the Great Outer Sea”, and he was well on his way (he made a push towards India, and his next plans were to take the Arabian Peninsula) when he died of some sickness (or possible assassination) at the age of 32.

What’s especially cool about Alexander the Great is that he did it all in his 20s. He was just a dude in his 20s and in his brief 12-year stint, he did this:

This was the largest empire in Ancient Greek history, and though things declined soon after his death, his conquests allowed Greek culture to spread far and wide and launched the Hellenistic Period of Ancient Greek Civilization, whose influence carried as far as the Byzantine Empire almost 2,000 years later.

Other things:

• His primary tutor between the ages of 13 and 16 was none other than Aristotle. Very weird that those two hung out a lot in a room alone together. I desperately want to know what they talked about and what their private jokes were and what kind of life advice Aristotle gave Alexander. Also fun picturing Aristotle coming to a session and being annoyed that Alexander the Great hadn’t done his homework.
• This relationship turned nasty later on, as Alexander became paranoid toward the end of his life and sent Aristotle threatening letters. Some theories even suggest Aristotle may have played a part in Alexander’s death.
• His reign began in Game of Thrones style. His father, the king, had had a new wife at the time of his death, and as Alexander was assuming power, Alexander’s mom (and the king’s ex) had the new wife and her daughter burned alive. Alexander had several other potential political rivals executed, and then when a series of neighboring Greek states rebelled against his rule, Alexander razed their cities, defeating them one by one until he had consolidated power over all of Greece. He then launched into foreign expansion.
• His mother was quite the person. On top of her habit of burning rival women alive, she was the ultimate hyper-ambitious tiger mom, putting annoying pressure on Alexander to conquer the world and convincing him (and others) that she was impregnated by Zeus before her marriage and that Alexander was the son of Zeus.
• Alexander was undefeated in battle in his life, despite often being outnumbered.
• Though ruthless in conquest and in politics, he was unusually gracious to the families of those who died in battle, granting them immunity from taxation and public service.
• Alexander founded over 20 cities and named them after himself, including Alexandria in Egypt.
• Some historians believe Alexander was bi-sexual (which was socially acceptable at the time) and was in a relationship with his best friend, Hephaestion. He also had a harem of women at his access, but rarely “used it.”
• He is said to have had one brown eye and one blue eye.
• What Hitler tried to do is essentially the same thing Alexander tried to do (though with more genocide), but it was so long ago that the tragic element of it carries no emotion today. If Hitler had done his thing 2,400 years ago, we might know him as Hitler the Great today.

2014 equivalent: Mark Zuckerberg

2. Marco Polo

Lived: 1254 – 1324

In 11 words: First European to document travels to Asia after 24-year voyage

His main thing: Marco Polo was 15 when he first met his father and uncle, who were traveling merchants returning to Venice from a long voyage. They wasted no time planning their next one, this time taking 17-year-old Marco with them. The voyage lasted an epic 24 years, and went like this:

The thing that makes Marco Polo so famous isn’t that he was the first European to explore Asia—he wasn’t—it’s that he was the first one to document it, in his book The Travels of Marco Polo. He returned to Venice from his 24-year voyage in his early 40s and lived the rest of his life there as a wealthy merchant.

Other things:

• He returned from his voyage to find Venice in battle with rival city-state Genoa. He joined the fight and was soon imprisoned. It was in prison that he wrote his famous book—except he didn’t write it. He dictated it to his cellmate, who happened to be a romance writer.
• In China, the Polos befriended Mongol leader (and Genghis Khan grandson) Kublai Khan, and Marco worked for a few years as his envoy. Kublai became attached and refused to let the Polos leave, but when a Mongol princess needed to be escorted to Persia to marry the king, the Polos got the gig. The long sea voyage (see map) was unpleasant—only 18 of the hundreds of passengers survived, but all three Polos made it.
• Polo’s mind was blown upon seeing elephants, crocodiles, monkeys, and rhinoceroses for the first time and mistook them for mythical creatures (he thought rhinos were unicorns). This is totally fair—imagine how weird those animals would seem if you had never seen them before.
• The whole thing about Polo bringing pasta or pizza to Italy is a tall tale, but he did bring back stories of paper money, an unknown concept in Europe at the time.
• Christopher Columbus got FOMO about Polo’s travels, and this was one of the major reasons he became an explorer. He always carried a copy of Polo’s book with him.

2014 equivalent: Curiosity Rover

3. Che Guevara

Lived: 1928 – 1967

In 11 words: Charismatic Marxist revolutionary, ruthless murderer, enduring symbol of rebellion and counterculture

His main thing: I can’t be the only one who has spent my life confused as to why the guy on the t-shirts is such a big thing. The Maryland Institute College of Art called the photograph to the left (taken of him at a memorial service) “the most famous photograph in the world,” and today, the image is a ubiquitous logo that symbolizes rebellion against authority, capitalism, and imperialism. But who was he?

Che grew up as an Argentinian math-loving, chess-playing intellectual who got his medical degree and became a doctor before deciding he’d rather be a rad dude. He took those ambitions to Mexico, where he met the Castro brothers, and they hit it off because both parties hated the US and blamed capitalist imperialism for most of the world’s suffering.

He went back to Cuba with the Castros and helped overthrow the government, and he was a key member of Fidel Castro’s new regime, both as a brutal executioner of political enemies and as the Finance Minister, shifting Cuban trade relations away from the US and toward the Soviet Union. He was an energetic dude and spent a lot of time in foreign countries trying to incite revolution, until he botched it and was captured by the CIA-assisted Bolivian military and executed at the age of 39.

Other things:

• He’s a polarizing figure today, both loved by some as an inspirational symbol of counterculture and loathed by others as an insufferable symbol of counterculture.
• People aren’t quite clear that in addition to being a valiant revolutionary, he was a ruthless murderer, executing hundreds of people without trial in Cuba.
• Right before he died, he managed to bully his timid executioner, screaming “Shoot me, you coward! You are only going to kill a man!”
• He was notoriously smelly, proudly changing his shirt once a week.
• His honeymoon apparently sucked.[1]

2014 equivalent: Some mixture of Occupy Wall Street and al-Qaeda

4. Mother Teresa

Lived: 1910 – 1997

In 11 words: Really nice nun who dedicated her life to helping the poor

Her main thing: Mother Teresa decided to obnoxiously spend her life making the rest of us look bad by dedicating everything she had to “serving the poorest of the poor.” She is ethnically Albanian, grew up in the Ottoman Empire (in present-day Macedonia), and moved to India at the age of 18 to be a nun.

And for the next 17 years, that’s what she was—a nun and a teacher, and she seemed content with this until Jesus, she says, told her to stop being a dud and do something to help all of the ridiculously poor people around her. So she changed her path and founded the Missionaries of Charity, which, among other things, ran hospices for poor, sick people so those “who lived like animals could die like angels.” She proved to be quite the entrepreneur, leveraging her growing celebrity and taking her work abroad, eventually scaling her charity to 133 countries with the help of 4,500 involved sisters. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, and tends to be a symbol of all things good today.

Other things:

• Though she lived her life on humble means, she was actually born into a wealthy family.
• She was highly chaste. What a waste of a bullet point.
• Some controversy swirls around her legacy, despite her overall shining reputation, centered around her vocal campaigns against contraception (some even believe she exaggerated how bad it was in India to get more attention) and her refusal to adopt Western medical standards in favor of poorer facilities because she believed that “suffering” brings people closer to Christ.

2014 equivalent: Some NGO you’ve never heard of because people like Mother Teresa are usually not famous

5. Julius Caesar

Lived: 100 – 44 BC

In 11 words: Roman general/dictator who laid the ground for the Roman Empire

His main thing: He came up from modest means and actually got a pretty late start. When he visited Spain at the age of 32, he saw a statue of Alexander the Great and it put him in a bad mood because he felt that he had accomplished very little (typical GYPSY). And he was just getting started as a priest before a war of rivals in his hometown ended the wrong way and forced him out of that title—so he turned toward the military instead. He rose steadily, both in military rank and political influence, until he eventually overpowered the weak senate, overthrew the Roman Republic, and was declared dictator.

He was a good leader, beloved by most of the people and made sweeping changes to the constitution, laws, and government structure that laid the groundwork for the Roman Empire, which would flourish for almost 500 years after his assassination.

Other things:

• Caesar was a cool dude. When he was captured by pirates and held prisoner once earlier in his life, they demanded twenty talents of silver for him as ransom. He interrupted and insisted they ask for fifty instead, which they then received. After they freed him, he got his fleet together, chased the pirates down, took back the money, and crucified them—something he told them he was going to do when he was in their captivity and they had laughed at him.
• Caesar had a full relationship with Cleopatra, which took place both in Egypt and in Caesar’s villa near Rome, which she would visit. This is like Aristotle tutoring Alexander the Great, where I’m just flabbergasted that two people who are that legendary hung out and slept together and cuddled. It’s just weird.[2] More on this in the Cleopatra section on the next page.
• He was assassinated by a bunch of the old guard he had overthrown, but they were unable to take power themselves because the masses had loved Caesar and they didn’t have support. Instead, Caesar’s adopted heir Octavian (Caesar’s great nephew since he had no sons) took power as the first Roman Emperor (under the name Augustus).
• Things can get confusing between Shakespeare’s play and the real story, and some people I spoke with even asked if Caesar was real or fictional. The answer is that he was certainly real and the Shakespeare plot isn’t too far off from reality. Mark Antony was really his second in command, Caesar really was stabbed a ton of times (23) by a lot of different men (~60), and Brutus was really someone Caesar trusted and one of the people who stabbed him. However, “Et tu, Brute?” is fiction.
• One lasting change Caesar made was to the calendar. At the time, they used the moon, which made the months and years irregular. He replaced that with a calendar based on the sun, setting the year at 365.25 days (adding the leap year to capture the .25s), and added three months onto 46 BC to align things with the seasons, starting 45 BC on January 1. We’re still living with these changes today.

2014 equivalent: Steve Jobs

6. Billy the Kid

Lived: 1859 – 1881

In 11 words: Lost, unfortunate boy who did dumb things and became an outlaw

His main thing: So I knew very little about Billy the Kid going into this. He barely qualified for Zone 2. And when I searched for images of him, this (image to the left) is what I found, which made me happy. I don’t have to interact with him in my life. And I assumed that as I read about him, I’d learn about all of his famous duels and gun feats and bank robberies and sheriff murders. I thought I was going to be learning about one of those “Most feared outlaws in the Wild West” characters.

Turns out that’s not really his story at all. He was born in Manhattan (six blocks from my apartment), raised by a (mostly) single mom who moved him and his brother around the country, eventually landing in the West before she died when William (Billy) was 14. And the thing is, he was a good kid. A hotel owner he worked for said William was the only employee who never stole anything from him, and his schoolteacher later said he was as well-behaved as anyone else. But as an orphan, life got tough, and when he committed a few petty thefts, he ended up in jail. Scared, he escaped up a chimney, and from then on he was a fugitive.

He continued getting honest jobs, but ended up as part of a gang war and became the scapegoat the New Mexico government used to show the public they were seeking justice. The governor placed a $500 bounty on his head, which made him famous. While others involved in the same gang war were left alone or granted amnesty, Billy the Kid (as he was now known) was too well-known and received a death sentence. He again made off and ran for a while, but he finally was shot and killed (at age 21) by a sheriff who hunted him down.

It’s not that he did nothing wrong—he killed eight people in his life—it’s that most of his killing and running and hiding were out of fear, self-defense, and the result of a downward spiral he never really wanted to be in—he’s basically the world’s most famous troubled teenager. And his epic fame is pretty random—he could have easily been a nobody in history, but the way things played out, he became a notorious outlaw back then and his legend only grew after his death. There’s also a small chance that everyone besides me already knows this stuff and I was mixing him up with Wild Bill Hickok.

In any case, that above photo is supposedly the only authentic image of Billy the Kid, and the original fetched $2.3 million at a 2011 auction, which I learned was the 7th most expensive photograph ever sold. This led me to go find a list of the other most expensive photos, and #1, which clocks in at a $4.3 million sale price, was this incredibly unimpressive photo, taken by a still-living German photographer in 1999.

My confusion about this is staggering. I would pay between $0.00 and $0.75 for that photo, depending on my mood.

2014 equivalent: Justin Bieber

7. Galileo

Lived: 1564 – 1642

In 11 words: Rare giant of scientific advancement fighting against hopelessly-backward Catholic Church

His main thing: Einstein called Galileo “the father of modern science,” which sums things up pretty nicely. Galileo made major discoveries about the motion of planets and stars, the motion of uniformly accelerated objects (i.e. that two objects would fall at the same rate regardless of their masses), sound frequency, and the basic principle of relativity, among other things—and major advancements in technology, including inventing or improving upon the telescope, microscope, thermometer, pendulum, and the compass. His work was central to most future developments in science, including those of Newton and Einstein, and most of what he discovered was in contradiction with conventional wisdom—his work was as shocking and revolutionary in the 1600s as Einstein proclaiming that “time is relative” was in the 1900s.

But the most impressive part about Galileo, other than his ability to make such a cranky facial expression in the above painting, is that he did everything he did in the face of threats and repression by the Catholic Church and their inane loathing of groundbreaking scientific advancements.

The main thing the Church kept yelling at Galileo for was his backing and advancement of Copernicus’s heliocentric model of the universe, which puts the sun, instead of the Earth, in the center of the solar system and suggests that the Earth’s spinning is why the sun appears to revolve around the Earth. The Church declared heliocentrism to be “foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture”[3] —in particular, the parts of scripture that said things like, “the world is firmly established, it cannot be moved” and “the Lord set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved”[4] —and ordered Galileo “to abstain completely from teaching or defending this doctrine and opinion or from discussing it… to abandon completely… the opinion that the sun stands still at the center of the world and the earth moves, and henceforth not to hold, teach, or defend it in any way whatever, either orally or in writing.”[5] That would be like modern-day governments imprisoning geologists who studied ancient rocks because their findings conflicted with the Bible’s accounts of the Great Flood. Or like preventing gay people from getting married because of passages in the Bible about sexual orientation. Thankfully, those times are over.

So the Church repressed the greatest genius of the century, finding him “vehemently suspect of heresy,” and placed him under house arrest for the rest of his life. Luckily, Galileo just hung out on his couch and kept doing his thing, publishing some of his most important works while under house arrest.

Other things:

• Galileo never married, having all three of his children out of wedlock with the same woman.
• One of the reasons Galileo started inventing things (like the telescope) in the first place was that he badly needed money to deal with all the money his starving artist little brother kept “borrowing” from him.
• He was briefly a professor at the University of Pisa, but he was inappropriate with his students and the university didn’t renew his contract.
• Despite his conflicts with the Church, Galileo was a devout Catholic. He briefly became a priest before his father convinced him to go into medicine, and his two daughters were nuns. But he was critical of the Church’s repression of science, stating, “Holy Writ was intended to teach men how to go to Heaven, not how the heavens go.”
• One of Galileo’s worst offenses against the Church was creating a character called Simplico in his famous book Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, who always presented the old, incorrect, geocentric view. Simplico suggests “simpleton” in Italian just like it does in English, and in the book, Simplico does not come off very well. The issue is that a lot of what Simplico says in the book were well known to be the direct views of the Pope (Urban VIII), indirectly insulting the Pope and hastening Galileo’s path toward house arrest.
• It wasn’t until 200 years later in 1835 that the Church finally stopped its prohibition of books advocating heliocentrism and not until 1992 that the Vatican officially cleared Galileo’s name of any wrongdoing.
• It should be noted that Galileo’s church difficulties occurred in the heart of the Renaissance. You can only imagine what it was like to be a scientist in the far more repressive Middle Ages (and how much potential scientific advancement was stifled).
• Some weirdo cut the middle finger off of Galileo’s corpse a century after his death, and it is currently on display at the Museo Galileo in Florence.
• Galileo’s dad begrudgingly allowed him to leave medicine in favor of mathematics and died a few years later when Galileo was an amateur math professor—he had no idea his son was anything special, let alone “the Father of Modern Science.”

2014 equivalent: Elon Musk

8. Confucius

Lived: 551 – 479 BC

In 11 words: Ancient Chinese philosopher who really wanted everyone to be less douchey

His main thing: Confucius was born into a middle class family and his dad died when he was three, assuming his three-year-old was just a shitty little three-year-old and not the great Confucius. After reading about Confucius for the last few hours, I can sum up his philosophy as “Don’t be a d--k.”

He didn’t like corruption, classism, or cruelty, and when a leader he was working for went on a three-day prostitution binge one time, Confucius soon stopped working for him. Way before we had The Golden Rule, Confucius came up with his own, similar version: “Do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself.” i.e. Don’t be a d--k.

Confucius believed that every human was at the center of a number of concentric circles. In the middle was the self, around it the family, around that was society, then the nation, the world, and beyond—and everything radiated outwards. So it started with you giving love to your family members, which then would turn into families projecting love outwards into society in the form of kindness. He rejected the importance of class, and accepted people into his school based on merit, completely ignoring their social standing, which was a totally radical concept at the time.

By the age of 50, he had developed a large following through his teachings, and this caught the attention of China’s leaders. He was appointed first as the governor of a small state and then as the Minister of Crime. Supposedly, under his reign in that role, crime dropped considerably as he used his post to spread his moral teachings. But his radical philosophies about not being a huge d----e proved too extreme for the leadership, and they released him just a few years later, sending him into 15 years of wandering exile.

He was granted return to his home as an old man and spent his last few years where he grew up, using this time to teach 75 disciples and complete some of his written works. He died thinking he was a failure because everyone was still a dick—but through his disciples, his work was organized into an elaborate set of rules and practices after his death, which had an incredible lasting impact on future Chinese dynasties and is still a part of how Chinese culture is wired today.

Other things:

• When I look at his above visual depiction, I just want to be him, and I’m sad I can’t be. Imagine looking like that.
• In spite of his generally modern, humane way of thinking, he had some weird exceptions—like proclaiming that men and women should walk on opposite sides of the street.
• He had children, which means that Confucius had sex, which is a weird concept.
• Confucianism isn’t particularly religious, drawing very little from the divine. Instead, Confucius focused on the teachings of old wise men from the past. Which is also weird—because Confucius is kind of the oldest, wisest person. There aren’t supposed to be older, wiser people than Confucius.
• China has traced his descendants down for centuries and it continues in modern times. There’s even a Confucius Genealogy Compilation Committee, which says he has 2 million known, registered descendants and that there are an estimated 3 million in all—this is the longest recorded family tree in the world, now in its 83rd generation.
• Recently, there was a proposed project to DNA test supposed male descendants of Confucius—if the male chain were truly unbroken as people believe it to be, they’d all share a common Y chromosome as their direct male ancestor. But then they were like, “Actually wait no don’t do that” because they realized there was more downside than upside—there’s a decent chance they’d find out that none of the people who think they’re Confucius’ descendants actually are, which would really take the wind out of everybody’s sails since the whole thing has enormous cultural significance.

2014 equivalent: The Dalai Lama

9. Cleopatra

Lived: 69 – 30 BC

In 11 words: Cunning leader but wrong time to be pharaoh—Rome takes over.

Her main thing: Her father was the pharaoh, and when Cleopatra was 14, he made her his co-ruler and groomed her to be a future ruler of Egypt. Upon his death in 51 BC, 18-year-old Cleopatra and her 10-year-old brother, Ptolemy XIII, became the kingdom’s new co-rulers (following Egyptian custom, they were also married—which Cleopatra must have been thrilled about since every 18-year-old girl’s dream catch is her 10-year-old brother). It turns out that neither of these teenagers was that into sharing the spotlight, and three years later they were in a full battle to be the sole pharaoh. Ptolemy XIII won the battle and Cleopatra was forced to flee into exile.

Julius Caesar’s rival Pompey came to Egypt to seek assistance from new middle-school ruler Ptolemy XIII, and the assistance Ptolemy gave him was to behead him so he could impress Caesar. When Caesar arrived a bit later, Ptolemy was like, “Look at what I did to Pompey high five,” but Caesar was like “Why did you do that you little shit he’s my granddaughter’s father” and Ptolemy was like, “fuck.” But Ptolemy knew the real key was that Caesar never meet his hot older sister, which would ruin everything—so he kept her locked away and guarded. Except the guards were unimpressive people and didn’t notice when Cleopatra rolled herself up in a rug and had someone bring her to Caesar that way.

It was Christmas for creepy 52-year-old Caesar when Cleopatra, 21, emerged from the rug and seduced him, and this was the end for Ptolemy XIII, as Caesar’s army placed Cleopatra back on the throne. Ptolemy had a tantrum and tried to rebel, but he embarrassingly drowned in the Nile instead, leaving Cleopatra as the undisputed ruler. Less than a year later, Cleopatra bore (what she insisted was) Caesar’s child, adorably named Caesarian, which means “Little Caesar.”

Then Caesar was assassinated, throwing everything into chaos.

Rome was suddenly in civil war, and when Octavian and Mark Antony’s team came out on top, Antony called Cleopatra to meet with him to answer for her lack of support during the war. He was being all serious and stern about this, and it took her like 1.5 seconds when they finally met to make him her puppy. They formed an alliance and went on to have three kids.

A bunch of years later, Cleopatra and Mark Antony ended up at odds with Octavian, fought him, lost, and Cleopatra faked her own death, causing Antony to react calmly and reasonably by stabbing himself in the stomach. Cleopatra then asked Octavian if he was gonna be a dick about things now that he had won, and he said yes, so she annoyed a cobra until it finally bit her and she died.

Other things:

• Go look at that picture of her above. I want her to look like that. You want her to look like that. We all just really want Cleopatra to be a hot person. Then, in 2007, everyone was devastated when this coin from 32 BC was discovered, suggesting that she actually looked like Jay Leno.
• The world then agreed to pretend this never happened.
• She was into cosmetics and wrote a book detailing remedies for things like hair loss and dandruff. She also apparently bathed in milk every day to stay young-looking.
• Like Alexander the Great (who thought maybe just maybe Zeus was his dad), Cleopatra (and her followers) thought she was divine, as the reincarnation of the goddess Isis.
• She wasn’t Egyptian. When Alexander the Great conquered Egypt 300 years earlier, he installed his general, Ptolemy, as the pharaoh, and Cleopatra was his direct descendant. She was also Cleopatra VII—there were six others before her, likely named after Alexander the Great’s sister, Cleopatra of Macedon.
• Her family situation was not healthy—well before she was exiled by her 13-year-old brother-spouse, her father had her older sister executed when she tried to set up a coup against him. Then later, after her husband-brother drowned, Cleopatra married her other younger brother before deciding to actually poison him to death instead. Then she executed her sister “just cause.” She went on to co-rule the kingdom with her pre-pubescent son, who was strangled to death on Octavian’s orders after Cleopatra committed suicide. Normal.
• One thing I realized during this post: someone born in 55 BC who died in 35 AD (at the age of 90) would have witnessed the rise and fall of Julius Caesar, the reign of Augustus and founding of the Roman Empire, Cleopatra’s whole reign and the fall of Egypt to Rome, and the birth, life, and crucifixion of Jesus.

2014 equivalent: Kim Jong Un (some imagination required here)

10. Mahatma Gandhi

Lived: 1869 – 1948

In 11 words: Much, much, much, much, much, much, much better person than you

His main thing: Nothing will make you realize how much everyone sucks more than reading about Gandhi for a few hours. You can look at it as all of us being normal and Gandhi being an exceptionally good person, or you can look at it like I did—Gandhi is just kind of normal and rational and literally everyone else is a horrible, low, greedy, petty, selfish, uncompassionate, ego-driven, short-sighted piece of s--t. We’re all animals, sorry. And he’s a one-man intelligent species.

Even the other people you’d consider to be great—Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama—each one of them can be quoted calling Gandhi their role model. They were just doing their best to imitate Gandhi.

I’m sure I’ll calm down about this tomorrow, but this is how I feel right now.

Anyway, here’s his story:

He grew up in a merchant family and was bad at everything. He was a mediocre student, poor athlete, and he’d run home from school because “he could not bear to talk to anybody.” He then moved to London to go to Law School, and came back to India and proceeded to be an unsuccessful lawyer (he had to sit down in court once, conceding defeat, because his knees were trembling so much). He also at this time looked really different than you’re used to:

He gave up on having his own law practice and accepted a position with an Indian firm who stationed him in South Africa, where he moved with his family.

After being treated like s--t by the British ruling class there (he had a Rosa Parks-esque episode where he was kicked off a train for not moving to the “car for colored people”) and seeing how badly the Indian population in South Africa as a whole was treated, he decided to ditch the shirt and try to fix things, and spent the next 20 years in South Africa trying to make the white people be less terrible. He achieved a ton in his 20 years there, including helping black South Africans gain the right to vote.

He then moved to India to make the white people there be less terrible too. The British Raj (the name for their rule in India) had been going on for 57 years when Gandhi moved there and he’d spend the next 32 years slowly dismantling it until India finally gained independence in 1947. To give you a sense of how large a role he played in this, the word Gandhi comes up 44 times in the Wikipedia article about the British Raj.

His major tactic was nonviolent civil disobedience (which MLK, Mandela, the Dalai Lama, and many others emulated to achieve their goals later on)—using tricks like boycotts of British goods, hunger strikes, and marches—and he generated a vast movement which ultimately did the trick. In the process, Gandhi became an international superstar and the one person who had the love and support of nearly all factions within India, which gave him the power to majorly influence things.

When India finally succeeded at booting the British out in 1947, violent battles erupted within India between the Hindus and the Muslims, which annoyed the f--- out of Gandhi because he thought he was done but now he had to make the brown people be less terrible too. He believed that the concept of being Indian transcended race, religion, and caste, and he detested the plan to divide India in two (which would create Pakistan for the Muslim population). Gandhi was Hindu, but he stood by the Muslims during this time to protest the Hindu violence against them. This pissed off a lunatic Hindu, who shot Gandhi in the chest and killed him.

Other things:

• In typical Gandhi form, early in his life, he took the vow of poverty, never capitalizing on of his power and celebrity. He spun his own clothing, walked everywhere, ate almost nothing, and died with $3 to his name. How’s your self-esteem doing over there?
• Speaking of walking, he was obsessed with it, calling it “the prince of exercises” and typically walking about ten miles a day. He attributes his top-notch health all the way into his late 70s to his walking habits. At the age of 60, he organized the famous Salt March (in protest of oppressive British salt taxes) and walked 241 miles from his home to the sea.
• His name was not Mahatma. It was Mohandas. Mahatma means “great-souled one” and was what people called him. Which he was never comfortable with.
• As you’ve probably experienced, he was a quote machine. My favorite is him being asked by a reporter what he thought of Western civilization and replying, “I think it would be a very good idea.”
• He was married at 13 and had his first child at 15, but at the age of 36, he took a vow of celibacy (as a way of confronting backward conventions relegating women to lower status), which he kept to for the rest of his life. The weirdest thing Gandhi ever did was bringing his grandniece to sleep naked in his bed with him, something he also did from time to time with other young women. He did this as part of a spiritual experiment so he could test himself and further his goal to elevate women to a higher plane, and because he’s Gandhi we’re going to give him the benefit of the doubt.
• He was pen pals with Tolstoy and Einstein.
• He came in at #2 for Time Magazine’s Person of the Century title in 1999 (Einstein was #1).
• Despite being the second most important person of the century, his parents died when he was 15 and 21, when he was still bad at everything—both believing they had raised a hapless dud. I keep mentioning this concept because it blows my mind.
• He and Mother Teresa were carried in the same carriage during their funeral processions.
• He has no relations to Indian leader Indira Gandhi or the other famous Gandhis.
• As much as Gandhi accomplished, he really only scratched the surface of the changes he wanted to make. Gandhi described himself as a “philosophical anarchist,” believing that governments were unnecessary and that rather than rights being enforced by a higher authority, each person should self-govern by mutual responsibilities and be ruled by an ethic of nonviolence. When asked to help write a world charter for human rights, he responded that he believed that it was much more important to have charter for human duties. To Gandhi, a free India required more than just transferring administrative rule from the British to the Indians—it required a total rewiring of how humans live and interact and handle conflict. Maybe if Gandhi had lived 100 more years, he could have created a shift that was that fundamental—but he didn’t, and as I explained above, the non-Gandhi part of the human race tends to be shitty, so his dream will have to wait a few hundred thousand more years until the species has caught up to him.

2014 equivalent: Nelson Mandela. And Mr. Rogers.

Note: These were 10 of about 300 people I could have chosen. There will be future volumes of this post.

SEE ALSO: The Great Perils Of Social Interaction

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By noon on May 19, 1780, a mysterious darkness had fallen over New England, so thick that animals behaved like it was nighttime and bewildered residents had to light candles to see.

The strange phenomenon seems to have stretched from Maine to as far south as New Jersey, where General George Washington wrote about the darkness in his diary while he fought the Revolutionary War against the British, according to ScienceDaily.

Darkness began to fall shortly after 10 a.m. and continued throughout the day. Eyewitnesses claimed it was as dark as midnight by noon, according to a study published in 2007 in the International Journal of Wildland Fire.

The study suggested that the incident was caused by distant wildfires near the Great Lakes. Smoke from these fires likely traveled hundreds of miles to blanket New England, obscuring the sun, according to the study.

How do they know? The researchers were studying trees in southeastern Ontario and discovered fire scars from the year 1780 (by counting the yearly tree rings back from the present day).

"Based on observation of wind direction and barometric readings on 19 May 1780, it seems most likely that a low pressure weather system carried dense smoke from the west or north to the New England region," the paper says. In addition to the wildfires in southeastern Ontario, widespread fires in Missouri and Arkansas may have added to the dense smoke.

Climate data suggests the fires were brought on by drought in the regions. Warfare between settlers and the British and Native Americans may have also played a role, in addition to intentional burning of tree debris from settlers clearing large swaths of forest.

The sun reportedly appeared dim and red before fast-moving red, yellow, and brown clouds rolled in. Rain falling from these clouds was dark and sooty, according to reports, corroborating the researchers' theory that there was dense smoke in the atmosphere from wildfires.

Of course, in 1780 the early American settlers could not understood this delicate interaction of climate forces. Worried villagers sheltered together at community centers and discussed what the phenomenon meant.

The Connecticut Legislature, in session during the darkness, debated whether to adjourn because of the possibility that the world was ending. "I am against adjournment. The day of judgment is either approaching, or it is not," said one legislator, Abraham Davenport, according to CNN's history of the incident. "If it is not, there is no cause for adjournment; if it is, I choose to be found doing my duty."

The 19th century poet John Greenleaf Whittier wrote this about the incident, according to CNN:

"Over the fresh earth and the heaven of noon,/ A horror of great darkness, like the night/ … The low-hung sky/ Was black with ominous clouds, save where its rim/ Was fringed with a dull glow, like that which climbs/ The crater's sides from the red hell below./ Birds ceased to sing, and all the barn-yard fowls/ Roosted; the cattle at the pasture bars/ Lowed, and looked homeward; bats on leathern wings/ Flitted abroad; the sounds of labor died;/Men prayed, and women wept; all ears grew sharp/ To hear the doom-blast of the trumpet shatter ..."

SEE ALSO: The Most Breathtaking Natural Wonder In Every State

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I found this 1917 advertisement for swastika jewelry while browsing through the NY Public Library Digital Gallery. The text reads in part:

To the wearer of swastika will come from the four winds of heaven good luck, long life and prosperity. The swastika is the oldest cross, and the oldest symbol in the world. Of unknown origin, in frequent use in the prehistoric items, it historically first appeared on coins as early as the year 315 B.C.

As this suggests, while the symbol of the swastika is most frequently associated with Hitler and Nazis during World War II, and is still used by neo-Nazi groups, the symbol itself has a much longer history. From wikipedia:

Archaeological evidence of swastika-shaped ornaments dates from the Neolithic period. An ancient symbol, it occurs mainly in the cultures that are in modern day India and the surrounding area, sometimes as a geometrical motif and sometimes as a religious symbol. It was long widely used in major world religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism.

Before it was co-opted by the Nazis, the swastika decorated all kinds of things. Uni Watch has tons of examples. Here it is on a Finnish military plane: Boy Scout badge:A women's hockey team called the Swastikas from Edmonton (from 1916):Another hockey team:In the comments, Felicity pointed to this example:She writes:

My mom is a quilter and collects antique quilts (when she can afford them). She says that while in general, antique quilts and quilt-tops have gone up a great deal in price over the decades, there's still one sort you can pick up for a song — swastika quilts.

It's kind of sad to think of somebody in 1900 putting all that time and hand-stitching into a 'good luck' quilt that is now reviled.

All of these examples occurred before the Nazis adopted the swastika as their symbol (and changed it slightly by tilting it on a 45-degree angle). Of course, the original meaning or usage of the swastika is beside the point now. Because it is so strongly associated with the Nazis, it's impossible to use it now without people reading it as a Nazi symbol. And in fact it's unimaginable that a group in the U.S. or Europe would use the swastika today without intentionally meaning to draw on the Nazi association and the ideas espoused by Hitler and his party.

Wendy Christensen is an Assistant Professor at William Paterson University whose specialty includes the intersection of gender, war, and the media. You can follow her on Twitter.

SEE ALSO: These 30 National Landmarks Could Be Destroyed By Climate Change

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Reddit user JalapenoJaques graduated high school in 2001. So he started a thread wondering how education has changed in the last 13 years.

The seven facts below present relatively new additions to common knowledge or even corrections to continuing misconceptions. Time to update some textbooks.

1. The world has five oceans now.

Traditional geography formerly taught four oceans — the Pacific, Atlantic, Arctic, and Indian.

But in 2000, the International Hydrographic Organization combined the southern portions of the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific oceans to create a fifth addition to the list, the Southern Ocean, shown above.

(h/t agt_michael_scarn)

2. Today, a food plate, not a pyramid, represents ideal nutrition.

At the behest of the First Lady in 2011, the USDA ditched its 2005 variation of the original 1992 food pyramid.

The original suggested portions for various food groups, like 2 or 3 servings daily of dairy, while the new plate shows general amounts. For example, half your plate should include fruits and veggies.

"This is a quick, simple reminder for all of us to be more mindful of the foods that we’re eating,"Michelle Obama said.

(h/t puffer567)

3. We realized humans continually grow brain cells.

Until the 1980s, scientists thought adult humans had all the neurons we'd ever have.

Working off previous research, a scientist named Michael Kaplan found neural precursor cells in the brain of an adult monkey, suggesting its brain underwent neurogenesis, or the creation of neurons.

Evidence of adult neurogenesis also appeared in the '90s but without adequate replicability.

Then, in 2013, researchers determined the age of hippocampus cells from deceased individuals. Cells found younger than the individual effectively proved that the human brain does create its own neurons. Conclusively, the brain maintains a steady supply of younger cells — even though humans undergo an overall loss as we age.

(h/t HereForTheFish)             

4. We finally understand how water travels into the cells.

Previously, modern science couldn't quite explain how water traveled so rapidly through cell membranes. They include non-water-soluble phoso-lipid bilayer, which water can't pass through.

Then, in 2003, Peter Agre and Roderick MacKinnon discovered protein channels in the cell membrane, called aquaporins, which allow water to enter the cell. They won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work.

The duo also researched a slew of other channels and valves crucial to our understanding of cell function.

(h/t andGuards)

5. We don't know as much about protons as we thought.

Previously, scientists thought they had the radius of a proton down. But in 2013, an international team of researchers conducted the study again, and they came up with a significantly different number. The new measurement was about 4% smaller than we previously thought. 

That difference, albeit small, presents sort of a puzzle. Either the earlier test was wrong, the new calculation is wrong, or we don't understand quantum electrodynamics — the way light and matter interact — as well as we thought.

(h/t restrider)

6. Brontosaurus isn't a real dinosaur anymore. In fact, it never was.

When you think of a giant plant-eating dinosaur with a lengthy neck, a Brontosaurus probably comes to mind.

But technically, the Brontosaurus doesn't even exist. It actually resulted from a combination of two other dinosaurs: Apatosaurus and Camarasaurus.

The misconception all started with a period in paleontology known as "The Bone Wars." Two paleontologists, Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope, were engaged in a bitter rivalry for evidence of dinosaurs.

In 1877, in the heat of the conflict, Marsh discovered a partial skeleton, unfortunately lacking a head, which he named Apatosaurus. He used the skull of another dinosaur, a Camarasaurus, to finish the replica.

But when Marsh discovered another skeleton two years later, he named it Brontosaurus, when in reality, he had just found a more complete Apatosaurus.

Scientists spotted the mistake in 1903, but the Carnegie Museum didn't replace the head on the skeleton until 1979. Many today still don't know the truth.

(h/t Soulrush)

7. The "God Particle" is real.

As far back as the 1960s, scientists have theorized about the Higgs Boson, or Higgs particle, also called the "God Particle." Its discovery was the final puzzle piece in the Standard Model, a physics theory that attempts to describe the interaction between particles — and thus, explain the creation and existence of all life.

The discovery of the Higgs Boson was of such vital importance that scientists spent 40 years trying to prove (or disprove it). And in 2013, François Englert and Peter W. Higgs finally did. They were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics that year for their work discovering the particle.

(h/t spankybottom)

SEE ALSO: 9 Facts You Learned In School That Are No Longer True

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Immigrants have always come to America, and the source of those immigrants has changed over time.

Via Vox, the Pew Research Center tabulated Census records going back to 1850 to see which countries sent the most immigrants to each state at different points in the country's history.

Pew made maps comparing the biggest sources of immigrants to each state from the 1910 and 2010 censuses. There's a clear shift from European immigrants to Mexican immigrants over the last century:

During the height of emigration from Europe to the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Germany was the largest supplier of immigrants to the U.S. In the second half of the 20th century and the early 21st century, Mexico has become the most common country of origin, with 29% of all immigrants nationwide.

Pew found that this trend also happened at the state level, and they made this GIF showing the states where Germany and Mexico provided the most immigrants over the last century and a half:

SEE ALSO: Here's The REAL List Of US Cities That Immigrants Are Flocking To Like Crazy

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In 1864, a small band of Confederate soldiers launched a surprise attack on St. Albans, Vermont, robbing and burning the small town in an attempt to strike terror into defenseless civilians throughout the north.

The incident is one of the lesser-known chapters of the Civil War. 

"It’s kind of the backwater of Civil War history," James Fouts, a historian of the St. Albans Raid, told Business Insider. "It’s the northernmost Confederate land action during the Civil War, but it takes place way the heck up in Vermont, which is 500 or 600 miles away from where the major scene of the action was taking place down in Virginia and farther south. So it catches people a little bit by surprise that the Confederates were active as far north as northern Vermont."

Confederate Planning

Twenty-one-year-old Confederate Lieutenant Bennett Young was the leader of the St. Albans Raid. Young claimed that a band of Union troops had raided and plundered his Kentucky town, and committed an "outrageous insult" on the woman he planned to marry, according to Oscar A. Kinchen's book "Daredevils of the Confederate Army: The Story of the St. Albans Raiders."

The young woman allegedly died weeks later as a result of the attack, prompting a vengeance-minded Young to enlist in the Confederate Army.

After two years of service with a Kentucky unit, Union troops captured Young in Ohio in 1863. After he escaped from a military prison, Young presented Confederate authorities with a plan to launch surprise raids along the Union’s northern frontier. In order to strike that far north, Young proposed attacking from neutral Canada.

Young and his recruits had official approval from the Confederate government to launch raids against St. Albans and other northern towns, Fouts said.

"Bennett Young was actually encouraged or ordered — if that's the word you want to use — to enlist a group of men, no more than 20, which he did in order to pull off raids across the northern border," said Fouts. "So Bennett Young actually enlisted 23 young men in something called the 5th Company Confederate States of America Retributors. They were officially mustered in as Confederate soldiers with the intent to commit mayhem across the northern border. It was a well-organized conspiracy by the Confederate government." 

Young was commissioned as a first lieutenant and sent by ship to Canada to prepare and carry out raids with his Confederate recruits, other escaped prisoners of war mostly in their early-to mid-20s.

In addition to fulfilling a personal desire for revenge, Young hoped to destroy valuable northern resources, seize plunder for the Confederacy, and force the Union to divert soldiers from southern battlefields to protect their northern frontier.

The raiders chose St. Albans for their first attack. Located 15 miles south of the Canadian border, St. Albans was a busy commercial and manufacturing center with a population of 2,000, according to the St. Albans Raid Commemoration Committee, which has helped created a historical website about the incident.

Between 18 and 22 Confederates disguised their identities and arrived in small groups from Canada over the course of 10 days. The soldiers blended in with the local population and scoped out the town's banks and horse stables. Passing himself off as a charming ministry student Young received a guided tour of the Vermont governor's mansion from the first lady herself, according to the St. Albans Raid Commemoration Committee.

The Raid

At 3 p.m. on Oct. 19, 1864, the raiders confronted the townsfolk outside a hotel and announced their true identities and intentions. "I take possession of this town in the name of the Confederate States of America," Young declared, according to the St. Albans Raid Commemoration Committee.

The pistol-wielding Confederates wore civilian clothing during the raid rather than Confederate uniforms, Fouts said. 

The raiders divided into groups. One was assigned to take residents hostage on the village green while the others robbed three of the town's banks.

"We are Confederate soldiers detailed from General [Jubal] Earley's army to come north and rob and plunder, the same as your soldiers are doing in the Shenandoah Valley and in other parts of the South," announced one raider to townsfolk at the Bank of St. Albans, according to Kinchen's book. "We'll take your money and if you resist, we'll blow your brains out." 

The raiders forced their prisoners to swear an oath "to uphold the Confederacy and its beloved president, Jefferson Davis, and never to do anything to the injury of the Confederate cause, nor to spread alarm of the raid until their captors were well out of town," Kinchen wrote.

At the Franklin County Bank, raiders locked an employee and patron in an airtight vault. A resident who happened to enter the First National Bank tackled one of the raiders to the ground but surrendered when the Confederates drew pistols on him.

"We represent the Confederate States of America," one of the raider's declared. "We have come to retaliate for the acts committed against our people by General [William] Sherman. You have got a very nice village here, and if there is the least resistance, we'll burn it to the ground," according to Kinchen.

While the robberies were taking place, Young and other raiders patrolled the town's main thoroughfare, where they captured all the townspeople they could find. They gathered the hostages on the village green to prevent them from informing nearby factory workers of what was happening.  

The Confederates even shot an elderly man who refused to surrender and another man who tried to stop Young from stealing a horse, although neither wound proved fatal.

Before the raiders departed on stolen horses and saddles, Young ordered his men to set fire to various buildings, using a chemical concoction of highly flammable liquid called Greek Fire.

By the time the band of raiders departed, flames were spreading among buildings and frenzied villagers were hurriedly gathering their own firearms to chase after the Confederates.

A crowd of townsfolk, led by recently discharged Union Captain George Conger, succeeded in wounding two or three of the Confederates during their escape.

The Confederates, for their part, shot and killed one civilian. Ironically, the only fatality of the raid was a worker from out of town who had a reputation for sympathizing with the Confederacy, according to Kinchen.

The Greek Fire only destroyed a single woodshed, but a burning bridge helped the Confederates stay ahead of pursuers and escape back into Canada.

Aftermath

The Confederates were estimated to have stolen $208,000, only $87,000 of which was recovered, according to the St. Albans Raid Commemoration Committee. Fouts said that $208,000 would be about $3.2 million today. "It was a considerable sum of money," he said.

The raid also met its goal of sowing widespread panic along the Union's northern border. "This was a terrorist raid, really," Fouts said. "It scared the pants off of people in St. Albans."

Civilians near the Canadian border feared more raids — but they never came. The raid ended up having little impact on the outcome of the war, which the South was losing anyway.

Posses captured 14 of the Confederates within 24 hours, turning them over to Canadian authorities. Although they stood trial in Canada, none were convicted or extradited, since Canadian judges believed the defendants acted as war combatants.

"During his trial ... he never showed any remorse," said Fouts of raid leader Bennett Young. "He was quite proud of what he did."

Young enjoyed taunting his victims in St. Albans in the days following the raid. He sent payment for his St. Albans hotel room, as well as a letter informing residents that they were now permitted to lower their hands.

At the end of the war in 1865, Young was one of the few Confederate officers not immediately pardoned. While his fellow raiders were allowed to return home, Young studied law in Europe.

He was pardoned in 1868, and returned to Kentucky, where he became a successful attorney, entrepreneur, author, and philanthropist, according to Fouts and the St. Albans Raid Commemoration Committee. 

"[Young] did not publicly speak about the raid a great deal, unless it was among his Confederate veterans — the guys that would understandably know what he was talking about and certainly know the situation in which he found himself," Fouts said.

Young died in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1919. "Even in the later years I don't believe he had any regrets for what he did," Fouts said. 

Young's daughter visited St. Albans in 1964 to attend the unveiling of a memorial plaque, according to the St. Albans Raid Commemoration Committee.

The town will hold a St. Albans Raid 150th Anniversary Commemoration Sept. 18-21, featuring reenactments, walking tours, lectures, and more. 

SEE ALSO: The Most Epic Beards And Mustaches Of The American Civil War

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