Infinite Wisdom

"All Quiet Along the Potomac. A Picket Shot."

La Triviata

• The Vinegar Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, where the landmark Quarters A of the old Navy Yard still stands, was named after the Battle of Vinegar Hill, June 21, 1798, in County Wexford, Ireland, the decisive engagement in the British defeat of the United Irishmen.
• Following the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 23, 1939, Soviet Vozhd Joseph Stalin did a favor for his new friend Nazi Führer Adolph Hitler, sending him 570 German communists who were wanted by the Third Reich, which incidentally also saved him the bother of murdering them himself.
• An outbreak of yellow fever in 1799 caused the deaths of 875 of the approximately 4,000 troops in the Spanish garrison of Veracruz, Mexico, while 358 other men deserted in the hope of escaping the disease.
• On January 7, 1782, the British cabinet ordered the capture of Havana by combined Royal Navy and Army forces concentrating from Britain, Ireland, North America, and the West Indies, which was accomplished after a 147 day siege which lasted from June 6 to August 13.
• In 1588, while an Italian gentleman was carrying a letter from Torquato Tasso and a copy of his latest work as a gift to a high churchman, the bandits who captured him near Mantua immediately sent the man on his way with the letter, but kept the book, as they wished to read it for themselves, the poet being very popular among Italy’s briganti.
• HMS Prince of Wales, the battleship sunk so spectacularly by Japanese naval aircraft off Malaya on December 10, 1941, was ordered as King Edward VIII, only to be renamed even before she was laid down, when that worthy abdicated.
• Although the state was very segregated, in 1900 nearly 850 of Georgia’s approximately 10,400 militiamen were African-Americans, who formed a battalion of infantry and a battery of artillery.

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