Dangerous Middle East Adventure led him to Writing Desk: The Story of a Former Cold War Spy
“I didn’t have a writing career and didn’t think in those terms. I still don’t. I’ve never really wanted a career in anything. Life’s too short and sweet for that grim, mortgage-in-the suburbs approach”, says John Fullerton, the former spy and journalist who lived and worked in 40 countries and covered a dozen wars.
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General Grant Encounters Terrorism in Madrid: The 1878 Attempted Regicide of King Alfonso XII
When former U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant visited Europe on a post-presidential world tour in the late 1870s political terrorism was in its nascent stage. The International Workingmen’s Association (or First International) split in 1872 between anarchist and statist factions and disbanded in 1876. After that, violence against heads of state increased.
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A Traitor’s Justice: The Execution of the St. Patrick’s Battalion in the Mexican-American War, 1847
Despite overtures to the Catholic Church by American political and military leaders during the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), the need to enforce discipline in theater was paramount to the U.S. Army’s success. When more than seventy Irish-American deserters, known as the Saint Patrick’s Battalion (San Patricios), were captured by U.S. forces in late August of 1847 following the Battle of Churubusco on the outskirts of Mexico City, they were summarily court-martialed. The former U.S. soldiers had been induced by Mexican incentives of free land and money to switch sides and fight for Mexico. Eventually their numbers reached a few hundred. They also fought well and were therefore doubly hated by U.S. Army officers. In contrast, the San Patricios are remembered as heroes in Mexico.
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Medieval Dresses: The Mirror of Medieval Society
There are many ads on the internet offering medieval dresses for sale. That means they are quite popular and have their fans that like to buy them and wear them on certain occasions. What are the reasons for such a fascination with medieval dresses? Well, everyone has their motives, but it’s definitely interesting to immerse in the medieval era and see that medieval dresses weren’t just clothes. Wearing a certain dress meant much more. A dress was a status symbol that defined a woman and who she was. Wearing a certain dress meant showing within which class you belong and how rich and powerful your family was. But, “medieval fashion” was also a reflection of the whole political and social situation during the Middle Ages.
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Norway’s King Sigurd the Crusader, 1089-1130AD
There were numerous Christian crusades to the Holy Land but one of the more fabled was the Norwegian Crusade. Led by King Sigurd I Magnussen (Sigurd the Crusader) in 1107, the three-year crusade was the first led personally by a European king.
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