Grace O’Malley (Gráinne Ní Mháille) demanded the release of her son, who had been imprisoned by Richard Bingham, Governor of Connacht. Elizabeth agreed, and Bingham was recalled to England. Grace was born in 1530 into the Ó Máille dynasty in the west of Ireland; the daughter of Eoghan Dubhdara Ó Máille. She is well-known historical […]
Aodh Mór Ó Néill (Hugh O’Neill), Earl of Tír Eoghan and Rudhraighe Ó Domhnaill (Rory O’Donnell) Earl of Tír Conaill – modern day Donegal), fled Ireland for the continent with about ninety followers on this day, September 4th, 1607. It’s often said that their flight from Ireland came at the end of the Nine Years […]
Oliver Cromwell, the butcher of Drogheda, died on this day in 1658, having suffered a painful end from a urinary tract infection that caused blood poisoning. Three years after he died, his body was exhumed and ceremonially hanged in chains, and then thrown into a pit, so that his enemies could be sure that he […]
September 2nd is not a day, oddly, on which much of significance happened. It’s the calendar’s version of a slow news day. But on this day in 1901, Vice President Theodore Roosevelt of the United States gave a speech to the Minnesota state fair, in which he uttered a phrase which has long outlived him […]
Martha, the last passenger pigeon, died on this day, September 1st, 1914. With her death, her kind became extinct. The passenger pigeon was driven to extinction by humans, and because they were so easy to catch. As recently as 1850, there were almost a million pigeons in North America. But the passenger pigeon was tasty, […]
Henry VI of England came to the throne on this day, August 31st, 1422, at the age of nine months. His disastrous reign would last 39 years, until it ended with the wars of the roses. His father, Henry V, was amongst the great English Kings, finally unifying the thrones of England and France, which […]
The Zulus never had an independent country again
The sack of Rome, considered by most historians to mark the fall of the Western Roman Empire, happened on this day, August 27th, 410AD. It was the first time in 800 years that Rome had fallen to a foreign enemy. The Empire had been in decline for almost two centuries, with invasions, on and off, […]
The Dublin lock-out began led by Jim Larkin. William Martin Murphy dismissed hundreds of workers who he suspected of membership of the ITGWU. William Martin Murphy, a major employer at the time, was chairman of the Dublin United Tramway Company, owned Clery’s department store, and the Imperial Hotel and controlled the Irish Independent, Evening Herald, […]
Albino Luciani, Cardinal Patriarch of Venice, was elected as Pope John Paul I on this day, August 26th, in 1978. Born in 1912, John Paul I was 65 years old at the time of his election, and in poor health. Though a popular choice amongst the Cardinals at the time of his election, he had […]
Several interesting things happened on August 25th. Most prominently, the date saw the liberation of Paris by the Allies in 1944. But that tale pales into insignificance beside the story of Hugh Glass and the Grizzly Bear. Hugh Glass was an American frontiersman, who lived most of his life in that lawless wilderness of the […]
The long history of anti-semitism in Europe reared its head again on this day, August 24th, 1349, when six thousand Jews were slaughtered in the City of Mainz, Germany, after being blamed for the bubonic plague. The Jews of Europe’s middle ages had a particularly hard time. In 1215, Pope Innocent II issued a decree […]