Or so you might think.

So on this day in 1864, hypothetical-mid-1860s-Vermont-you would have been slightly surprised to find a troupe of 21 renegade Confederate cavalrymen rampaging through Saint Albans, VT, a small village about 15 miles from the Canadian border. The Confederates, led by one Lieutenant Bennett H. Young, climbed up the steps of one of the town’s hotels, announced that St. Albans was now the territory of the Confederate States of America. Then 9 of the Confederates herded the frightened townspeople into the village green while the rest stole their horses and started robbing banks.

Canada—still at that time a province of the British Empire—had declared itself neutral in the War Between the States. This made it a natural destination for Confederate prisoners-of-war who managed to escape from camps in the far North—since Canada was neutral, it wouldn’t extradite them. Bennet Young was one of these, a cavalryman who was captured at the Battle of Salineville, escaped to Canada, and there came up with the idea of enlisting some of his fellow former Confederates in raids against far northern towns. His idea was to (1) make some extra money for the dwindling Confederate treasury, and (2) to force the United States Army to redeploy troops to protect crucial battleground states like, say, Vermont.

Young made his way from Canada back to the Confederacy, where he pitched his ‘Raids from Canada’ idea to his superiors. They gave him some money, made him a lieutenant, and sent him back north to Quebec. On October 10, Young and two fellow Confederates checked into a hotel in St. Albans, telling the proprietor in their blatantly non-Canadian accents that they had come from St. Johns for a “sporting vacation.” Every few days, a couple more of the strange Canadians would show up in town, until finally there were twenty-one, a full platoon. And that’s when Young walked outside and told everyone they were now prisoners of the CSA.

After forcing several of the bank tellers to pledge allegiance to the Confederacy, Young and his men robbed three of the town’s banks and galloped toward the Canadian border with $208,000 in their saddlebags and a single shed in flames behind them (they had planned to torch the town as well, but their homemade Greek fire didn’t work, and the shed was all that caught fire). They crossed the border, where they were promptly arrested by the Canadians.

The US Government demanded that Canada turn Young and company over to them, but the Canadians refused to extradite them on the grounds that Young’s raid had been a military action, rather than just a well-run bank robbery. The Canadians gave most of the money back to Vermont, and Young and his men waited out the rest of the war in Canada.

People Seek Shelter in the Peshtigo River (From an 1871 Harpers Weekly illustration)

On this night in 1871, long before Smokey the Bear, before the National Park Service, back before you, and only you, could prevent forest fires, two massive fires broke out on the shores of Lake Michigan. One you’ve probably heard of: the Great Chicago fire, later blamed, unfairly, on Mrs. O’Leary and her klutzy cow.

The other one you probably haven’t. At almost exactly the same time that Bessie wasn’t kicking over a lantern and torching downtown Chicago, the worst fire disaster the US has ever seen annihilated the lumber town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin, killing anywhere from 1200 to 2500 people and torching a million acres of forest and farmland.

I bring up that about Smokey the Bear and the Park Service as a way of pointing out that the rural Great Lakes, circa 1871, had a very different attitude toward public fire safety than we do today. Farmers and woodcutters set fires constantly—cook fires, camp fires, rubbish fires, accidental fires—and they weren’t always terribly conscientious about putting them out or keeping them from spreading. So when, on the night of October 8, 1871, a strong west wind blew across Wisconsin, there were a lot of small forest fires for it to blow into a lot of very, very dry trees.

It’s hard to wrap your mind around the sheer apocalyptic fury of the firestorm that followed. In their book on the disaster, Firestorm at Peshtigo: A Town, its People, and the Worst Fire Disaster in American History, Denise Grass and William Lutz describe it like this:

“A firestorm is called nature’s nuclear explosion. Here’s a wall of flame, a mile high, five miles wide, traveling 90 to 100 miles an hour, hotter than a crematorium, turning sand into glass.

There aren’t many good places to wait out a firestorm, but Peshtigo, located in the middle of the dense Wisconsin forest, was about the worst place imaginable. Everything in the town was flammable. The buildings were made of wood. The sidewalks were made of planks. The streets were covered in sawdust. And the town, remember, was in the middle of a forest. Which was burning. The fire burned so hot at the center of town that it generated whirlwinds that threw houses into the air. People jumped into the Peshtigo River to escape the flames and were boiled alive. And then the flames jumped over several miles of Green Bay to burn the other side.

By the time the smoke cleared, twelve communities were gone and at least 1200 people were dead. Peshtigo had lost more than half of its population. So many people were dead, in fact, that there weren’t enough survivors to identify the bodies, and most of the bodies had to be buried in unmarked graves.

The tragedy was the worst fire disaster in American history and, in terms of lives lost, probably the the third worst natural disaster overall, after the 1905 Galveston Hurricane and Hurricane Katrina. It was so horrifically, stupendously bad, in fact, that during World War II Allied scientists studied Peshtigo as a paradigm for how a firestorm might be artificially created if someone wanted to burn, oh, Tokyo or someplace like that. They built fully furnished test villages in the Utah desert and practiced started fires for maximum firestorm effect. They eventually got it right, and at Dresden in 1945 started a firestorm that killed more people than either of the bombings of Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

So if Peshtigo was so bad, why was it so completely overshadowd by the Chicago Fire? Well, for one thing, while the Chicago’s fire failed to feature a huge freaking fireball in the middle of downtown, Chicago, unlike Peshtigo, was an important city, one which people outside the Midwest had actually heard of. Also unlike Peshtigo, it was intricately by numerous railroad and telegraph lines connected to the rest of the US—Peshtigo, by contrast, had one telegraph line, and the fire burned it up. Add the apocryphal story about the O’Leary’s cow, and the Chicago Fire was set to become national legend, while Peshtigo slipped into Overlooked History.

So a bunch of angry, angry armchair (and non-armchair) scientists sent out a lot of angry, angry letters-to-editors accusing the Post Office of fostering scientific illiteracy by promoting the obsolete ‘brontosaurus’ (no one seemed to care about the Pteranadon mistake). With the zeal of lab-coated maiasauras protecting their poor, defenseless eggs from the oviraptors of bad science, they demanded that the Postal Service recall the stamps. To save the children.

The Postal Service, with the tenacity of an defiant Ankylosaur, stuck to their guns:

Although now recognized by the scientific community as Apatosaurus, the name Brontosaurus was used for the stamp because it is more familiar to the general population. Similarly, the term “dinosaur” has been used generically to describe all the animals, even though Pteranadon was a flying reptile.

Which cuts to the heart of why the whole debate was stupid: while people argued about a petty naming controversy, they missed this:

When the Postal Service launched their grand move to foster scientific literacy, they did it as a tie-in with Disney World (whose 28th Anniversary was also today) and with Spielberg’s Land Before Time.

And as anyone who grew up in the 90s—or has children who grew up in the 90s, or was alive in the 90s—should be aware, the four ‘dinosaurs’ featured on the stamps were, of course, the four most memorable in Land Before Time. So I think we can assume that the people who designed the stamp campaign—the one to make kids care about science!—were working under the ‘if it was in that Spielberg movie, it must be a dinosaur’ approach to taxonomy.

Needless to say, no one bitched about that. God Bless America.

Meanwhile,Harold, sitting in London, had a huge problem. Two huge problems, actually. Because at the same moment that Harald and his horde of 15,000 Vikings was marching down from Scotland, Duke William “The Bastard” of Normandy was sitting across the Channel with his own army, waiting for an opportune time to cross. Willam had declared his own claim to the throne of England and gathered an army to go enforce it. He’d already been driven back once by storms, buying Harold some time. But he was clearly coming.

So Harold, sitting in London, was going to have to march north to defeat Harald, and then turn around, march back past London, and stop William before he reached the capitol.

And he did it. In one of the most incredible examples of military endurance and sheer ballsiness in history, King Harold took his army of Saxons on a headlong forced march north to Yorkshire, a distance which, today, is about 211 miles up the M1. He did this, you understand, in four days. Which is about 50 miles march a day, through medieval England, a place not reknowned for the quality of its roads. His army marched so fast that, on this day in 1066, they managed to catch King Harald and the Vikings completely by surprise. Harold caught Harald at Stamford Bridge, still on the march. And marching soldier generally didn’t wear armor. In fact, most of Harald’s soldiers didn’t even have their armor with them—they’d sent it ahead of them on the longships that were tailing the army down the coast.

Armorless, the Vikings began to cross Stamford Bridge, only to find Harold’s army waiting. The Saxons charged, and the front half of the Viking army broke and ran. Some accounts say that the only Viking to hold position was a giant Norseman who held the Saxons off the bridge by swinging a GIGANTIC AXE, and that he was only killed–yes, really, this is the accepted story–by one of Harold’s men who floated under the bridge on a barrel and stabbed him through the boards on the bridge. This bought the Vikings enough time to form a shield wall, and they managed to hold off Harold’s army for a while.

But they still didn’t have any armor, so it was only a matter of time before the Saxons broke their line, and once that happened, the battle was over. Harald, the last great king of the Vikings, was killed by an arrow to the throat, and the age of Vikings died with him. For hundreds of years, the Norse peoples had fought the Saxons–and the Angles, and each other–for control of England, fighting and settling until large swaths of Northern England spoke Danish. Harald’s death marked the end of those days. The remnants of his army negotiated a truce with Harold, and 24 of the original 300 longboats limped back to Norway. And that was the end of that.

Harold, as it happened–and here we’re slipping into Very Not Overlooked History–didn’t get much time to enjoy his victory. He turned his army around and rushed south to confront the inevitable invasion from Normandy. Two weeks and hundreds of miles later, his exhausted army met William’s Normans (who were also, technically, Norse themselves, although they’d been living in France a long time and spoke French) at Hastings. The battle was  up in the air–the Saxons may even have been winning–when an arrow popped through the eye-slit of Harold’s helmet. And that was the end of that. William was crowned King of England on Christmas Day at Westminister Abby. He spent six years getting the rest of the country under his control, depopulating the native nobility and giving their lands and titles to his supporters, and ushering in an age of French cultural hegemony that would last for almost 300 years.

So that’s it for Vikings. Next time, back to video game history and guys getting run over by newfangled machinery.

On this day in 1889, ninety-eight years before a pixellated plumber named Mario began his first epic quest to save the Princess Peach from the brutish Donkey Kong, a young Japanese businessman named Fusajiro Yamauchi founded the company now known as Nintendo to sell hand-painted hanafuda playing cards.

Hanafuda—and Japanese card games in general—have a bit of a curious history. There wasn’t much popular card-playing—or gambling—in Japan until the 1450s. That was when the Jesuit priest and future saint Francisco of Javier landed in Japan with a copy of the Gospel and—more importantly—a deck of Portuguese-style playing cards. In the next eighty years, gambling with Western cards became enormously popular—so popular, in fact, that when the military dictators of the Tokugawa Shogunate closed Japan off from the West in 1633, they banned gambling and Western cards as well.

The matter might have ended there, and the Japanese fascination with playing cards might have gone down in history as a brief fad. But the Tokugawas had underestimated the new Japanese love for betting on cards. When Western cards became illegal, enterprising Japanese gamblers started inventing their own card games. These would be popular—and legal—for a while, and then the Tokugawas would figure out that they were being used for gambling and ban them too.

By the time the government began to relax the gambling prohibition, the last game standing was Hanafuda, which fused Japanese art and playing styles with Western-style cards. Unlike Western cards, Hanafuda cards have no numbers: there are twelve suits—each named after a month—each containing four cards with similar pictures. To this day, Nintendo—which means “Leave luck to heaven,” reflecting the company’s early association with gambling—still sells playing cards in Japan.

In the 50s, Nintendo CEO Hiroshi Yamauchi (Fusajiro’s grandson—every Nintendo CEO, with the exception of the most recent, has been somehow related to the founder) realized that the company was never going to be REALLY, REALLY BIG as long as they were just making playing cards. Using new capital from a franchising deal with Disney, he started expanding into a variety of bizarre new ventures—a cab company, an instant rice brand, even (and I am so totally not even remotely making this up) a chain of sex hotels, which Yamauchi himself was said to frequent sans wife. (In a nice nod to history, today some Japanese sex hotels have begun offering Nintendo Wii rental along with your hourly-charged room).

Had any of these succeeded, Nintendo might today be known primarily as an instant rice company—or, perhaps, a sketchy sex hotel company—and my generation would not have grown up playing Super Mario Brothers.

But as luck would have it, all of those ventures failed. Nintendo was near bankruptcy when Yamauchi decided to use the company’s relationship with toy retailers—cemented by sixty years of card sales—to break into the Japanese toy market. This wasn’t especially successful either—but it did lead to Nintendo’s experimentation in the 70s with new brands of electronic toys, including the ‘laser guns’ that would make games like “Duck Hunt” possible. This, in turn, led them into the video game market—and the rest, as they say, is Overlooked History.

Harald in the middle of his life, complete with awesome beard. Courtesy of (and rights to) Mitch Brewer.

Today in 1066, the Viking King Harald Hardrada launched his invasion of England with a crushing victory over the militia of King Harold Godwinson, kicking off a three-way war for the English crown.

When Harald showed up in Northern England with 300 longships and fifteen thousand Viking warriors, he justified his invasion with the dubious claim that he was actually the rightful king of England. There was actually some (really, really weak) basis for this, having something to do with a deathbed agreement between one of Harald’s oddly named relatives and the former king of Norway. But the real reason for the invasion seems to have just been that Harald was the kind of man who liked invading places.

As a young man, Harald had fled Norway after being on the losing side of one of the periodic wars of succession, heading east with his picturesque band of ragtag Viking adventurers into Russia, where he fought for Prince Yaroslav of Kiev against the Poles. Later, he headed south to the Byzantine Empire, where he served for almost a decade in the Emperor’s (mostly Viking) Varangian Guard, participating with bloody distinction in the invasions of Bulgaria and Sicily. Finally, in 1045, with Yaroslav’s daughter on his arm and a lot of money in his pocket that he may or may not have stolen from the Byzantine Emperor, he headed home to Norway. After some behind the scenes wrangling with his family, Harald announced himself king.

While Harald wasn’t an especially popular king, he was effective, cementing his claim to the throne of Norway by (a) making it illegal for anyone but people named Harald Hardrada to field a hird, or standing army, and (b) killing anyone who got in his way. Then, as the one and only power in Norway, he invaded Denmark, claiming—all together now—that he was the rightful king.

Perhaps you’re starting to notice a pattern here. But by Harald’s time, after hundreds of years of Viking invasions of virtually every country in Europe, many of the ruling families and nobility of England, France, Denmark, Scandinavia, and parts of Russia were related. So ‘invasions’ weren’t really invasions in the modern sense—not in the way, say, that the Nazis invaded France or Napoleon invaded Russia. They were much more like large-scale coups d’etat: someone like Harald shows up in someplace like England or Denmark, fights a couple of battles and kills or exiles (preferably kills) the old king. The strength of his army and his claim convinces the feudal nobility and the Church to support him, he becomes king in the old king’s place, and everyone goes about their business as before. Very tidy.

Or at least, that was how it was supposed to go. But after fifteen years of unpopular, stalemated war in Denmark, Harald finally admitted to himself that it wasn’t working. And that was when the inimitably named Tostig Godwinson, King Harold of England’s brother, sent Harald a message saying that if Harald invaded England, Tostig could guarantee that the chieftains of England would support his claim.

And Harald, you’ll remember, was a man who liked invading.

So Harald landed in England with his army, and Tostig and his supporters joined him. Harald routed one of Harold’s armies at Fulford, and headed for York to win a quick victory of Harold and take the throne.

But as luck would have it, at the same time Duke William the Bastard of Normandy was readying an army for his own invasion. He had tried to cross the channel once already, on September 12, but had been driven back by storms. So as Harald rushed south toward York, and Harold—who had been expecting an invasion from Normandy—tried to raise an army to fight him off, William sat with his fleet in Normandy, waiting for the right time to invade.

Will Harald beat Harold? Will Harold beat Harald? Will Will beat Harald and Harold? And most importantly, will you cheat and check Wikipedia for the answer to all these questions, or will you stay tuned till Friday for Part II: Harald on Harold?

To be continued.

Laugh-In‘s catch-phrase was “sock it to me,” and the show’s producers liked to feature brief clips of noted celebrities or politicians saying it. Laugh-In got to show its power to make famous people say silly things, and the famous people got to make themselves look cool in front of the show’s mostly young audience of millions. Same principle as SNL today. Everyone won. So when Nixon was campaigning in California in 1968, one of the shows writers, Paul Keyes, talked him into appearing.

This was an unlikely appearance for Nixon, who—aware of how much television had hurt him in the 1960 election against Kennedy—tended to avoid TV appearances as much as possible. Most of his aides advised him against it. Keyes was a friend of Nixon’s, and somehow convinced him to take a break from a press conference to film a short cameo, in which Nixon looked at the camera and said ‘Sock it to me?”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCp8Edp4pfo

Actually, that’s not quite accurate. Take after take, Nixon kept saying “Sock it to me!” angrily, which the producer didn’t like. Finally, he tried it with an upturned inflection— “sock it to meeee?” —making it a question. The producer loved it.

He loved it so much, in fact, that he thought that Democratic candidate and former VP Hubert Humphrey should go on the show, saying something like, “I’ll sock it to ya, Dick!” or “Good idea!” But Humphrey, in the manner of so many politicians who have missed the power of new media, declined. Or more accurately, his handlers declined, saying that it wouldn’t be a dignified thing for a presidential candidate to do. And they were right, because when the clip aired before millions of viewers, it made Richard Milhouse Nixon, a man whose name was synonymous with ‘uptight, stodgy politician’ look almost, well . . . human. Nixon was paid $230 for his appearance, and went on to win the ’68 election.

It’s impossible, of course, to say whether his Laugh-In appearance won Nixon the election, effectively ending forty years of more-or-less liberal control of the government, just as it’s impossible to say whether his poor showing in the 1960 televised debates lost him that election. But George Schlatter, creator of Laugh-In, liked to quote Hubert Humphrey as saying that not appearing may have lost the Democrats the 1968 election.

And Nixon, Schlatter said on a PBS documentary called Satire and Parody; Sock it to Me? “said the rest of his life that appearing on Laugh-In is what got him elected.

“And I believe that. And I’ve had to live with that.”

Huskisson gets run over

There aren’t very many good days to get run over by a train, but British Minister William Huskisson picked a spectacularly bad one.

On this day in 1830, Huskisson went back to his home district of Liverpool to attend the opening of the Liverpool-Manchester Railroad. This was a hugely important moment for British industry, as it linked the mills in Manchester—seat of the English Industrial Revolution—to the port of Liverpool, meaning that goods could be moved, cheaply and reliably, from factory to ship. This was the first reliably timetabled intercity rail line anywhere, ever, and everyone worth knowing in British politics and industry showed up. The Duke of Wellington—who was also Prime Minister—and assorted politicians, capitalists—everyone. It was a big, auspicious day.

And then Huskisson had to go and become the first famous person to get run over by a train.

Huskisson had served a long and distinguished career representing Liverpool in the House of Commons, where he was instrumental in dismantling much of the old mercantilist trade laws in favor of ones that would help to usher in the new age of capitalism and free trade. The new age signaled by the opening of the LMR.

So when, as part of the ceremony, the locomotive Northumbrian headed from Liverpool toward Manchester, Huskisson was on it. And when the train stopped in the small town of Parkside to refill its water tanks, and several passengers—including the Duke of Wellington—got off, Huskisson saw this as an opportunity to go play some politics. He started to get off the train.

But unfortunately—for Huskisson, if not for this column—it was at this moment that the Rocket, a steam locomotive, was speeding toward the Northumbrian on a parallel track. Huskisson—aware, no doubt, that trains kill—didn’t get out of the train. Instead, he hung on to the open door, waiting for the Rocket to pass. But he misjudged the distance between the two tracks, and the Rocket slammed into the door, knocking Huskisson off balance and onto the track. Under the Rocket. Which ran over his legs. The conductor detached the Northumbrian from the rest of the train and sped with Huskisson to the nearest doctor, where he died a few hours later.

Huskisson was the third person to die after getting hit by a train—not the first, as is sometimes reported (by no less than The Guardian, who really should know). But he was the first really famous person to die after getting hit by a train.

He also seems to be the first to have seen the train coming. The first casualty, killed in 1821, was a carpenter walking home in a “blinding sleet storm” when he was fatally surprised by a locomotive. The second, a “female, name unknown,” killed in 1827, seems to have been blind, although, for obvious reasons, no one managed to ask her after the accident.

The moral of all this, I suppose, being: Trains kill.

And they love to keep the element of surprise.

De Rijk was a large man, and he managed to hold the museum guards off long enough to slash the painting more than a dozen times while shouting, by way of apology, “I have been sent by the Lord! I have been forced to do this by forces out of this Earth!”

The guards finally wrestled De Rijk to the ground, and he was later committed to a mental home by the magistrate, who apparently rejected God’s role in attacking the national treasure. De Rijk later committed suicide. After a four-year restoration process, the painting went back up, this time under permanent guard. Which was lucky, because it meant that when, in 1990, another Dutchman sprayed acid on the painting from a concealed bottle, the guards were able to douse the painting with water quickly enough to avoid permanent damage.

De Rijk wasn’t the first person to attack The Night Watch. He wasn’t even the first Dutch person. Or the first to do it with a knife. That distinction went to “a discharged naval cook named Sigrist,” who, we are told in a gnomically worded 1911 New York Times article, “with a knife deliberately slashed the masterpiece,” apparently as revenge for his discharge from the navy.

The 1956 detonation at Maralinga was only one minor instance in a long-running series of hundreds of experiments between 1955 and 1963 that were used to definitively resolve important questions like (1) how powerful British nukes were or (2) what happens when you light a nuke on fire (it explodes).

Semi-relatedly, on this date in 1967, Gibraltar, in a transparent effort to avoid, at all costs, the hazards of becoming a former colony of Great Britain, voted 12,138 to 44 to stay connected.