After all his narrow escapes, what finally caused Harry Houdini’s death?
Acute appendicitis overcame the former Erich Weiss known as Harry Houdini on October 31, 1926, Halloween.
He was 52 years old.
By the time of his death in 323 B.C., Alexander III, king of Macedonia, had conquered Persia, Syria, Phoenicia, Egypt, Bactria, Bukhara, and the Punjab. His armies marched as far as India. He was thirty-three when he died.
Constantine XI, who ruled from 1448 to 1453, was the last Byzantine emperor. He died fighting the Turks in the battle for Constantinople, which ended in the fall of the nearly 1,100-year-old Byzantine Empire.
In 1963, unemployed twenty-two-year-old Ernesto Miranda was arrested for stealing $8 from a bank employee in Phoenix, Arizona. While in custody, he was picked from a lineup by a young woman who said he had kidnapped and raped her. After two hours of interrogation, the police gained a confession from Miranda. The U.S. Supreme Court…
Mongkut of Siam, the king in The King and I, had 9,000 wives and concubines. King Solomon, by contrast, had only 700.
Tokyo Rose was a Japanese American named Iva d’Aquino (b. 1916) known for her World War II radio broadcasts aimed at weakening the morale of U.S. servicemen. Convicted of treason after the war, she received a presidential pardon in 1977. She had several counterparts, all known as Axis Sally and all broadcasting to GIs in…
The last viceroy of India was not Lord Mountbatten. Louis Mountbatten (1900-1979) was India’s last British viceroy, or governor general, from August 1947 to June 1948. Chakravarti Raj agopalachari (1879-1972) then served as governor-general of India’s interim government from June 1948 to January 1950, when the position was abolished.