Fleeing from Holland in the early 1900s, a Dutch officer’s wife named Margaretha Geertruida Zelle changed her name to Mata Hari. At first she became a licentious dancer and later the most notorious spy of World War I. Arrested in her Paris hotel in February 1917, she was shot by a firing squad on October…
The term chauvinism originally referred to Nicolas Chauvin, a French soldier of the Napoleonic era whose devotion to Napoleon was considered excessive and unreasonable. He later appeared in a number of plays and literary works, including Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel (1905), always representing an exaggerated patriotism. The term has since taken on a more general…
Martha Mitchell, wife of Richard M. Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, was known as the Mouth That Roared. She was so called for her sometimes outrageous comments on liberals, protesters, reporters, and other menaces to society.
As the subject of the first children’s book of the same name, the character Goody Two-Shoes helped to usher in the children’s book industry. Goody Two-Shoes was a poor girl, who, when given a pair of shoes, became so happy that she told everyone she met about them. The tale was written by Oliver Goldsmith…
Since the ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher (fifth century B.C.) left no writings behind, it is hard to tell if Pythagoras discovered the Pythagorean theorem. His disciples in the Pythagorean school credited him with the theorem concerning the relative lengths of the sides of a right triangle. But it was probably developed later, when mathematical…
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.