Erle Stanley Gardner wrote 75 “case of the” books, beginning with The Case of the Velvet Claws in 1933 and ending with The Case of the Troubled Trustee in 1965.
Erle Stanley Gardner died in 1970.
At least six actors have played Al Capone: Paul Muni, Rod Steiger, Neville Brand, Jason Robards, Ben Gazzara, and Robert DeNiro. Brand played him twice: in The Scarface Mob (1959) and Spin of a Coin (1962).
The gypsies probably came from India. Romany, the Gypsy language, is Indic; but it is not known when or why the Gypsies left India. Living as aliens in every country, they reached Persia by A.D. 1000 and northwest Europe by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Shirley Temple, aged five, was presented a miniature Oscar statuette “in grateful recognition of her outstanding contributions to screen entertainment during the year 1934 for such films as Stand Up and Cheer, Little Miss Marker, and Bright Eyes.
Wheat, the food base of Western civilization, is by far the most widely grown plant. It has been cultivated for more than 7,000 years in every continent except Antarctica.
For 41 years, under the reign of the Medicis, citizens of Florence, Italy, paid what we now know as an income tax. Called the Scala, the tax was instituted in 1451, supposedly on a progressive scale. The tax turned into an easy type of political blackmail, and as such it was repealed when the court…
The members of the secret brotherhood formed in 1848 exhibited their paintings anonymously with the signature PRB. The founding members were Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais, who were rebelling against the unimaginative academic art of their day. Though the PRB (unmasked in 1850) had a profound influence on Western painting,…