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William Wallace
William Wallace’s birth and early life are very much shrouded in mystery. Some sources state he was the younger son of a minor Scottish land-owner, Malcolm Wallace, born in Elderslie near Paisley. Sir Malcolm was documented to have had three sons, Malcolm Jr, William and John. However, based on his seal on a letter sent to King Philip IV, a Crown tenant, Alan Wallace was his father, he was from the similar sounding Ellerslie near Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, and this is backed up by Alan Wallace’s signature on the 1296 Ragman Roll, which William refused to sign. His age is also disputed with a birthdate range of 1270 to 1276. The…
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Marie Laveau The Voodoo Queen of New Orleans
When you think of New Orleans, Louisiana, most people automatically think of Jazz music, Great food, Mardi Gras, Bourbon Street, but we can’t forget about Voodoo and the Voodoo Queen herself Marie Laveau. She is probably one of New Orleans greatest Historical figures and what we know about her life is very little. Let me explain about Voodoo a little first. I am not going to dwell on it to much right now, maybe in a later post. Voodoo was brought to French Louisiana during the colonial period by workers and slaves from West Africa and later by slaves and free people of colour who were among the refugees from…
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Gráinne Ní Mháille or Grace O’Malley
In honor of Talk Like a Pirate Day, I decided to dedicate today’s post to one of the best. Grace O’Malley was a queen, a pirate and all around bad ass. She went toe to toe with Queen Elizabeth I and won. Not many people did that. Gráinne, or Grace as it was Anglicized, was born in 1530 on the west coast of Ireland to Owen O’Malley, a wealthy trader, seafarer and chieftain. Legend says that as a teenager she begged her father to let her serve with him aboard his ships. He told her no saying her hair would get caught in the rigging. The next day, she showed…
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The Winter Queen: Elizabeth Stuart
Born into the royal Stuart family of Scotland, Elizabeth was brought up as a princess and taught to be a future queen. It was on August 19 of 1596 that Elizabeth was brought into this world by her father, King James IV of Scotland (not yet the king of England or Ireland) and mother, Anne of Denmark. She was the second eldest child of 7, only preceded by her elder brother, Henry, Prince of Wales. If only she knew that life would not always be about pampering and extravagance, life as it were for Elizabeth was a struggle. Up until the age of 7 Elizabeth had been placed in the…
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Publius Vergilius Maro aka Virgil
Publius Vergilius Maro was born of peasant stock in 70 BCE, but managed to rise into the upper echelon of Roman society by the time of his death in 19 BCE. He is best known for his epic poem The Aeneid, which was unfinished at the time of his death. It was this epic commissioned by Augustus Caesar outlined the founding of Rome by a Trojan refugee and gave Rome its sense of destiny and history, which the young empire lacked compared to the older civilizations of the age.Virgil was twenty when th [...]
