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The Story Behind Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was not a children’s author. Not an author at all. He was a mathematician, and was more at home with numbers than words. Dodgson was a bachelor living in the college town of Oxford, England. In 1856, Christ Church, where he was a member, had a new dean appointed. Henry Liddell, a classical scholar of some renown, and his wife and children moved into town. Dodgson and the Liddells struck up a friendship, and was especially friendly with their children. Although he had none of his own, Dodgson seemed to have a way with children and charmed them with his ability to tell whimsical stories. One bright…
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Mary Seacole
Born Mary Jane Grant in 1805 in Kingston, Jamaica, Mary Seacole became one of the most important nurses in the Crimean War. She was the daughter of a free black Jamaican woman who was skilled in traditional medicine and a Scottish soldier. Mary learned her mother’s traditional remedies and gained a reputation as a ‘skilful nurse and doctress’ working in a boarding house caring for invalid soldiers and their wives. She married Edwin Horatio Seacole in 1836, and with her husband travelled to the Bahamas, Haiti and Cuba. While there, she studied local medicines and treatments and added them to her repertoire. Her husband died in 1844, and Mary was…
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The Great Storm of 1854
In 1853, Britain was embroiled with its allies in an invasion of the Crimean peninsula in order to destroy the naval base at Sevastopol. It was four on one fight of Britain, France, the Otttoman Empire and Sardinia against Russia, which was making territory incursions into Modavia and Wallachia in the Balkans. This war turned into a three year slog which was characterized as a “notoriously incompetent international butchery” by historian Alexis Troubetkoy. By the fall of 1854, the supply situation for both sides were looking bleak. The Allies had only prepared for a summer campaign, so winter supplies were badly needed. A fleet, of both British and French ships,…
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Princess Louise- The Rebel Princess
Born the sixth child and fourth daughter to the famously moral Queen Victoria and her consort Prince Albert, Louisa Caroline Alberta had a lot to live up to. She consistently bucked the traditions of the day and the feisty princess was popular with the public. Her mother not so much. Victoria wrote to her older daughter Vicky in 1864, “God bless the dear child – who is so affectionate and has so many difficulties to contend with, I hope and trust she will get over them… and still become a most useful member of the human family.” “Loosy”, as she was called by relatives, was born on March 18, 1848,…
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Dr. John Snow- The father of modern epidemiology
Clean water is essential for life. Without it, we die quickly of horrible diseases. As modern life progressed, our cities got dirtier and dirtier. Cities realized quickly they needed to do something to get the streets cleaner. In 1858, the city of Chicago even had all of its buildings lifted four feet to make room for a sewer. Other cities followed suit, which was good. One problem. Most of the sewers emptied into water sources. The water in Chicago, for example, was so bad that dead fish would show up in bath water. Residents nicknamed their water “chowder”. The introduction of the flush toilet made the water supply worse. It…
