The plague took the lives of million of Europeans from the 14th until the 17th century. In England, its destruction stayed mainly in the south of England concentrating around the poor quarters of London. But for one small village in England’s rural north, the plague would be devastating and historic. The case of the small village of Eyam in Derbyshire is famed throughout England and serves in the modern age of an example of the importance of self quarantine in the face of deadly disease.
During that time, the small village of Eyam with a population of approximately 700 people lost 260 of its inhabitants to the plague. The plague affected 76 different families and wiped out a few of them forever. Many households had only a single survivor who lived to tell the tale of those terrible months. 
As hundreds of scientists from around the world were conscripted in the Manhattan Project during the thick of Word War II, the best and brightest were passed along to the top-secret research site in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the secrets of the world’s first atom bomb would soon be unlocked.
Though the US Army heavily patrolled the site and sensitive documents were kept under lock and key, Los Alamos was far from leak proof. The researchers themselves, highly prized for their brilliance and unique areas of expertise, could not be explicitly ruled out of service due to any supposed political leanings. Even the “Father of the Atomic Bomb,” Robert Oppenheimer, was known to keep company with known Communists and under surveillance by the FBI during his involvement in the project.
Meanwhile, another Los Alamos team member, theoretical physicist Klaus Fuchs, while a staunch anti-fascist, had been a member of the Communist Party in his native Germany. After fleeing to Britain to escape the Nazis, he was loaned out to the Manhattan Project in 1943 and, in short order, became a valuable asset to the team. To this day, Fuchs is credited with several key calculations that would prove essential to making the bomb a reality.
After the project disbanded in 1946, however, Fuchs switched sides and spent the next two years passing secrets to Soviets that included a method for refining uranium and diagrams for the construction of a hydrogen bomb. At the same time, the Central Intelligence Agency was projecting that the Soviets would be incapable of going nuclear until the mid-1950s. When the USSR conducted their first successful atomic test in 1949, a stunned President Truman initially declared that the explosion must have been an “accident.”
Fuchs was exposed the following year after US Intelligence decrypted messages implicating him as a traitor. He confessed immediately, leading to a rash of similar revelations from other Los Alamos workers. An Army corporal who worked the base, David Greenglass, revealed that he too sold secrets to the Soviets, including schematics of Fat Man, the atom bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. In strange confluence of events, he was able to receive a reduced sentence in exchange for testifying against his own sister and her husband — who happened to be none other than Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Both were found guilty and executed, sparking one of the opening salvos of the Cold War and leading to a controversy that lingers to this day.
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On August 24th, 1926, eighty thousand people broke into a riot at the corner of Broadway and 66th Street in New York City. More than two hundred policemen were dispatched to the scene and an emergency hospital was erected on site to tend to those injured by glass from broken windows or trampled as the crowd surged through the sidewalks.
Meanwhile, Valentino’s body was shrouded in gold cloth, placed in a wicker basket, and whisked to the Campbell Funeral Parlor at Broadway and 66th. Though the press announced the actor was to lie in state beginning at four o’clock the following afternoon, mourners soon began to congregate at the corner. By the following morning, tens of thousands of those who had come to pay their last respects — the vast majority of which happened to be women — stood four wide in a line that stretched for eleven blocks. 
As police tried to rearrange the crowd into a single file, more orderly fashion, mourners spilled in street, losing clothes and shoes along the way and rushing the door as deliveries of flowers poured in. High theatrics transpired inside the funeral parlor as well with approximately one hundred and thirty-eight people a minute viewing the corpse of Rudolph Valentino and many a brokenhearted girl fainting at its sight. Only fanning the flames of this mass hysteria were an honor guard of Fascist Blackshirts, reputedly dispatched by Bennito Mussolini himself to protect the body of the Italian-born film star. The remembrance’s roster of physical clashes was complete once a faction of New York anti-fascists arrived to face down their opposition.
Bonnie Prince Charlie, or Charles Edward Louis Philip Casimir Stuart, was the son of the executed English King, James Stuart. Charlie was brought up a Roman Catholic and was taught to believe that the Stuarts were the true ruling family of England and Scotland. From his birth the Prince was at the center of the Jacobite revolt and he was trained in the military arts so that he would be able to lead his own army to war and reclaim his rightful kingdom. 
Unfortunately at The Battle of Culloden on the 16th April 1746 the Jacobite army was defeated by William Aufustus, the Duke of Cumberland. Thousands of Jacobites were killed but the Prince managed to escape with a bounty of £30,000 or $1 million on his head. After the battle Charlie fled to the Island of Benbecula, where Flora MacDonald lived.
Flora gave her own account of what happened: “After Miss MacDonald (with some difficulty) agreed to undertake the dangerous enterprise, she set out for Clanranald’s house, Saturday, June 21st and at one of the fords was taken prisoner by a party of militia, she not having a passport. She demanded to whom they belonged? And finding by the answer that her stepfather was then commander, she refused to give any answer till she should see their captain. So she and her servant, (Neil MacKechan), and another woman, Bettie Burk, a good spinster, and whom he recommended as such in a letter to his wife at Armadale in Sky, as she had much lint to spin. If her stepfather (Hugh MacDonald of Armadale) had not granted Miss a passport she could not have undertook her journey and voyage. Armadale set his stepdaughter at liberty, who immediately made the best of her way to Clanranald’s house and acquainted the Lady Clanranald with the scheme, who supplied the Prince with apparel sufficient for his disguise, viz. a flower’d gown, a white apron, ect., and sent some provisions along with him.”
It is said that the during the journey the Prince sung Flora many songs including ‘The King shall enjoy his own again’
Many historians have often asked the question of whether or not World War II could have been avoided. Some scholars of military history point to the British led policy of appeasement that existed just before the war and culminated with the Munich Agreement on September 29, 1938, as one way in which the allies failed to realize the threat of Hitler’s regime.
Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933 and immediately set about reversing all the conditions of the Versailles Treaty. Neighboring nations complained but did not take military action against Hitler when he began to build the new German, remilitarize the Rhineland or even annex Austria (Anschluss) in March of 1938.
On September 29, 1938, Hitler met with British leader Neville Chamberlain and French leader Edouard Daladier. The meeting was mediated by Italian leader Benito Mussolini and ended in an agreement which Hitler drafted and the other leaders simply agreed to. The treaty stated that the German people of Czechoslovakia in an area known as the Sudetenland would be annexed to Germany in stages during October of the same year. This was in line with Hitler’s policy of Lebensraum and uniting all German peoples every where.
