Annie Oakley died on November 3, 1924 from pernicious anemia. Her life is a testament to the strength and determination of American frontierswomen. Skilled with weapons and equal to many of her male counterparts, Annie Oakley remains an integral part of western history.
It was in 1885 that the star crossed (or rifle crossed) couple joined the famous Buffalo Bill Wild West Show. 
There are many characters in our society we are familiar with whether from books and comic books or television and movies. One of the characters we know from a variety of media is Conan the Barbarian but little is known about how he came into being. Conan is a character from the sword and sorcery genre created by a writer from Texas named Robert E. Howard in 1932. Howard’s Conan stories began as a series of articles submitted to the fantasy magazine Weird Tales. Howard’s influences ranged from the Greek writer Plutarch to the mythology works of Thomas Bulfinch. Howard wrote many more Conan stories over the next 4 year completing 21 stories.
Robert E. Howard committed suicide in 1936 after a combination of depression and the unrecoverable coma his mother entered (she died the day after Howard committed suicide). In the years after Howard’s death the Conan copyright changed hands several times and eventually wound up in the hands of L. Sprague De Camp and Lin Carter. They revised the Howard stories and sometimes rewrote them.
Conan books have been written and published by various different authors over the last 50 years, many of them trying to imitate the style of Robert E. Howard. The original Conan stories written by Howard were allowed to go out of print and were unavailable in their original form. In 2003 the original Howard stories were collected and printed by British Publisher Wandering Star and were republished in the U.S. by Ballantine. These volumes included Howard’s original stories but expanded on them by offering his notes and letters on the setting and for the world of Conan which provided a more complete look at the history of Howard’s ideas and the genesis of the character. Regardless of the history of the character the books, comic books, and the movies of the 80s have kept the Conan character alive and well in the imagination of society since he was first put into print in the 1930s by Robert E. Howard.
|
History Collectors: We offer a wide selection of museum quality replicas and authentic items representing nearly every century of the Common Era and the most significant civilizations of ancient history. Once you browse through our online catalogue, we are certain you’ll find the perfect gift for yourself or a loved one with an interest in history. | |||||||||||
On October 27, 1871, the infamous Boss Tweed was arrested in New York on corruption charges. For many, the arrest was long overdue as he had a disturbing stronghold on the New York political system for many years.
The growing population of New York created a need for large construction projects, municipal improvements and contract workers. It was a fertile ground for manipulative individuals to make a few extra bucks on the side. Boss Tweed was a member of The Society of Saint Tammany a charitable organization that became a filter for money jobs and votes from the immigrant community.
Halloween is a celebration we are all familiar with and is often a controversial one as well since various groups disagree with dressing up as monsters and other ghoulish creatures. A lot of organizations prefer to have fall festivals instead of Halloween celebrations believing it is an evil holiday but the history of it tells a different story. Halloween has its origins in the ancient Celtic celebration known as Samhain. It was a festival held at the end of the harvest season and is sometimes regarded as the Celtic New Year. It was a time the Celtic pagans inventoried their supplies and slaughtered livestock in preparation for winter. They also believed that October 31 blurred the lines between the living and the dead. The dead were dangerous to the living and were the cause of illness and crop damage or failure and the Celts wore masks and costumes to placate the spirits. 
The term Halloween is a shortened version of All Hallows’ Eve which was the evening of All Hallows’ Day and was a day of northern European pagan festivities which was known as All Saints Day by the church which was a Christian celebration that occurred on May 13 but was moved to November 1st by a couple of 9th century popes. The church measured the days as starting at sunset so All Saints Day and Halloween were celebrated on the same day for a while though now All Saints Day is celebrated the day after Halloween since that calendar system has not been used for centuries. Many in the church see it is a demon worshipping holiday but historically it is the day when the living and dead can communicate for a short time. Halloween as we know it was brought to America in 1840 by Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famine in their country.
Some of the traditions and their activities have their roots in historical stories and events. The Romans added some of the Celtic traditions into their own culture and one of those is honoring the goddess Pomona. The symbol of Pomona is an apple which may be an explanation of the modern Halloween tradition of bobbing for apples. Over time the custom of dressing like witches and goblins became more ceremonial than a belief that the dead were actually walking the earth. Trick or Treating is believed to have started as a 9th century European custom known as souling. On November 2nd Christians would roam from village to village asking for pieces of bread with currants baked into them known as Soul Cakes. They would promise to say prayers for the recently deceased from any of the people who gave them the cakes and the prayers were believed to help the soul on its way to heaven. The jack-o-lantern is a holdover from Irish legends about a drunkard named Jack who tricked Satan into climbing a tree and carved a cross into the tree trapping Satan. The tale says that Jack died but was not admitted to heaven because of his bad ways and was not let into hell since he had tricked the devil. The devil gave him a glowing ember to light his way which Jack placed in a hollowed turnip to make the light last longer. The Irish used turnips initially as their Jack-o-lanterns but the newly arrived Irish in America found that hollowed pumpkins made better lanterns and they have been a fixture of Halloween since. Halloween has become a large holiday in America from both the economic and social aspects and only gets bigger each year regardless of how it is celebrated.
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.
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.”
