Grace Greenwood Bedell Billings (November 4, 1848 – November 2, 1936) was an American woman, notable as the person who’s correspondence, at the age of eleven, influenced Abraham Lincoln to grow his familiar beard.
Shortly after this exchange, Lincoln allowed his beard to grow. By the time he began his inaugural journey from Illinois to Washington, D.C. by train, he had a full beard. The trip took him through New York State,
and included a stop in Bedell’s hometown of Westfield, New York, where
thousands gathered to meet the president-elect. There, Lincoln asked to
meet Grace Bedell by name.
The Lincoln Bedell statue, Westfield, New York is dedicated to this event (Source)
the funniest and best thing i’ve learned while doing research for this shakespeare project is that in the late 19th century, there was this group called the american acclimatization society and their thing was bringing european plants and animals to the u.s. so one member was this guy named eugene schieffelin and he was like obsessed with shakespeare, so he went, “hey, wouldn’t it be cool if we tracked down EVERY SPECIES OF BIRD SHAKESPEARE EVER MENTIONED and brought them ALL to America” so he rounded up like a hundred European starlings and released them in central park, and now there are upwards of 200 million starlings in North America and they cause around $1 billion worth of damage to crops every year, all because shakespeare mentioned them exactly ONCE in Henry IV part 1
the papers i had to write at my english courses were always a MESS bc my handwriting was normal at the start of the line but ended up either shrunken or stretched by the end of it. honestly it’s the w o r s t
tfw the lord of the fiefdom you are a serf under calls you a stinkard and you come up with a clever retort a day later but he would have you executed and it doesnt matter anyway because youre not literate in latin and traveling to his keep would take at least a fortnight so you just keep working the fields like you do every day
i remember asking a teacher about it when i was like 12 and he just told me syllabic separation wasn’t important. which does make me wonder – when one is writing on paper and runs out of space at the end of the line, what does one do? does one just write the entire word in a new line and leave the end of the previous line empty? this feels wrong and wasteful. maybe it’s just one of those things only native speakers have to worry about and us don’t
if you think the invention of the internet has made people believe anything, you are dead wrong
when photographs were invented, people assumed anything in a photograph had to be real. so in 1917 some little girls drew pictures of fairies, cut them out, and took pictures of them in various positions. people bought it. sir arthur conan doyle even endorsed it in a scholarly article.
convincing as fuck, right???
THE GIRLS DIDN’T EVEN ADMIT THEY WERE FAKE TIL THE 1980′s!!!!
(for you history nerds, this is known as the “cottingley fairies” hoax)
“Well, all the adults lied to us about things, so we lied about fairies.”
the cottingley fairies hoax is seriously one of my favorite things to ever happen ever.
EY FATTY BOOM BOOM 