Pirates, it is frequently claimed, have existed since the dawn of history, as long as there has been traff ic and commerce at sea.1 Presumably, the origins of piracy would thus be sometime in the pre-historic past, when people f irst took to the sea for commercial purposes, probably around eight thousand years ago, along the coast of the Persian Gulf.2 Historical records over close to three and…
In 1850, an epidemic swept America—but instead of leaving victims sick with fever or flu, this epidemic involved a rabid craze for the music of Swedish soprano Jenny Lind. American showman P. T. Barnum (who would later go on to found the circus now known as Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey), a shrewd marketer and self-made millionaire, is credited with spreading “Lindomania” through a s…
In the mid-1950s I had been puzzled that no comprehensive biographical dictionary was available in paperback and I determined to fill the gap. I wrote to Penguin Books in London/ Harmondsworth and received a thoughtful and encouraging letter from A. S. B. Glover, a classical scholar and editor. The two generally available major biographical dictionaries, Chambers’s and Webster’s, both had s…