It’s a great day in the history of light entertainment for the masses, as it was on this day in 1883 that the first ever dedicated vaudeville theater was opened by the legendary theater entrepreneur B.F. Keith, in Boston. Keith was a bit of a visionary. He saw variety shows as the coming wave in [...]

First off, Happy Dominican Independence Day! It was a scant and mere 167 years ago today that The Dominican Republic gained their Independence from Haiti, and now have a fairly robust economy, all things considered[1]. Also, best of anniversaries to People magazine! Much like Playboy before it, People was shocking to “cultured” sensibilities when it [...]

I know, I know, tempus fugit and all that, but it’s amazing how fast some things recede into the mist. They’ve been fighting in Darfur for eight years now. And it was ten years ago that the Taliban blew up those huge statues of Buddha in the hills outside of Bamyan, Afghanistan, that had been [...]

Sometimes progress takes a long, long time. On this day in 1836, Samuel Colt patented his Colt service revolver, one of the major steps forward in the history of shooting people. The Civil War wouldn’t have been nearly as effective, Abe Lincoln wouldn’t have been so successfully assassinated, the OK Corral would have been the [...]

The first time a law was ever called “unconstitutional” was February 24, 1803, when the Supreme Court disallowed outgoing President John Adams from adding a new set of circuit courts and appointing new Justices during the lame duck session before Thomas Jefferson was to take power. One of the new justices, William Marbury, was waiting [...]

Big publishing firsts today, if you’re one of thise grass-chewing interlectuals we keep hearing about so damned much these days on some of the news shows. Today saw the first publication of The Communist Manifesto (Marx, Engels, 1848), the first-ever issue of the New Yorker magazine (Harold Ross, 1925), and the first-ever telephone book (really [...]