On the night of April 18th 1775, Paul Revere rode through the night calling to the people of Boston that, “the British are coming!” Tension had been brewing between American colonists and their British overlords, and in April 1775 British troops moved to disrupt the recently formed ‘Massachusetts Provincial Congress’. Seeing the British arrive, Revere… Read More Why Sybil Ludington wasn’t ‘the female Paul Revere’
I recently wrote a piece about the history of the royal tiaras featured in the first two seasons of The Crown. It turned into one of my longer posts just because Claire Foy, as Queen Elizabeth II, was given a multitude of tiaras and ornaments to wear. By comparison, this will be much shorter, as… Read More ‘The Crown’s Crowns (Season 3 & 4)
By request, I have begun watching The Spanish Princess. The show, by its own admission, takes dramatic licence with history for the sake of creating a dramatic story. I was surprised then to see just how much of the show is rooted in actual history. Characters are aged up (or down) in places, but then… Read More The History of the Spanish Princess: Katherine arrives in England
During a recent re-watch of The Crown, I was struck by an exchange between Princess Margaret and her dresser. Princess Margaret is deputising for her sister, the queen, and is just about to put on her tiara when she has a thought: “What about the state diadem tiara or the Cambridge lover’s knot?” “Those are… Read More ‘The Crown’s Crowns (Seasons 1 & 2)
Elizabeth of York and Henry VII had the very model of a courtly marriage. Their marriage was not only stable but actually affectionate. I’ve speculated in the past that it was because of their genuine feeling for each other that their own children went on to have such tumultuous experiences with marriage, possibly seeking the… Read More “More dirty than queenly”: The Marriages of Mary Tudor
Did someone try to assassinate Elizabeth I with a poisoned dress? This question (the number one question posed to this blog in 2020) derives from the film Elizabeth (1998). In said film, one of her ladies, Isabelle Knollys, dies mid-coitus with Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, while wearing a dress intended for the queen. The… Read More Elizabethan Assassination Attempts (not feat. a poisoned dress)
Have two different versions of the Titanic’s final moments… The first from A Night to Remember (1958) The second and arguably more iconic from Titanic (1997)…
It’s pretty hard to get together research for a decent blog post during a global pandemic. I’ve got to learn a language, discover a skill, homeschool a child, clean the house, journal, do P.E. with Joe and all that other stuff we can apparently do because we’re in lockdown. If y’all can get on all… Read More Trivia of Titanic Proportions
I’m a child of the nineties and so most of my early movie education consisted of credit sequences that told us what happened next to the characters. Maybe that’s why after reading about some period in history my immediate thought is…okay and then what did they do? I recently wrote about the Donner Party, a… Read More The Donner Party: What Happened Next…
“It’s not Christmas until I’ve talked about the Donner Party.” – Me, Christmas Day 2019. It turns out that trivia of how the ill-fated Donner Party saw in the Christmas of 1846 may not be entirely appropriate conversation for Christmas Dinner, especially when there are children present. Luckily for you, my musings have to go… Read More Creepy History: The Donner Party, Deaths and Diagrams
