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For Halloween, this is the full post of the story. This is a full text version in HTML for the short story by Edgar Allan Poe titled “The Cask of Amontillado”. I consider it one of his best stories. The story is set in a nameless Italian city in an unspecified year and is about the narrator’s deadly revenge on a friend whom he believes has insulted him. Like several of Poe’s stories, and in keeping with the 19th-century fascination with the subject, the narrative revolves around a person being buried alive-in this case, by immurement. What is Immurement? Immurement...

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By feeding his visions for the future to a well-regarded contemporary, the prolific inventor offered a peek into his brilliant mindThomas Edison’s Forgotten Sci-Fi Novel By feeding his visions for the future to a well-regarded contemporary, the prolific inventor offered a peek into his brilliant mind image: https://thumbs-prod.si-cdn.com/SaK24N73uB4NZpv6UBgOTSg4_3M=/800x600/filters:no_upscale()/https://public-media.smithsonianmag.com/filer/7e/68/7e68f98c-2edb-4b57-a412-f3a5202e1397/ggc17y.jpg Thomas Alva Edison thinking at his desk Thomas Edison’s ideas fed the story that would become In the Deep of Time. (RTRO / Alamy Stock Photo) By Greg Daugherty SMITHSONIAN.COM JANUARY 3, 2018 5373914744 When Thomas Edison died in 1931, he held more than 1,000 patents in the United States alone. He...

Rome (AFP) - Emma Morano, an Italian woman believed to have been the oldest person alive and the last survivor of the 19th century, died Saturday at the age of 117, Italian media reported... "She had an extraordinary life, and we will always remember her strength to move forward in life," the mayor of Verbania was quoted as saying... Morano's death means there is no one living known to have been born before 1900. "I eat two eggs a day, and that's it. And cookies. But I do not eat much because I have no teeth," she said in her...

State Sen. Don Gustavson is using history as his guide as he again attempts to require Nevada students to learn cursive handwriting by the end of third grade. Gustavson, R-Sparks, has even included the Founding Fathers in his cursive cause, which began with the 2015 legislative session and continued last week when he filed essentially the same bill draft that previously died in committee. This time around, he believes testimony from history and education experts will propel SB86 into law. “All of our original founding documents and letters from our Founding Fathers were almost all done in cursive writing,” Gustavson...

No, the United States isn't trying to build a military force of centenarians. It just seems that way after the Selective Service System mistakenly sent notices to more than 14,000 Pennsylvania men born between 1893 and 1897, ordering them to register for the nation's military draft and warning that failure to do so is "punishable by a fine and imprisonment." The agency realized the error when it began receiving calls from bewildered relatives last week.

A punt gun is a type of extremely large shotgun used in the 19th and early 20th centuries. A single shot could kill over 50 waterfowl resting on the water’s surface. The hunter would maneuver the entire boat in order to aim the gun. In the United States, this practice depleted stocks of wild waterfowl and by the 1860s most states had banned the practice. “Since Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897 there has been a punt gun salute every Coronation and Jubilee in Cowbit, Lincolnshire, England” - Wikipedia

Annie Oakley (1860 – 1926) was an American sharpshooter and exhibition shooter. Oakley’s amazing talent and timely rise to fame led to a starring role in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, which propelled her to become the first American female superstar. Oakley’s perhaps most famous trick is being able to repeatedly split a playing card, edge-on, and put several more holes in it before it could touch the ground, using a .22 caliber rifle, at 90 feet. (NOTE: Just go to the link provided to watch the 25 second video clip.)

Cemetery Guns and Grave Torpedoes Newspaper editor Arthur Brisbane once said, “The fence around a cemetery is foolish, for those inside can't get out and those outside don't want to get in." However, this has not always been the case. For centuries graveyards had to content with the scourge of grave robbers who preyed on the valuables of corpses, and even the corpses themselves. This threat led to an industry solution—grave guns. Cemetery Guns Set-guns, defined as a gun that is set to fire on any intruder that encounters the wire that sets it off, have been around since at...

Why not? The federal budget is now like a teetering Jenga tower that stretches into the Earth’s upper atmosphere. There’s no question that it’s going to topple pretty soon, so in the meantime, why not have fun and see how many more pieces we can stick on there before it does? Vice President Joe Biden on Tuesday announced an ambitious $53 billion program to build new high-speed rail networks and make existing ones faster over the next six years.Biden, who estimated he has ridden Amtrak between Washington and his home in Wilmington, Delaware, some 7,900 times, made a strong pitch...

Meet the Big Apple's 111-year-old wonder. Jane Gilsenan has touched three centuries, lived under 19 US presidents and witnessed some of the greatest moments in history. She is New York City's oldest living resident, according to experts, and one of the oldest people in the world. "I'm lucky to live as long as I have so far," the super-centenarian said last week at her home in a Staten Island convent. "I had nothing to do with it. It was wished on me." Gilsenan was born at Amsterdam Avenue and 98th Street in Manhattan on May 8, 1898, at the same...

Barack Obama has evoked Abraham Lincoln ever since launching his campaign at the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Ill. Now he plans to arrive in Washington the same way that Lincoln did in 1861, with a train trip that will include stops, speeches and crowds along the way. On Jan. 17, Obama and his family will start the day with an appearance in Philadelphia, where they will board a chartered Amtrak train. The train will stop in Wilmington, Del., where the Obamas will be joined by Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. Then comes a stop in Baltimore before the...

Perhaps it's time to recolonize the Middle East. If we get our NATO allies and Russia together with us on the same page and invade the entire Muslim Middle East and re-establish European run colonial governments, we could save a lot of money on oil and put an end to government sponsored terrorism. Together, this alliance would have 90% of the world's military might. Without the mother's milk of oil revenue, it will be far more difficult fot terrorists to obtain the financing for nuclear weapon development or purchase. Russia could administer Iran, France could administer Syria, Britain could administer...

America’s Earliest Terrorists: Lessons from America’s first war against Islamic terror. By Joshua E. London (author of "Victory in Tripoli: How America's War with the Barbary Pirates Established the U.S. Navy and Shaped a Nation," John Wiley & Sons, September 2005, http://www.victoryintripoli.com/ ) At the dawn of a new century, a newly elected United States president was forced to confront a grave threat to the nation — an escalating series of unprovoked attacks on Americans by Muslim terrorists. Worse still, these Islamic partisans operated under the protection and sponsorship of rogue Arab states ruled by ruthless and cunning dictators. Sluggish...

Reviewing "Victory in Tripoli: How America’s War with the Barbary Pirates Established the U.S. Navy and Shaped a Nation," by Joshua E. London, John Wiley & Sons Inc., 2005. 276 pages, Photos, map, bibliography, index Though America’s first encounter with the Barbary States occurred in October 1784 when the Betsey was captured and her crew taken to Morocco, our wars with the Barbary pirates began officially in 1801. The Tripolitan Wars, as they were formally known, were waged against maritime terrorists who operated from the modern day states of Morocco, Tunisia, Libya and Algiers, arrayed along Africa’s northern coast in...

There has been much discussion recently about how to "manage the rise of China." The phrase itself is soothing, implying gradualism, predictability and time. Time enough to think and prepare, to take measurements of China's trajectory and adjust as necessary. If China eventually emerges as a clear threat, there will be time to react. But meanwhile there is time enough not to overreact, to be watchful but patient and not to create self-fulfilling prophecies. If we prematurely treat China as an enemy, it is said, it will become an enemy. The idea that we can manage China's rise is comforting...

A manuscript of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, scheduled to be auctioned by Sotheby's in London next month with an estimated sale price of $3 million to $4 million, may have been used at the premiere of the work in May 1824. Sotheby's London is prepared to sell a musical manuscript — the musical manuscript, one is tempted to say, given the few items that are likely to become available nowadays and the importance of the work involved — Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. In three bound volumes of 465 pages, the offering includes virtually the complete score of that symphony in manuscript....

The illegality of most federal gun lawsThe Bill of Rights, including the Second Amendment, was never intended by its Framers to be the primary safeguard of liberty. In the view of the Framers, the main protection of liberty was the structure of the Constitution itself. The separation of powers would prevent the rule by fiat which burdened most of Europe. And the legislative branch was granted only the power to legislate on specific, enumerated subjects (e.g., patents, bankruptcies, interstate commerce). Thus, Congress would have no power to censor speech, to suppress assemblies, to outlaw guns, or otherwise infringe rights.(749) In...