985
A stranger warns the people of Shorapur that they will come to regret their hospitality.
In 1850, Charles Dickens’s magazine ‘Household Words’ carried this curious tale, written by Colonel Philip Meadows Taylor, who at the time was a correspondent on ‘The Times’ in India. Set in the legendary past, the story concerns the town of Shorapur in India, which in Dickens’s time was still a semi-independent Kingdom, and a question as simple as it is timeless: Cats, or Dogs?
Picture: By Gottfried Mind (1768-1814), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.
Posted February 5 2018
986
A fierce Victorian rivalry sprang up between two football teams from the industrial heartlands of the North East.
Sunderland AFC is a team in the English Football League with a proud history, six times champions of the top flight and twice winners of the FA Cup. Their first trophy, Football League Champions, came in 1892, but in those days they were not the only league side from the busy industrial town on the Wear.
Picture: By Thomas M. Hemy (1852-1931), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.
Posted February 1 2018
987
A Roman general asks his officers to decide where their priorities lie.
Constantius I Chlorus was supreme commander of the Roman Army in Britain and Gaul, and a co-ruler of the Roman Empire from 293 to 306. His son Constantine the Great became the first Roman Emperor to allow Christians to worship freely, and although Constantius was not a Christian himself, it is clear where his son acquired his respect for religious liberty.
Picture: From the British Museum, via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.
Posted January 30 2018
988
Ten British POWs in German-occupied Poland decide to help a young Jewish woman escape the SS and a death march to the sea.
As the Second World War came to an end in 1945, the Germans began emptying their concentration camps by ‘death marches’, gruelling, roundabout (dodging the Allied advance) journeys on foot to the Baltic shores, where the SS forced their captives into the sea and gunned them down. But one young woman escaped, with the help of ten British prisoners-of-war.
Picture: From the Imperial War Museums collection, via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.
Posted January 29 2018
989
After more than a month in the wilderness of the Sinai Peninsula, Moses finds that the Israelites are growing rebellious.
The Israelites have at last escaped slavery in Egypt, but now another test lies before them: the wilderness of the Sinai Peninsula. The food and flocks they have brought out with them cannot sustain them for ever, especially if they have no water.
Picture: © Tommy, via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0.. Source.
Posted January 24 2018
990
Even as Moses is in the presence of God receiving the Ten Commandments, the people down below are already breaking the first of them.
Moses has brought the Israelites out of servitude in Egypt into the hard wilderness of the Sinai Peninsula. God has given them manna to eat and water from dry stone, but their hearts fail them when Moses goes up into the quaking, cloud-capped, lightning-crowned Mount Sinai, and does not return for over a month.
Picture: © Adergham2017, via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0.. Source.
Posted January 24 2018