When you think of croissants, what country comes to mind? If you’re like most people, you probably thought of France, and indeed, the French do make great croissants. They even gave us the word for them. But as famous as the French are for them, the croissant is not a French invention. The origin of the croissant is actually a ways to the east, in Austria. Specifically they were invented in Vienna, in 1683. That year, the city of Vienna was under siege by a massive Ottoman army composed of approximately 140,000 soldiers. To put this in perspective, the population of the Ottoman Empire at the time was somewhere around 11 million, which meant that more than one out of every hundred Ottoman citizens were in Austria for the siege of one city. Less than 300 years later, the United States would deploy roughly one out of every 100 citizens to fight World War II, across Europe and the Pacific, over a four-year span. The Ottoman Empire was investing the equivalent in blood and money t...

Remember the sitcom Roseanne ?  In case you don’t, Roseanne was a popular show about a working family in a small town in downstate Illinois, struggling on the edge of poverty.  It starred the popular comedian Roseanne Barr in the title role, with the already-popular actor John Goodman as her husband.  The show ran for nine seasons, from 1988 to 1997, and frequently appears on lists of the greatest television shows.  After twenty years, you can still catch marathons of the show running in syndication, and an eight-episode tenth season is planned for 2018, so fans can catch up with the lives of these fictional characters.  It had a good eight years, but that ninth season… that’s when the grumbling among the fans began. Working hard in middle America: Roseanne and her TV family before the lottery ticket—and well before Roseanne backed the Trump ticket. In the first episode of the ninth season, the Connor family, played by Barr and Goodman and several...

“When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”—Richard Nixon, 1977 President Nixon in the famous Nixon/Frost interview, 1977 On June 17, 1972, a group of men were caught breaking into Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate Hotel in Washington, DC.  This was the beginning of the famous Watergate scandal, when President Richard Nixon hired agents to conduct espionage on the Democratic Party, hoping to give himself an extra advantage in the presidential election that year.  When the election took place that November, Nixon won in a landslide, carrying 49 states.  Only Washington, DC and Massachusetts voted for his Democratic rival, Senator George McGovern.  Needless to say, Nixon was probably being a little too cautious where his reëlection was concerned. Word got out, and the people and Congress started to call for an investigation.  Facing growing pressure, President Nixon asked Attorney General Elliot Richardson to appoint a s...

Halloween is often seen as a children’s holiday, or a holiday that used to be just for children but has since turned into an adult masquerade festival, too.  This was never really true.  In fact, getting kids in on the fun is a pretty recent development. The roots of Halloween are kind of scary.  They date back to pre-Christian Celtic Britain, known then as the festival of Samhain in Ireland, or Calan Gaeaf in other Celtic-speaking regions.  It took place in the middle of autumn, like it does today, as a way to mark the coming of winter.  The souls of the dead were said to walk the earth, and people would dress up as the dead in order to protect themselves from these souls.  Later, the Catholic Church made November 1  All Saints’ Day , a celebration of Christian saints, and made November 2  All Souls’ Day , a day to remember the dead.  These days were a major holiday on the Christian calendar, so October 31 was celebrated as the vi...