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Showing posts from June, 2019

I Did Not Kill President Garfield

“Assassination has never changed the history of the world.”—Benjamin Disraeli In every country and in every time and in every point in history, citizens complain about corruption in their government. There are always people saying it’s never been worse. Sometimes they’re correct about that, too, but really, in most cases, you can find at least one point in history where corruption had been worse than however terrible it might happen to be right now. In America, for all the corruption that might be going on in the national and state capitals today, it’s reasonable to say that in the 1870s, corruption was much worse. Scandals plagued the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant, and his successor, Rutherford B. Hayes, didn’t manage to do much to clean things up, despite high expectations from the voters and his own best intentions. One big issue on the minds of critics of the day was the buying of offices, where a politician was allowed to offer a job to someone in exch

The Guillotine: A Humane Way to Kill?

Since the early thirteenth century, engineers have worked to streamline the process of beheading.  The earliest known beheading machine was the Halifax Gibbet, found in the town of Halifax, Yorkshire, England.  The first record of its existence dates from the year 1210, though the first public record of the Gibbet executing anyone comes from 1280.  It was a simple device: two long upright poles fitted with grooves would allow a heavy wooden block to be raised on a rope and dropped by the operator.  Attached to the block was an axe which would chop off the head of the criminal below.  The Gibbet was used for the execution of petty criminals, which was defined as anyone who stole (or who confessed to having stolen) money or goods worth 13½ pence or more.  The Gibbet was used to kill over 150 thieves between 1280 and 1650, when Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell abolished capital punishment for theft.  Certainly others were executed throughout England for theft, but there was only one Gib