Jane Grey stands alone among the monarchs of England. Her reign was too brief from 10 July until 19 July 1553. In folk tales, she is called the Queen for nine days, the first Protestant martyr, the victim of the English Counter-Reformation. In numerous works of the XIX century, Jane Grey is the ideal woman of the Victorian era.
Our heroine was born and lived during the heyday of the Reformation. This period is considered the brightest in the history of Foggy Albion. A quarrel of Henry VIII with the Pope was the beginning. The head of the Roman Catholic Church refused to legalize the divorce of the king with his first wife Catherine of Aragon. The monarch was offended, and in 1534 the parliament decided to free the English church from subjection to Rome. As a result of the Reformation, the state received free land and funds confiscated from the Church. This allowed to equip the fleet, which managed to defeat the Spanish Invincible Armada. England became the mistress of the seas. But it was a time of political instability.
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Josef Mengele was a German physician. During the last two years of World War II he conducted medical experiments. Mengele sent tens of thousands of Jews to the gas chambers at Auschwitz, a concentration camp in Poland. He was never apprehended and thus was never prosecuted as a war criminal.
Josef Mengele was born on March 16, 1911 in Bavaria. He was the son of an agricultural machinery manufacturer. Josef was a promising and ambitious student. In 1938, he received his doctorate in medicine. Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, director of the Frankfurt University Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene, made Mengele his assistant. Mengele focused his work on twins, because they were especially suited for genetics research.
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Valery Chkalov was a legendary Soviet test pilot, Hero of the Soviet Union, who made the first non-stop flight across the North Pole.
Valery Pavlovich Chkalov was born in 1904 in the village of Vasilyovo, Nizhny Novgorod province. It is interesting that now this place has received not only the status of the city, but also a new name in honor of the great pilot. Valera’s parents were ordinary people. His father worked as a boilermaker at the shipyard, and his mother was a housewife. Unfortunately, she died when her son was 6 years old. After school Chkalov went to the Cherepovets Technical School, but due to lack of finance, the school was liquidated. Valery returned to his father and began to work as a stoker on the steamer. In 1919 he saw the plane with his own eyes and began to dream of flying machines.
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D. W. Griffith was an American film maker, who invented much of the basic technical grammar of modern cinema.
David Wark Griffith was born on January 22, 1875 at Crestwood, Oldham County, Kentucky. At the age of 18 he became an actor in Louisville. He was a supporting player in provincial companies for 10 years performing under the stage name Lawrence Griffith. In 1906 he secretly married actress Linda Arvidson Johnson. However, they parted 5 years later.
In 1907 Griffith sold a poem to Frank Leslie’s Weekly and a play, A Fool and a Girl, to actor James K. Hackett. The play failed and Griffith decided to try his hand in the movie business.
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Hermann Göring was a German politician and air force commander. He was second in command to Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany.
Hermann Wilhelm Göring was born on January 12, 1893 in Rosenheim, Bavaria. He was the son of the consul general of the German Empire in Haiti. Hermann was educated in the military school. In October 1915 Göring became a fighter pilot and by 1918 he had won all the important military awards.
After the war he went to Denmark to fly as a private pilot. Göring met Hitler when he returned to Germany in 1922. Hermann became commander of the Nazi storm troopers. In November 1923, he received a painful injury which brought on his first drug addiction.
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Many people know about yogis and fakirs of India who pierced their cheeks or tongue, without experiencing pain and without any harm to themselves. To do this they had to train hard. Here is a story about unique Dutch.
Arnold Gerrit Henskes was born in Amsterdam on August 6, 1912. Later he took name Mirin Dajo, which means “wonderful” in Esperanto. Already in his childhood unusual things happened to him. Arnold had a strange ability to paint while sleeping. At first he was surprised when he woke up in the morning and found that his hands were covered with paint, and on the table there was a picture with his signature. It turned out that he painted without waking up. Today, such a rare condition is called somnambulism, or sleepwalking.
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Alexander Nevsky was the Russian leader, prince of Novgorod and grand prince of Vladimir. He was an outstanding military leader and statesman. He protected Russia against European invasion during the Middle Ages. Alexander defeated the Swedes at the Neva River. His heirs ruled Russia until 1917.
Alexander was the son of Yaroslav Vsevolodovich, Prince of Pereiaslavl and Novgorod. In 1236 his father moved to Kiev and Alexander succeeded him as prince of Novgorod. Alexander Nevsky knew Latin and Greek, and one of his favorite books in his childhood was biography of Alexander the Great.
Alexander had to guard the western frontiers from the Swedes and the Germanic Sword Knights of Livonia. On July 15, 1240 Alexander defeated the Swedes at the mouth of the Neva River.
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