Despite many attempts to defeat Greece, Persian kings ultimately failed. Ephialtes betrayed the Spartans at Thermopylae, but Salamis was quite another story. Unrest in Babylon ultimately doomed the Persians. Xerxes violated the first rule of war—not to divide your forces—which cost him dearly.
Louisiana happens to be where James R. Randall, a Baltimorean, composed what became and most regrettably still remains Maryland’s official state song. All attempts to replace it have utterly failed. Sometimes called “America’s most martial poem,” the words should offend Americans in general, but most especially Marylanders. Three reasons seem paramount: the song was used as a Confederate battle hymn; it demeans our most cherished President as a “tyrant,” “despot,” and “Vandal”; and it maligns the Union troops as “Northern scum”!
For George Alfred Townsend’s mausoleum to have sat unused for over a century is remarkable. Inscribed on its lintel is “Good Night Gath” (his pen name during the Civil War). Visitors to Gathland State Park can see Townsend’s most famous project, the War Correspondents Memorial Arch, the first monument dedicated to journalists killed in combat. Even his first project, Gapland Hall, survives; it’s the park’s visitors center.
From the first moment I saw the model of the Liberator, I knew that plane had been ugly and cumbersome. Our made-in-the-USA penchant for euphemistic names wasn’t enough to rescue it from its sluggishness. Unless you’re a real aficionado of the Liberator, you probably don’t know that most of them that exist today came from India, which flew them into the Sixties. Rabid fans of the plane will know that Diamond Lil was featured in the 2006 film Beautiful Dreamer.
“Let’s go see a train, Bobby!” said my grandfather in 1954. Every time I recall that marvelous day, I smile. After all, never again would steam locomotives pass through the B & O station in Laurel, Maryland, where I grew up. Drive wheels churning and slipping on the shiny rails, steam hissing below, smoke billowing above—that Pacific loco marked itself indelibly into my little boy’s mind and heart!
“The law’s the law and you’re under arrest,” said the Montgomery cop. Rosa, who’d declined to give up her seat on the Cleveland Avenue bus, thus became the Mother of the Civil Rights Movement, while two other Negro women who had yielded their seats slipped quietly into obscurity. Eugene Daub sculpted a monument to her for the National Statuary Hall Collection, where she’s the only African American woman so honored. Yet, in her old age, she lived in poverty in Detroit, where you can visit the very bus she rode that eventful December day in 1955 (ironically, that GM-built bus, all spruced up now, is enshrined in a Ford Museum).
You can validate your puzzle solution with certitude.