Ruth Turner
Professor Hugetz
ENGL 1302-AHS05
16 April 2021
Redux Transcript part 2
I have a list of fun facts with some complementary explanations beneath them including links to
further information. I don’t really know how to make it interesting as a transcript, but here’s
what I have:
History Facts:
- There is less of a time difference between the T. Rex and the iPhone than between the T.
Rex and the Stegosaurus.
- George Washington’s teeth were not wooden.
- Pond scum was an important component of the Aztec diet.
- A real person made a suit made of human body parts.
- John Quincy Adams swam naked in the Potomac while he was president.
- Paul Revere did not shout “The British Are Coming” when he rode to Lexington.
- During WWII, Japan launched some balloons with bombs that actually made it to Oregon
before exploding.
- George Washington never chopped down the cherry tree.
- Teddy Roosevelt recruited people from San Antonio for the Spanish-American War.
- Napoleon was sentenced to exile on the island of Elba for six years... he served not quite
one.
- The Coast Guard was founded by Alexander Hamilton.
- Captain Morgan was a real person.
- Although the priority of the Aztec women was to care for their family, they could easily
have a career as well.
- The fates of the wives of Henry VIII can be remembered with a little poem: Divorced,
Beheaded, Died, Divorced, Beheaded, Survived.
- The Teddy Bear is named after Theodore Roosevelt.
- The Metal Detector was invented to try to save President Garfield after he was shot, but it
failed to find the bullet because Garfield was resting on a bed with metal springs.
- Someone tried to assassinate Andrew Jackson, but failed... twice.
- Theodore Roosevelt was the youngest person to assume the presidency.
My books list (has a link to Goodreads historical fiction list, which includes just about every
historical fiction book available in English. (Goodreads is access to reading lists and ideas for the
next novel to read. It is not access to free online access to the full book. Lots of people get
confused about it and people who have been on Goodreads for a long time have little patience for
new people. It’s not a very friendly place, but has very useful summaries and easy access to look
at books, so I like it) I am only going to include the title and the first sentence of description that
is listed in Goodreads.):
- Fatal Throne: A story from the perspectives of Henry VIII and his six wives.
- Carnegie’s Maid: A mesmerizing story of love, power, and the woman who inspired an
American dynasty.
- Fever 1793: It’s late summer 1793, and the streets of Philadelphia are abuzz with
mosquitoes and rumors of fever.
- Caddie Woodlawn: Caddie Woodlawn is a real adventurer. She’d rather hunt than sew
and plow than bake and tries to beat her brothers’ dares every chance she gets.
- Dear Martin (Dear Martin #1): Justyce McAllister is top of his class and set for the Ivy
League—but none of those matter to the police officer who just put him in handcuffs.
- Alex and Eliza: Their romance shaped a nation. The rest was history. 1777. Albany, New
York.
- Timeline: In an Arizonia desert, a man wanders in a daze, speaking words that make no
sense. Within twenty-four hours he is dead, his body swiftly cremated by his only known
associates.
- A Great and Terrible Beauty (Gemma Doyle #1): In this debut gothic novel, mysterious
visions, dark family secrets, and a long-lost diary thrust Gemma and her classmates back
into the horrors that followed her from India.
- The Book Thief: it is 1939, Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has
never been busier and will be busier still.
- America’s First Daughter: In a compelling, richly researched novel that draws from
thousands of letters and original sources, bestselling authors Stephanie Dray and Laura
Kamoie tell the fascinating, untold story of Thomas Jefferson’s eldest daughter, Martha
“Patsy” Jefferson Randolph—a woman who kept the secrets of our most enigmatic
founding father and shaped an American legacy.
- The Birth of Venus: Alessandra Cecchi is not quite fifteen when her father, a prosperous
cloth merchant, beings a young painter back from northern Europe to decorate the chapel
walls in the family’s Florentine palazzo. A child of the Renaissance with a precocious
mind and a talent for drawing, Alessandra is intoxicated by the painter’s abilities.
- The Other Countess: England, 1582.
- Salt to the Sea: While the Titanic and Lusitania are both well-documented disasters, the
single greatest tragedy in maritime history is the little-known January 30, 1945, sinking
in the Baltic Sea by a Soviet submarine of the Wilhelm Gustloff, a German cruise liner
that was supposed to ferry wartime personnel and refugees to safety from the advancing
Red Army.
- At The Water’s Edge: After embarrassing themselves at the social event of the year in
high society Philadelphia on New Year’s Eve of 1942, Muddied and Ellis Hyde are cut
off financially by Ellis’s father, a former army Colonel who is already embarrassed by his
son’s inability to serve in WWII due to his being colorblind.
- Uprising: Around her the workers were screaming out prayers and curses... she herself
was sobbing tearlessly... her only prayer was still, “I don’t want to die.”
- Between Shades of Gray: Lina is just like any other fifteen-year-old Lithuanian girl in
1941.
- The Minister’s Daughter: A merrybegot and a minister’s daughter—two girls who could
not have less in common. Yet their fates collide when Grace and her younger sister,
Patience, are suddenly spitting pins, struck with fits, and speaking in fevered tongues.
The minister is convinced his daughters are the victims of witchcraft.
- Incantation: Estrella is a Marrano: one of the Spanish Jews living double lives when
those who refused conversion risked everything.
- Cate of the Lost Colony: Lady Catherine is one of Queen Elizabeth’s favorite court
maidens until her forbidden romance with Sir Walter Raleigh is discovered.
- The Downstairs Girl: By day, seventeen-year-old Jo Kuan works as a lady’s maid for the
cruel daughter of one of the wealthiest men in Atlanta. But by night, Jo moonlights as the
pseudonymous author of a newspaper advice column for the genteel Southern lady, “Dear
Miss Sweetie.”
- Sarah, Plain and Tall (Sarah, Plain and Tall #1): Set in the late nineteenth century and
told from young Anna's point of view, Sarah, Plain and Tall tells the story of how Sarah
Elisabeth Wheaton comes from Maine to the prairie to answer Papa's advertisement for a
wife and mother.
- Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister: Set against the backdrop of seventeenth-century
Holland, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister tells the story of Iris, an unlikely heroine who
finds herself swept from the lowly streets of Haarlem to a strange world of wealth,
artifice, and ambition.
- The Smile: Hers is the most famous portrait in the world. Here, in prose as rich as the
high Renaissance, is Mona Lisa's tale: a story of passion, intrigue, loss, and, most of all,
love.
- Hush: An Irish Princess' Tale (#1): Melkorka is a princess, the first daughter of a
magnificent kingdom in mediæval Ireland—but all of this is lost the day she is kidnapped
and taken aboard a marauding slave ship.
- Drowning Ruth: In the winter of 1919, a young mother named Mathilda Neumann
drowns beneath the ice of a rural Wisconsin lake.
- Cinders and Sapphires (#1): Rose Cliffe has never met a young lady like her new
mistress. Clever, rich, and beautiful, Ada Averley treats Rose as an equal.
- Climbing the Stairs: During World War II and the last days of the British occupation in
India, fifteen-year-old Vidya dreams of attending college.
- The Witch of Blackbird Pond: Orphaned Kit Tyler knows, as she gazes for the first time
at the cold, bleak shores of Connecticut Colony, that her new home will never be like the
shimmering Caribbean island she left behind. In her relatives' stern Puritan community,
she feels like a tropical bird that has flown to the wrong part of the world, a bird that is
now caged and lonely.
- A Mad, Wicked Folly: Welcome to the world of the fabulously wealthy in London, 1909,
where dresses and houses are overwhelmingly opulent, social class means everything,
and women are taught to be nothing more than wives and mothers. Into this world comes
seventeen-year-old Victoria Darling, who wants only to be an artist—a nearly impossible
dream for a girl.
- Evidence of Things Unseen: Fos has returned to Tennessee from the trenches of France.
Intrigued with electricity, bioluminescence, and especially x-rays, he believes in science
and the future of technology. On a trip to the Outer Banks to study the Perseid meteor
shower, he falls in love with Opal, whose father is a glassblower who can spin color out
of light.
- The Mercy of Thin Air: New Orleans, 1920s.
Raziela Nolan is in the throes of a magnificent love affair when she dies in a tragic
accident. In an instant, she leaves behind her one true love and her dream of becoming a
doctor—but somehow, she still remains. Immediately after her death, Razi chooses to
stay between—a realm that exists after life and before whatever lies beyond it.
- Wind Rider: Williams’s lyrical prose makes this journey to prehistoric western Asia at
once inspiring and heartwrenching.
- The Midwife’s Apprentice: The girl known only as Brat has no family, no home, and no
future until she meets Jane the midwife and becomes her apprentice.
- Come Juneteenth: Sis Goose is a beloved member of Luli’s family, despite the fact that
she was born a slace. But the family is harboring a terrible secret, and when union
soldiers arrive on their Texas plantation to announce that slaves have been declared free
for nearly two years, Sis Goose is horrified to learn that the people she called family have
lied to her for so long.
- Number the Stars: Ten-year-old Annemarie Johansn and her best friend Ellen Rosen
often think of life before the war. It’s now 1943 and their life in Copenhagen is filled
with school, food shortages, and the Nazi soldiers marching through town.
- Passion Blue (#1): "Be sure you know your true heart’s desire, or you may find yourself
surprised by what you receive." This is the warning the Astrologer-Sorcerer gives Giulia
when she pays him to create a magical talisman for her. The scorned illegitimate daughter
of a Milanese nobleman, Giulia is determined to defy the dire fate predicted by her
horoscope and use the talisman to claim what she believes is her heart’s desire: true love
and a place where she belongs–not likely prospects for a girl about to be packed off to the
cloistered world of a convent.
- Lost: Essie can tell from the moment she lays eyes on Harriet Abbott: this is a woman
who has taken a wrong turn in life. Why else would an educated, well-dressed, clearly
upper-crust girl end up in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory setting sleeves for six dollars a
day?
- The Queen’s Vow: A Novel of Isabella of Castile: No one believed I was destined for
greatness. So begins Isabella’s story, in this evocative, vividly imagined novel about one
of history’s most famous and controversial queens—the warrior who united a fractured
country, the champion of the faith whose reign gave rise to the Inquisition, and the
visionary who sent Columbus to discover a New World.
