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At the time of the March Revolution (1917), the Bolsheviks were still a negligible group. Their leaders were scattered: Lenin in Switzerland, Stalin in Siberia, Trotsky...in New York...Yet when Lenin heard of the fall of autocracy, his mind was made up. A socialist revolution in Russia-and perhaps world revolution too-was within reach.

As of 1975, the Senate could close debate--or achieve cloture--by a supermajority of sixty votes. The majority party usually had to account for the demands of the minority in order to move a controversial bill to a vote.

Thus, although the president is not a king, nobody is directly above him in the chain of command either. Preventing American presidents from amassing the power of a king requires that the other two branches of government-Congress and the courts-be vigilant in checking the power that the president does have.

Lila opened her eyes and saw red.
Not a bold red...but a subtle, pervasive tint, like she was looking through a pane of colored glass. Lila tried to blink away the color ,but it lingered. When Kell called his city Red London, she assumed he'd picked the color for some arbitrary --or at least ordinary--reason. Now she could see he meant it literally.

On the fourth day of the bombing, compelled by the irresistible need for certain kinds of freedom despite the circumstances-or, perhaps, because of them- people started going to coffeehouses again, sitting on the porches, often staying out to drink and smoke even after the sirens sounded.

Unionist mountaineers cast their whole vote for their beliefs. From a region surrounded by Confederate territory came two mounted North Carolina regiments to fight for the Union cause. Hundreds of men ( from North Carolina) joined Tennessee, Kentucky, and other northern regiments, and Union recruiters roamed the area with considerable success.

"How did you come by this tank?" she asked him.
He grinned. "Stole it from the British government...."

A shocking 1.7 million Austro-Hungarian troops were in Russian captivity at the beginning of 1917...The Russian Kerensky Offensive in June 1917 rather too easily ripped a thirty-mile gap between the corps of the Austro-Hungarian Third Army and took thousands more prisoners.

He turned to see the cylinder in her hand, pointed at the nearest of the wolves. The animal yelped--a sound more like a dog--and it collapsed, whining. Its mate, with a final snarl, fled.
"Why did you do that?" Voll, incredulous, stared at the wolf, which now lay still...
"What?".....
"They were leaving. They weren't any threat to us..."

Invisible...in their deep, narrow trenches, the Russians awaited every Austrian attack, then rose as one and flattened it with salvo fire. As the Austrians fled...the Russians counterattacked into the openings and hit the Austrian flanks.

Darrow nodded. "And idiocy is no defense...but temporary insanity is. All four were in agreement to commit a felony--kidnapping Kahahawai, the use of firearms to threaten and intimidate their victim..."

Darrow posed the well-worn questions of the village skeptic... Did Jonah live inside a whale for three days? How could Joshua lengthen the day by making the sun (rather than the earth) stand still? Where did Cain get his wife?

Borglum is sixty-nine years old this August day as he rides to the summit of the mountain with the powder-man he thinks of as Billy Slovak....and thus far three of the four great Heads have emerged from the stone...

Atahualpa had begun a conversation with Darwin on the supposed backwardness of European science and philosophy. Evidently it was a dialog that had been developing during the voyage, as the Inca tutors got to know the minds of their students.
---"The Unblinking Eye" by Stephen Baxter

Mary Surratt, along with three of her codefendants, was convicted and sentenced to hang... It was a surprise...that President Johnson's expected commutation of her sentence never came--

When, after a long, slow death agony, the Roman Empire in the West finally collapsed...the Germanic tribes that seized one province after another had no tradition of literacy. The barbarians who broke into the public buildings and seized the villas may not have been actively hostile to learning, but they certainly had no interest in preserving its material traces...

The (Vichy) French government gave lists of Jews to Nazis and assisted in identifying and expropriating the assets of wealthy Jewish families. More and more roundups of Jews swept France, and the (French) gendarmes became as feared as Nazi storm troopers.

On February 24, 2022, as Russia swept into Ukraine, fantastical stories of biological warfare began to surge across the internet. Spokesmen for the Russian Defense and Foreign Ministries solemnly declared that secret U.S.-funded biolabs in Ukraine had been conducting experiments with bat viruses. The story was unfounded...and it was...debunked. nevertheless, an American Twitter account...began tweeting about it

...In his sorry state, he did not notice the sound of running feet approaching him. Only when the Indian adorned in bright red war paint let out a piercing screech did Ian look up.
...Ian raised his musket up over his head just as the savage was bringing down his hatchet. As the blade of the hatchet bit into the stock of the weapon..., Ian let go with both hands, jumped back and to one side...

Gail looked out at the water, wanting to hear it again, that soft foghorn sound, and she did, but it was inside her this time....
----from "By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain" by Joe Hill

On June 28, 2013,... Harris performed the marriage ceremony for (Kris) Perry and (Sandy) Stier...
"By virtue of the power and authority vested in me by the State of California, I now declare you spouses for life," Harris declared. The ceremony lasted four minutes and thirty seconds. It was eons in the making.

Sir John Lambert's brigade, more than two thousand muskets strong, took up a position behind La Haye Sainte. His three veteran regiments were recently arrived from America, where they had taken part in Sir Edward Packenham's campaign in Louisiana, including the disastrous Battle of New Orleans, in which that general, Wellington's brother-in-law, had met his end. Their officer corps was considerably reduced...

Time and the winds will sooner or later bury the Seven Cities of Cibola--Phoenix, Tucson, Albuquerque, all of them--under dunes of glowing sand...

"What is it?" she asked....She leaned close to Walker. "Walk, tell me, what is it? What is this? What are you trying to say?"
"This is how it starts," he whispered...
"This is how the uprising begins..."

1483 Edward IV dies, succeeded by his young son, Edward V. He is deposed by his uncle, Richard of Gloucester, who becomes Richard III. Edward and his brother, the Duke of York, are kept in the Tower of London and disappear, presumed murdered.
1485 Henry Tudor...defeats Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth. He... becomes Henry VII.

Lord Canning.... had made a prophetic speech: "We must not forget that in the sky of India... a small cloud may arise, at first no bigger than a man's hand, but which, growing bigger and bigger, may at last threaten to overwhelm us with ruin."

Although they do not take into account those killed when the Cheka suppressed hundreds of insurrections against Soviet authority, the best estimates set the probable number of executions at about a hundred thousand, or about seven times the number killed by the tsarist government during the entire century before the Revolution.

(Czar) Nicholas barely had time to leap to his feet and utter "Chto?--What?"--before Iurovskii shot him in the head, turned slightly, and fired two shots at (Prince) Aleksei. Aleksandra and one of her daughters managed to cross themselves before the bullets from their killers' revolvers tore into their chests...The rest...fell in a second barrage.

From the legs up he was a man, bare-chested, with dark matted hair, a spade beard, and curling horns on his brow. From the hips down he had the legs of a large black goat, with shaggy hair and cloven hooves. A stubby tail sprouted above his hairy buttocks...
Hyacinth nodded toward the goat man. "Meet the Great God Pan."

"Never liked killing," Brood told him. "Yo no quiero a personas que quieren. Thought I'd like killing you, though. Thought a lot about it, homie."