Thucydides is regarded as the first scientific historian.

During the Peloponnesian War he was made a general of the Athenian army. When he failed to prevent the Spartans from seizing the city of Amphipolis in 424 B.C., he went into exile. He then set out to write an impartial account of the Peloponnesian War. He intended it “not as an essay to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all times.”

Thucydides sought to sift fact from fiction and to achieve accuracy in his narrative. He did not live to complete his work. His History of the Peloponnesian War begins with the causes of the war and ends in the year 411 B.C. Thucydides emphasized the military and political aspects of the war. He reconstructed or composed the speeches of the main participants in order to present their divergent views. As critical history and as literature, Thucydides’ history is a masterpiece. Many English translations are available.

Thucydides in Athens, in about 400 B.C

In August 1797, when Bligh was a captain, his ship became involved in the great British mutiny near the mouth of the Thames River. But in October of that year, with the same ship and crew, he successfully fought the Dutch at Camperdown. In 1805, named governor of the Australian penal colony through Banks’ influence, Bligh proved unpopular and was removed in 1808. He returned to England and was appointed rear admiral in 1811 and vice admiral in 1814, although he held no commands. Bligh died in London on December 7, 1817.

Illuminati was a term used by the early Fathers of the Christian Church to signify persons baptized into the faith. They were called illuminati, or illuminated ones, on the ground that they had received from God the grace of an enlightened understanding.

During the 16th and 17th centuries, the name was adopted by a mystical sect in Spain and France, The Spanish illuminati (aluminados) seem to have been in origin akin to the various Gnostic heretics who flourished in the early Middle Ages, though their appearance in Spain is later.

They were suppressed by the Inquisition during the 16th century; they also established themselves in Picardy and elsewhere in France during the 17th, and lasted in isolated bodies till the end of the 18th.

Other societies have from time to time employed the name. The 20th-century Rosicrucians, for example, call them
selves Illuminati. The Rosicrucian illuminati are quite distinct; their tenets are mixed with alchemy and occultism.

Finally, in 1776 a secret masonic society of anti-religious rationalists with republican and free-thinking views was formed by Adam Weishaupt, professor of Canon Law at Ingolstadt, Bavaria, who had been educated by the Jesuits but became a freethinker. It was anti-Jesuit, and was suppressed in 1785.

She was born Marie Grosholtz in Strasbourg, France, and baptized on December 7, 1761. She spent her early life in Paris, where she learned the art of wax modeling from her uncle Philippe Curtius and worked in his studio. It was frequented by the fashionable and intellectual world, and Marie modeled from life such noted men as Rousseau and Benjamin Franklin. During the Revolution of 1789 she was suspected of royalist sympathies.

Madame Tussaud’s wax-figure group showing Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, and their children. Marie later was imprisoned and was forced to model the severed heads of the royal family and the aristocracy, including Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. She also modeled the head and body of the revolutionist Marat in the bath where he was killed by Charlotte Corday.

In 1795, Marie married Frangois Tussaud, an engineer, by whom she had two sons. The marriage failed, and she went to England in 1802, taking some of her best figures. She exhibited these in London and the provinces, added other figures, and in 1835 settled in Baker Street, London, where she died on April 16, 1850. Her best work, at the age of 81, was a self-portrait.

Madame Tussaud’s Exhibition was opened on the present site in Marylebone Road in 1884. It was destroyed by fire in 1925, but the original molds were saved, and it reopened in 1928, since when many changes have taken place. Portrait sculpture was carried on by her descendants until the death of her great-great-grandson Bernard Tussaud in 1967. Wax portraits continue to be made in the exhibition’s studios.

Bogart’s distinctive acting personality was established in 1935, when he played a snarling gangster in The Petrified Forest. His recreation of the part for the screen the following year established him in motion pictures. His memorable films include Casablanca (1942) , The Maltese Falcon (1942), To Have and Have Not (1945), Key Largo (1948), The Treasure of Sierra Madre (1948), and The African Queen (1951), for which he won an Academy Award.

Bogart was married four times, the last time to the screen actress Lauren Bacall. He died in Hollywood on January 14, 1957.

Groucho (Julius, 1890-1977) was born in New York City (as were all the brothers) on October 2 1890. His visual trademarks were his painted-on moustache, huge cigar, and a walk that was something between a crouch and a lope. In the Marx Brothers act it was usually Groucho who fast-talked them into or out of ridiculous predicaments. After the act broke up, Groucho continued to appear in occasional movies, but he became better known as a TV personality with his 11-year (1951-1961) run in You Bet Your Life, a quiz show that succeeded largely because of his quick-witted ad-libbing. Groucho wrote the autobiographical Memoirs of a Mangy Lover (1963). In 1974, Groucho accepted a special Academy Award on behalf of all the brothers.

Chico (Leonard, 1887-1961) was born on March 22, 1887. For purposes of the act, Chico adopted an outrageously phony Italian accent. He also played the piano in an eccentric manner. He died in Hollywood, California, on October 11, 1961.

Harpo (Arthur, 1888-1964) was born on November 23, 1888. Wearing a blond fright wig and a battered top hat, he pretended to be a childlike mute, communicating by gestures and persistently honking a toy horn. His feature “turn” in the act was as a harpist. He died in Hollywood on September 28, 1964.

Gummo (Milton, 1892-1977) and Zeppo (Herbert, 1901-1979), two other brothers, were briefly in the act.

The mother of the Marx Brothers, Minna, was the daughter of entertainers and the sister of the vaudeville star Al Sheean (of Gallagher and Sheean). She was determined that her sons would be in show business. After making several false start, the Four Marx Brothers (Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and Gummo) became an established comedy act on the major vaudeville circuits shortly before World War 1.

The war interrupted their career, since Harpo and Gummo joined the Anny, but the Four Marx Brothers (with Zeppo replacing Gummo) resumed their act in 1918. The brothers left vaudeville for the legitimate theater in 1924, appearing in their own musical I’ll Say She Is, followed by Coconuts (1926) and Animal Crackers (1928).

The first Marx Brothers film was their adaptation of Cocoanuts (1929). Zeppo left the act after Duck Soup (1933) to establish a theatrical agency in Hollywood (in which he later was joined by Gummo) . The three brothers then appeared in A Night at the Opera (1935), A Day at the Races (1936) , Room Service (1938) , A Day at the Circus (1938) , Go West (1940 ), The Big Store (1941) , and A Night in Casablanca (1946). Love Happy (1950) was their last film together.

Cleopatra was 17 when her father the Pharaoh (king) of Egypt died, leaving her and her 10-year-old brother to rule together over his kingdom. Her brother’s guardians seized power and drove her from the throne.

Soon afterwards, Julius Caesar, ruler of Rome, went to Egypt. Cleopatra was brought to him secretly and he fell in love with her. With his help, she organized a revolt against her brother. She then went to Rome with Caesar. But she returned to Egypt when he was assassinated. Two years later, Mark Antony, a follower of Caesars, came to visit her. He, too, fell in love with her. Although he was one of the three men who ruled Rome, he decided to remain in Egypt. Octavian, another of the three, and brother of Antony’s wife, determined to destroy the lovers.

A great sea battle took place near Actium on the west coast of Greece. Octavian won, and Antony and Cleopatra were forced to retreat to Alexandria, the capital of Egypt. Oct avian’ s forces surrounded the city.

Knowing she was defeated, Cleopatra lay in the tomb built for her burial, and sent word to Antony that she had killed herself. Thinking her dead, he ran himself through with his sword. According to legend, Cleopatra killed herself by allowing herself to be bitten by an asp, a poisonous snake.

An interesting sidelight on Florence Nightingale’s work in the Crimea is afforded by her letter from Balaclava Hospital to Mother Clare Moore of Bermondsey: ‘Your going home is the greatest blow I have had yet. But God’s blessing and my love and gratitude go with you as you will know. You were far above me in fitness for the general Superintendency both in worldly talent of administration and far more in the spiritual qualification which God values in a Superior. My being placed over you in our unenviable reign of the East was my misfortune and not my fault’.

Her selfsacrificing services to the wounded made her name famous throughout Europe.

She wrote several pamphlets on nursing and hospitals, and a fund, the interest on which amounts to about £1600 per annum, was raised in 1857 for the purpose of training nurses, now carried out at St Thomas’s and King’s College Hospitals. She received the Order of Merit in 1907. The Verney-Nightingale papers afford interesting details of her relations with Benjamin Jowett (who wanted to marry her) , Richard Monckton Milnes (also a great admirer), Sidney Herbert, and the poet Arthur Hugh Clough, both also intimate friends.

In 1927, Jolson made film history when he appeared in The Jazz Singer, the first full-length talking picture. His other films include The Singing Fool (1928), Mammy (1930), Hallelnjah, I’m a Bum (1933), and Swanee River (1939). From 1932 he also had a radio show.

Jolson, who popularized such songs as April Showers, Swanee, and Sonnu Boy, dubbed the musical sound track for two autobiographical films, The Jolson Story (1946) and Jolson Sings Again (l949). Al Jolson died on October 23, 1950, in San Francisco, California.

Munch made his conducting debut in Paris in 1932 and conducted the orchestra of the Societe des Concerts du Conservatoire from 1936 to 1946. In 1949 he succeeded Serge Koussevitzky as conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and in 1951 became director of the orchestra’s Berkshire Music Center. He retired from the Boston Symphony in 1962 and formed the Orchestre de Paris, with which he was on tour when he died, in Richmond, Va., on November 6, 1968.