ANNIVERSARIES
12 DECEMBER 1870
In Washington, DC, the formerly enslaved Joseph Rainey is sworn in as congressman from South Carolina, becoming the first black American to sit in the House of Representatives.
20 DECEMBER AD 69
Vitellius is pelted with dung and murdered
The Roman emperor’s corpse is then dumped in the Tiber
The Roman emperor Vitellius was a very fat man. “His besetting sins,” wrote the historian Suetonius, “were luxury and cruelty. He divided his feasts into three, sometimes into four a day: breakfast, luncheon, dinner and a drinking bout; and he was readily able to do justice to all of them through his habit of taking vomiting agents.” On the road he would “snatch bits of meat and cakes amid the altars, almost from the very
