Summary of Michael Farquhar's Bad Days in History

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 New Year’s is a day filled with new hope and fresh starts, except for those who are unfortunate enough to live during the New Year. For some people, January 1 was a dead end.

#2 Timothy Pickering was an early American pest. He was so obnoxious that even his own biographer couldn’t stand him. But he was the first senator to be censured for telling the truth.

#3 Ronald Wayne, the co-founder of Apple Computers, was a lucky man when he was set free from the company in 1977. He had been given a 10 percent stake to serve as Apple’s parent, but he felt that the risk was too great. Instead, he sold stamps and coins out of his mobile home in Nevada.

#4 The War of Currents was a fight between Edison’s direct current system and Nikola Tesla’s alternating current system. It was a vicious campaign to discredit the rival system, and it culminated in the public execution of a convicted ax murderer named William Kemmler in 1890.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Jun 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822530294

IRB Media

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Insights on Michael Farquhar's Bad Days in History

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 6

Insights from Chapter 7

Insights from Chapter 8

Insights from Chapter 9

Insights from Chapter 10

Insights from Chapter 11

Insights from Chapter 12

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

New Year’s is a day filled with new hope and fresh starts, except for those who are unfortunate enough to live during the New Year. For some people, January 1 was a dead end.

#2

Timothy Pickering was an early American pest. He was so obnoxious that even his own biographer couldn’t stand him. But he was the first senator to be censured for telling the truth.

#3

Ronald Wayne, the co-founder of Apple Computers, was a lucky man when he was set free from the company in 1977. He had been given a 10 percent stake to serve as Apple’s parent, but he felt that the risk was too great. Instead, he sold stamps and coins out of his mobile home in Nevada.

#4

The War of Currents was a fight between Edison’s direct current system and Nikola Tesla’s alternating current system. It was a vicious campaign to discredit the rival system, and it culminated in the public execution of a convicted ax murderer named William Kemmler in 1890.

#5

The Dreyfus Affair was the result of a prolonged saga of miscarriage of justice and virulent anti-Semitism. It involved the French military, and it was decided in 1985 that a statue of Dreyfus, holding his broken sword, should be placed in the École Militaire courtyard. But the French military never reconciled with its own dishonor.

#6

Thomas Cromwell was Henry VIII’s most adept henchman. He was the ruthless engineer of the English king’s divorce from his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, his split from Rome, and the destruction of his second wife, Anne Boleyn. But as a matchmaker, he was a failure.

#7

Anne’s marriage to Henry was annulled six months after it began on the grounds of non-consummation, as well as an alleged premarital contract with someone else.

#8

The fall of Cromwell was a precursor to the king's ultimate undoing. The nobles of the realm were always resentful of the power and influence of the upstart Cromwell, and they violently turned against him.

#9

The Battle of the Bulge was the last gasp of Hitler’s dying Third Reich, and it was the British field marshal Bernard Law Montgomery who took credit for saving the Americans from an impossible situation.

#10

The Japanese prime minister’s home was the venue for the state dinner, an elaborate meal that George H. W. Bush became violently ill from. He eventually passed out, and the rest of the dinner landed on his lap. He humorously defused the situation by saying, Why don’t you roll me under the table, and I’ll sleep it off while you finish the dinner.

#11

In 1980, 63 terrorists were publicly beheaded in Saudi Arabia for having seized the Grand Mosque of Mecca the previous November. The executions were carried out simultaneously in eight Saudi cities.

#12

The merger of AOL and Time Warner was announced in 2000. It was the largest corporate merger in history, and was described in the business press as breathlessly as a dazzling royal wedding. But the future arrived in an instant, and the companies had another problem: They seemed to hate each other.

#13

The Brooklyn Bridge, or the Eighth Wonder of the World, was built in 1883. It was designed to be supported by steel cables, but one corrupt character with a crucial role in its construction substituted inferior wire that was then applied to the bridge.

#14

The U. S. House of Representatives debated a constitutional amendment that would give women the right to vote in 1915. Many speakers, including Stanley E. Bowdle, noted that men and women are different, and that women resent the limitations of sex. But they didn’t want to discuss why.

#15

Genius is the ability to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later. It has been proven that some of the most brilliant minds have gone unheralded in their own lifetimes.

#16

From this cradle of the Confederacy, we must sound the drum for freedom. We must rise to the call for freedom-loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South.

#17

George Wallace, a much more moderate man before he became the governor of Alabama, made a Faustian bargain with segregationist voters in order to win his position. He then delivered the inauguration speech that would forever define him.

#18

On January 15, 1919, a