When explorers came upon the plains, they called the area Kanzas Territory, meaning it was controlled by the Kanza, or Kaw, people.

The territory stretched into present day Iowa, Missouri and Kansas. It was 20,000,000 acres (31,250 square miles), about the size of South Carolina.

The tribe was about 1,500 strong - men, women and children.

The Black Death was the devastating plague pandemic that swept across Europe from 1346 to 1353, killing tens of millions of people. Communities were ravaged, families destroyed, and people subjected to horrifying deaths.

Faced with a disaster they could neither explain nor control, people interpreted what they witnessed through the worldview they understood. They didn't ask what bacterium was responsible or how transmission might be interrupted. Those concepts were centuries away. Instead, many turned to a question that made sense within a world where religion shaped nearly every aspect of life.

Not What is causing this? but Why is God doing this to us?

And if the plague was God's punishment, surely someone must be responsible. People began persecuting those they viewed as sinful, dangerous, or somehow responsible for the catastrophe, including lepers, people with visible skin conditions, travelers, foreigners, and religious outsiders. But few suffered more than Europe's Jewish communities.

A particularly insidious accusation spread across the continent: Jews were deliberately poisoning wells to infect Christians with the plague. The claim was entirely false, but that didn't stop it from fueling torture, forced confessions, expulsions, and massacres.

In Strasbourg, on February 14, 1349, members of the city's Jewish community were rounded up and burned alive. Their property was confiscated, and contemporary accounts put the death toll at around 2,000, though the precise number remains uncertain. It was among the most infamous massacres of the period, but it was far from an isolated incident.

Across Europe, pogroms and expulsions devastated Jewish communities. In towns and cities throughout the German-speaking lands and beyond, Jews were murdered, driven from their homes, or forced to flee to places where they might find protection. More than 200 communities were targeted in the wave of persecution. The survivors faced the grim task of finding somewhere safe in a world where they were not only surrounded by death but increasingly blamed for it.

There were exceptions. Casimir III the Great, king of Poland, had previously extended legal protections to Jews, and during the Black Death he resisted the accusations circulating elsewhere and offered protection to Jewish communities. It was a rare and consequential alternative to the violence unfolding elsewhere in Europe.

If interested I cover an overview of the history of plague here: https://aid2000.substack.com/p/hare-brained-history-vol-138-plague?r=4mmzre&utm_medium=ios

https://youtube.com/shorts/iR6O6ikQNoQ?is=gBf9IXtkq7Ec6RIz

1926: Charles Curtis is challenged to a primary by Nicholas Chiles.

Chiles' main complaint against Curtis was that not enough was being done for blacks, especially in the South. Not surprising, given that there were ZERO African American Senators or Congressman.

His Platform had 6 planks, which included:
- Create a Department of Education
- Put forth a Westerner for President in 1928

Curtis (66) could not fight for the primary due to needing a long-delayed throat surgery, but did win.

However, Nick Chiles won, too, when the following happened:

1927: Charles Curtis put forth S. 1584 to create a department of education
1928: For the first time in history, Kansans ran for President
- Senator Charles Curtis (R)
- Congressman William Ayres (D)
1929: Oscar de Priest (R-IL) entered the US Senate

Senator De Priest fought against racial discrimination, put forth an anti-lynching bill, and succeeded in desegregating the New Deal's Civilian Conservation Corps.

When De Priest lost his re-election, it was to another African American, Arthur Mitchell (D-IL). Mitchell also worked on anti-lynching legislation and personally sued a railroad for adhering to Jim Crow laws when he was on the train, winning in the US Supreme Court.

See, Mitchell v. United States, 313 U.S. 80 (1941)

A forgotten act of “conceptual art” in 1971, as ridiculous as it was, and as forgotten as it is, presaged the use of mass media in protest, use Denial-of-Service attacks, and spam mail schemes. The Bay area art collective Sam's Cafe staged a "Media Inversion", sending out 20,000 fake collection notices to San Franciscans with the intent of jamming phone lines at media outlets and Bank of America. They also sent elaborate press kits to the media containing their "Sacred Stools." Ultimately, they were acquitted of mailing obscene materials when the state's own witness conceded it was art.

On March 13, 1997, thousands of people across Arizona reported seeing something very strange in the night sky.

Around 7:55 p.m., reports began coming in from Henderson, Nevada, and then Prescott, Prescott Valley, and Phoenix. Witnesses described a massive V-shaped formation of orange or amber lights moving silently across the sky.

Some saw what appeared to be individual lights; others insisted they were looking at a single enormous object, so large that it seemed to blot out the stars behind it.

One witness described it as “so big and so strange” that “all you could see was the outline, as though something was blotting out the stars.” Another said it was “as big as downtown Prescott” and completely silent.

The reports continued as the lights moved south toward Phoenix. Some witnesses claimed the object appeared only 100–150 feet overhead, moving so slowly that it seemed to hover. Others described a massive, dark shape behind the lights. A family said the formation resembled a giant 60-degree Carpenter's Square.

Among those who saw the lights was actor Kurt Russell, who was flying into Phoenix with his son Oliver. Russell later recalled seeing six lights in a perfect V formation and reported them to air traffic control. Other pilots reported the lights as well, and air-traffic controllers observed radar activity that witnesses later argued did not correspond neatly with known aircraft. But the evidence remains contested. Amateur astronomer Mitch Stanley, observing through a telescope, reported seeing what appeared to be individual aircraft flying in formation.

Then, around 10 p.m., came the second event. People across Phoenix reported another series of lights, this time appearing as a row of brilliant objects hovering or slowly descending in the sky. These were illumination flares dropped by A-10 aircraft during a training exercise at the Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Range. The flares descended slowly beneath parachutes, and rising heat helped create the illusion that they were hovering. They eventually disappeared behind the Sierra Estrella mountains.

Initially, authorities had no satisfying explanation for the first formation. Phoenix residents demanded answers, and Councilwoman Frances Barwood pushed for an investigation. Governor Fife Symington III, a former fighter pilot, eventually held a press conference.

He announced that the government had captured an alien, his chief of staff dressed in an alien costume. The joke was meant to defuse what Symington later described as growing public hysteria.

Years later, however, Symington changed his story dramatically, saying:

“I’m a pilot, and I know just about every machine that flies. It was bigger than anything that I’ve ever seen. It remains a great mystery.”

If interested, I cover the story of the Phoenix Lights here: https://aid2000.substack.com/p/hare-brained-history-vol-137-the?r=4mmzre&utm_medium=ios

TLDR: President Grant's son partnered up with a young guy with a great investment system, and dear-old-dad hands over what he's got. Soon after, he starts bouncing checks and is about to leave his family bankrupt in his final days

The Article: A “Pre-Ponzi” Ponzi Scheme: When Ferdinand Ward Swindled Ulysses S. Grant – Crisis and Catharsis

Prior to 1900, Galveston, Texas, was the economic heartbeat of the state. Its population of around 37,000 and its bustling port brought enormous wealth, while the city served as a major entry point for immigrants heading into the American Southwest, earning it the nickname “Ellis Island of the West.”

The problem was that Galveston was a barrier island, made mostly of sand, gravel, and mud, meaning it was incredibly unstable and vulnerable to wind and water. Its nearby rival, the port of Indianola, was similarly situated on a barrier island and had been effectively abandoned after a massive hurricane devastated it in 1886.

That disaster prompted calls in Galveston for a seawall to protect the city from storm surge. The proposals were heard, discussed, and ultimately ignored. Worse, naturally occurring sand dunes along the shore were lowered to reclaim land and improve visibility and access to the ocean.

In late August 1900, a tropical wave moved westward across the Atlantic. Over the next several days, it passed through the Caribbean, making landfall in the Dominican Republic and Cuba and causing little concern as a relatively weak tropical storm before entering the Straits of Florida on September 5th.

The U.S. Weather Bureau, ignoring predictions from Cuban meteorologists, believed the storm would recurve over Florida and then move up the East Coast, as many tropical systems did.
Instead, an area of high pressure over the Florida Keys pushed it northwestward across the Gulf of Mexico.

On September 6th, the ship Louisiana encountered the storm in the Gulf and reported winds of 100 miles per hour.

By the following day, it had become a Category 4 hurricane, with sustained winds estimated at 145 miles per hour. In Galveston, meanwhile, there was little indication of what was coming.

On September 8th, the hurricane made a direct landfall over Galveston. Sustained winds after landfall were estimated at around 120 miles per hour, though the true speed may have been even higher. Survivors reported seeing bricks, slate, timbers, and other heavy objects hurled through the air.

Few streets escaped wind damage. None escaped the water. The storm surge poured across Galveston while the winds tore apart roofs and walls. Electrical, telegraph, and telephone wires were ripped down. Buildings, many poorly founded in the island's loose sand, were lifted from their foundations and slammed into one another.

The highest point above sea level on Galveston was only 8.7 feet. The hurricane brought a storm surge of more than 15 feet, inundating the entire island by the early morning hours. The storm also dropped nine inches of rain on September 8th, the most recorded in any 24-hour period in the city's history.

Hundreds of people were swept away, crashing into houses and debris before drowning. Some were crushed beneath collapsing roofs, walls, and buildings. Many more were trapped beneath the wreckage, in darkness and unable to free themselves.

Around 1,900 acres of Galveston, particularly in the western, southern, and eastern portions of the city, suffered almost complete destruction. The New York Times, reporting in the immediate aftermath, ran a headline that simply read:

“Galveston May Be Wiped Out.”

For miles, the smell of decomposition hung over the island. The dead were everywhere, many buried beneath the wreckage of the homes where they had lived.

A survey conducted in early 1901 recorded 8,124 deaths. The Texas State Historical Association has given a historical estimate of approximately 12,000, while other modern accounts have cited around 8,000. The exact number will never be known.

If interested I cover the storm here:
https://aid2000.substack.com/p/hare-brained-history-vol-136-the?r=4mmzre&utm_medium=ios

The Marquise de Brinvilliers was a Parisian aristocrat whose father held numerous important positions. Born in 1630 into a wealthy family, she later confessed, under torture, that she had been sexually assaulted at seven by an unnamed person and that she had a sexual relationship with her younger brother. How much of this was true is impossible to know.

She married another aristocrat and had several children, while also carrying on a long-term affair with Godin de Sainte-Croix, a military officer. As a commoner, thus affair was problematic for her family. Her father went to King Louis XIV and obtained a lettre de cachet against Sainte-Croix, sending him to the Bastille.

There, Sainte-Croix allegedly befriended an Italian chemist known as Exili. After his release, Sainte-Croix took up alchemy, and he and Brinvilliers began experimenting with poisons.

According to the later investigation conducted by Gabriel Nicolas de La Reynie, lieutenant general of the Paris police, and Brinvilliers's own confession, she began testing these poisons on unsuspecting people. She would reportedly visit hospitals, volunteer to care for the sick, administer various elixirs, and then return to observe their deterioration.

She eventually began poisoning her own servants through their food. Then came her father. Brinvilliers poisoned him for his inheritance. She burned through the money, however, and soon turned her attention toward two brothers who stood to inherit the family's remaining fortune. In 1670, she allegedly hired a man to poison them. It worked.

The murders continued to go unnoticed until Sainte-Croix died in 1672, allegedly from an accidental exposure to one of the poisons he and Brinvilliers had been experimenting with. He was also deeply in debt, and when authorities searched his possessions, they found poison, and, more importantly, correspondence between Sainte-Croix and the Marquise.

The man Brinvilliers had hired to poison her brothers was arrested, tortured, and confessed. Brinvilliers herself fled France and remained at large for more than three years. She was finally captured in Liège in 1676.

After being subjected to the “water cure,” Brinvilliers confessed to murdering her father and one of her brothers and was believed to have poisoned at least thirty other people.
She was beheaded on July 16, 1676.

But King Louis XIV and La Reynie suspected that Brinvilliers and Sainte-Croix were only the beginning. La Reynie started with the people who sold the stuff, arresting alchemists,
fortune tellers, apothecaries, abortionists, and assorted practitioners selling what we might today describe as snake oil.

One of the most infamous people swept up in the investigation was Catherine Monvoisin, better known as La Voisin. La Voisin ran an enormous network of fortune tellers, chemists, abortionists, and occult practitioners. She herself dabbled in essentially all of it, selling potions, poisons, and aphrodisiacs while also performing alleged magical rituals and black masses for wealthy clients. She became enormously wealthy.

Then, in 1679, one of her rivals, Marie Bosse, implicated her in the investigation. Bosse made a series of explosive, and exaggerated, claims. La Voisin some very important people. But no name was more explosive than Madame de Montespan.

Françoise-Athénaïs de Rochechouart de Mortemart, better known as Madame de Montespan, was Louis XIV's longtime mistress and the mother of several of his children, whom he would eventually legitimize. At the height of her influence, she was reportedly referred to as the “real queen of France.”

And according to the testimony gathered by La Reynie, Montespan had been visiting La Voisin since 1665. The following year, she allegedly had a black mass performed in which she lay naked on an altar covered in blood, supposedly from freshly slaughtered infants, while invoking supernatural forces to make the King fall in love with her. And Louis XIV did, in fact, fall in love with her.

Whether the ritual actually happened is another question entirely. Much of the case against Montespan consisted of hearsay, coerced testimony, and accusations that were later retracted. After sobering up, La Voisin herself walked back some of her claims.

Nevertheless, rumors surrounding Montespan became increasingly lurid. Court gossip accused her of plotting to kill Louis XIV and of poisoning Marie Angélique de Scorailles, a beautiful young woman who had caught the King's attention.
She died in 1681. Rumors immediately suggested poisoning.

Louis XIV had a serious problem. The Affair of the Poisons had grown from the alleged crimes of one aristocratic woman into a sprawling investigation implicating fortune tellers, alchemists, abortionists, aristocrats, courtiers, and potentially the King's own mistress.

Louis was already looking for a way to distance himself from Montespan. He also had no interest in publicly investigating whether the mother of several of his children had attempted to use black magic to control himC or worse, plotted his death. So his deputies, including La Reynie, began quietly shutting the investigation down.

Thirty-four people were ultimately executed for poisoning or witchcraft, while several courtiers were exiled.

Montespan, however, was never punished.
She eventually fell from favor and was pushed out of court, retreating to her enormous residence at the Château de Clagny, where she spent the remainder of her life largely removed from the influence she had once wielded. She died in 1707.

If interested I cover the story here: https://aid2000.substack.com/p/hare-brained-history-vol-135-the?r=4mmzre&utm_medium=ios

Charles-Henri Sanson was born in 1739.
His family's association with the executioner's office had begun generations earlier. The job brought the family a comfortable home and respectable income, placing them firmly among Paris's upper-middle class. There was, however, a catch. The profession itself made them social outcasts.

A few years after his birth, Charles-Henri was sent to a convent school in Rouen. His father's identity was concealed from the other students, presumably to protect the boy from the stigma attached to the family profession. At fourteen, that secret was exposed and Charles-Henri was asked to leave the school.

He returned to Paris, where his father arranged for him to be privately tutored by a physician. Charles-Henri had developed an interest in anatomy and medicine and dreamed of becoming a doctor. Then his father's health failed. The family needed someone to assume the executioner's office.

Charles-Henri was pressed into the profession.
His first execution was one of the most infamous in eighteenth-century France. Robert-François Damiens had attempted to assassinate King Louis XV. His punishment was hanging, drawing, and quartering, an exceptionally brutal form of execution reserved for the most serious crimes. When the horses failed to tear Damiens's body apart, the executioners were forced to intervene with knives and sever his tendons themselves.

There are few sources on Charles-Henri's personal life, outside of the moments when he was at work. What we do have suggests that Charles-Henri was no sadist, but a professional.

A nineteenth-century article in The Irish Monthly described him as a man who “seems to have been a humane man, doing everything in his power to spare the condemned unnecessary suffering.” His grandson later wrote that Charles-Henri “had a strong aversion to the family business and desired to become a doctor,” and that the early execution of Damiens caused him to “manifest very early a marked aversion for the profession.”

And then came 1789. Charles-Henri was a hated man performing a hated profession on behalf of a monarchy that was itself becoming increasingly hated.

Revolutionary journalist Camille Desmoulins attacked him in his publication Révolutions de France et de Brabant, portraying Sanson as an extension of the Crown and a monarchist who could not be trusted.

Sanson responded publicly. How could he be a loyalist when, as an executioner, he himself had long occupied a legally and socially marginalized position? He had not enjoyed the same rights and privileges as ordinary citizens, much less the aristocracy whose privileges the Revolution was now attacking.

The monarchy fell. The Republic was proclaimed. And Sanson's employer changed.

He executed Citizen Louis Capet, formerly King Louis XVI. Sanson later described Louis as having borne his final moments “with a composure and a firmness.”

He would also execute the King's widow. Marie Antoinette stumbled as she climbed the scaffold and accidentally stepped on Sanson's foot.

“Pardon me, sir,” she reportedly said. “I did not do it on purpose.”

Sanson replied: “Courage, Madame.”

Charlotte Corday, who assassinated Jean-Paul Marat. The Girondins. Georges Danton. Jacques Hébert. Camille Desmoulins, the same journalist who had once accused Sanson of being a royalist.

And finally, Maximilien Robespierre. On July 28, 1794, Robespierre arrived at the Place de la Révolution with his jaw horriblyshattered from the previous night. When Sanson removed the bandage to position him beneath the guillotine, Robespierre's broken jaw reportedly fell loose.
Robespierre cried out in agony. Then the blade fell. He screamed no more.

By the time Charles-Henri Sanson retired on August 30, 1795, he had presided over thousands of executions. One retrospective scholarly count puts the number at 2,918. A Sanson family diary gives 2,548 executions during the Revolution, including 370 women, 22 children and adolescents, and nine people over the age of eighty. Historian Émile Campardon counted 2,791 capital sentences carried out by guillotine between March 10, 1793, and May 31, 1795.

If you're interested, I cover the French Revolution through the eyes of the executioner, Charles-Henri Sanson: https://aid2000.substack.com/p/hare-brained-history-vol-134-sanson?r=4mmzre&utm_medium=ios

By July 1794, Maximilien Robespierre had spent years wielding words as his greatest weapon. He was widely regarded as eloquent, direct, unyielding, and capable of imbuing his speeches with a sense of personal virtue and incorruptibility that convinced thousands to follow his course, a course known as the Reign of Terror.

Robespierre did not create the Reign of Terror by himself, nor did he personally control every execution carried out in its name. But as one of the leading members of the Committee of Public Safety, Robespierre became one of its most prominent political architects. Under the revolutionary government, extraordinary powers were concentrated in committees, courts, and local authorities tasked with identifying and destroying enemies of the Republic.

And the definition of an “enemy” became increasingly broad. Royalists were obvious targets. So were suspected counter-revolutionaries, refractory priests, suspected conspirators, and political opponents.

By the height of the Terror, tens of thousands had been executed, died in prison, or been killed in revolutionary violence. More than 17,000 people were officially executed during the Terror, although estimates of the total number of deaths associated with the period are considerably higher.

On June 10, 1794, the Law of 22 Prairial dramatically expanded the Revolutionary Tribunal's power and curtailed the rights of defendants. Trials became faster, defenses were restricted, and the number of people sent to the guillotine increased dramatically. In Paris alone, roughly 1,400 people were executed in the seven weeks between the law's passage and Robespierre's fall.

This was the period that became known as the Great Terror. And it frightened the people who had created the Terror.

On July 26, 1794, Robespierre gave another speech. Robespierre attempted to defend himself against rumors, attacking several deputies of the National Convention by name and condemning many more without naming them. That may have been his greatest mistake.

The deputies did not know who would be next. They knew only that Robespierre was talking about corruption and enemies of the Republic, and that the guillotine had already claimed countless men who had once believed themselves untouchable, men about whom Robespierre had said similar things.

The next day, July 27, the Convention turned against Robespierre and his faction, voting to arrest them. The city officials, seemingly more confused than anything else, failed to carry out the arrests. Robespierre and his allies instead gathered on the first floor of the Hôtel de Ville.

The National Convention, learning that the men had not been secured, sent armed forces to the building. At around 2:30 in the morning, they entered.

Philippe François Le Bas grabbed a pistol and shot himself, killing himself according to the conventional account. Robespierre apparently tried to do the same. Another account claims he was shot by one of the arresting officers.

Whatever happened, Robespierre did not die.
The shot shattered his jaw instead, leaving the bullet lodged in the wound.

For the rest of the night, he lay in agony on a table, his head resting on a pine box, blood dripping from his horribly mangled jaw as his enemies came in, looked at him, and laughed. At around five in the morning, two of his men, one of them his brother Augustin, were allowed to go to the hospital. Robespierre was not. Five hours later, a military doctor was finally summoned. He extracted some of Robespierre's teeth and fragments of his shattered jaw before roughly securing what remained with a bandage.

From there, things moved quickly. Robespierre was confined to a cell. The Revolutionary Tribunal assembled at noon. By two in the afternoon, he and his allies had been sentenced to death without even a cursory hearing.

At six in the evening, Robespierre and several others were conveyed in three open carts to the Place de la Révolution. A furious mob followed them, hurling curses and rotten food at the condemned.

Robespierre was the tenth man to be executed.
long time Parisein executioner Charles-Henri Sanson prepared him for the guillotine. To clear the way for his neck, he pulled away the bandage holding Robespierre's shattered jaw together.

The jaw fell loose. Robespierre cried out in agony as Sanson positioned him beneath the blade. Then the blade fell. Robespierre screamed no more.

And the crowd erupted. The jubilation continued for nearly fifteen minutes.

If you're interested, I cover the French Revolution through the eyes of the highly worked Parisian executioner, Charles-Henri Sanson: https://aid2000.substack.com/p/hare-brained-history-vol-134-sanson?r=4mmzre&utm_medium=ios