https://www.historytoday.com/miscellanies/not-so-special-relationship

The Time Lens, 3521 Randolph Street, North, Attleboro, MA (2026)

10/26/2026

David Hunter Strother, also known as Porte Crayon, was born in Martinsburg on September 26, 1816, and spent his formative years in the community. Strother achieved distinction in a variety of fields, including journalism, art, hospitality, politics, and diplomacy. He also served in the United States Army, ultimately attaining the rank of brevet brigadier general.
In his youth, he aspired to gain admission to the United States Military Academy at West Point. To prepare for this goal, he pursued his education in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Despite these efforts, he was ultimately unsuccessful in securing an appointment to West Point, however, during the Civil War, Strother remained loyal to the Union.
Strother assisted his father in managing a hotel at Berkeley Springs that accommodated approximately 400 guests during the busy season. At the time, the resort was the only spa in the mid-Atlantic region accessible by rail. During the off-season, Strother traveled extensively, drawing upon his experiences for his artistic and literary pursuits. His work appeared in Harper’s Monthly Magazine, earning him recognition as both an illustrator and author. During the Civil War, he served in the Union Army and ultimately attained the rank of brevet brigadier general of volunteers. Following the war, he served as an administrator at the Virginia Military Institute and later held the position of United States consul in Mexico.
Strother sketched a cemetery in Paris that he admired and, in collaboration with surveyor J. P. Kearfott, adapted the design for a hillside in Virginia. This would, of course, become Green Hill Cemetery in Martinsburg.
Strother maintained extensive diaries throughout the Civil War, documenting events as they unfolded. These accounts were later published under the title “A Virginia Yankee in the Civil War”, providing a valuable firsthand perspective on the conflict. During his service in the Shenandoah Valley in 1864, Strother served alongside Rutherford B. Hayes and William McKinley, both of whom would later become presidents of the United States. David Hunter Strother died in 1888 and was buried in Green Hill Cemetery in Martinsburg, a fitting final resting place given his role in helping design the cemetery. His burial there represents a lasting connection between Strother’s personal legacy and the community in which he was born and raised.

10/26/2026

In 2007, Heath Ledger was invited to present at the Academy Awards, but declined after learning the script included a joke about Brokeback Mountain. According to those involved, Ledger felt the joke mocked the film's central message and chose not to take part.

His reaction reflected how seriously he viewed the story he and Jake Gyllenhaal had brought to the screen. When asked about it later, Ledger reportedly said, “It’s not a joke to me,” emphasizing that he did not want the film's themes reduced to a punchline.

For Ledger, Brokeback Mountain was never about controversy or shock value. He saw it as a simple, human love story, explaining, “This is about love. Like, that's it, man.” His decision became one of the most memorable examples of his commitment to the film and the values it represented.

10/25/2026

Nelson was dead. The fleet was shattered. And seventeen captured French prizes had to be shepherded home through the worst Atlantic storms in a decade.

HMS Euryalus — a 36-gun frigate commanded by Captain Henry Blackwood — had spent Trafalgar circling the edges of the battle, relaying signals and observing the carnage. When the guns finally fell silent off Cape Trafalgar on 21 October 1805, Blackwood's work had only just begun.

The Royal Navy had won the greatest naval victory in its history. Twenty-two enemy ships captured or destroyed. French and Spanish sea power broken for a generation. But Victory herself was a floating wreck, her rigging shot away, her decks soaked in blood. Nelson's body lay below in a cask of brandy. Collingwood, now in command, transferred his flag to Euryalus — the only ship still nimble enough to coordinate what came next.

And what came next was not triumph. It was survival.

The fleet was scattered across miles of open water. Masts were gone. Sails were shredded. Thousands of men — British, French, Spanish — clung to battered hulls taking on water. Seventeen enemy prizes had struck their colours, but prize crews were skeleton-thin and half the ships had no functioning pumps. The wounded screamed below decks. The dead went over the side.

Then the wind turned.

An Atlantic gale roared in from the southwest. Within hours, the swell was running fifteen feet. Ships that had survived broadsides and raking fire at point-blank range began to founder in the open sea. Prizes that might have been worth tens of thousands in Admiralty prize money were cut loose and abandoned. Others ran aground on the Spanish coast. Some sank outright, taking French and British sailors down together.

Blackwood worked Euryalus like a sheepdog. For three days he tacked between the scattered fleet, carrying orders, coordinating tows, directing the makeshift convoy toward Gibraltar. He passed within hailing distance of Victory as she limped north under jury rig, Nelson's flag still flying. The signal flags were gone. There was no cheering. Just the work.

By the time the first ships staggered into Gibraltar, only four of the seventeen prizes remained under British control. The rest were gone — wrecked, scuttled, recaptured, or swallowed by the sea. The fleet had won everything at Trafalgar and lost half of it in the week that followed.

Euryalus stayed at sea. Blackwood's orders were to bring the fleet home — not to Gibraltar, but to England. To Portsmouth. To the dockyards and the widows and the Admiralty dispatches that would have to explain how the greatest victory in naval history had ended in this exhausted, grieving crawl across a thousand miles of hostile water.

It took weeks. The damaged ships couldn't make more than a few knots. Storms forced them to heave-to for days at a time. There were no banners. No guns firing in salute. Just the cold work of keeping battered warships afloat and getting broken men home.

When Victory finally reached Portsmouth on 4 December 1805, Blackwood was still alongside in Euryalus. He'd been at sea for two months — from the chase across the Atlantic, through the battle, and then the long haul home. He hadn't slept more than a few hours at a stretch since Trafalgar. He'd watched Nelson die. He'd saved a fleet.

The country erupted in mourning and celebration at once. Nelson's funeral became a state event. Trafalgar became legend. But for Blackwood and the men of Euryalus, the victory had never felt like one. It had felt like three weeks of gales and drowning men and ships going down in the dark.

They'd brought the fleet home. Not in triumph. In silence.

The full story — and others like it — over at Empire Untold. Follow the page for the chapters they didn't put in the paintings.

10/25/2026

The mud of the Argonne Forest is thick with blood, and the air is practically humming with German machine-gun fire. A blacksmith from rural Tennessee, who didn't even want to be in this war, is about to do the impossible. What Alvin York did that day in 1918 made him one of the most famous men in America. But what his own government did to him decades later nearly destroyed him completely. It’s a harsh reminder of how quickly a nation can forget its heroes—and what it actually takes to make things right.

10/24/2026

Six thousand Belgian mu*****ns workers lived under Belgian law, policed by Belgian officers, on English soil. Britain built them an entire town in 1916 — and erased it by 1919.

When Germany tore through Belgium in August 1914, a quarter of a million civilians crossed the Channel in weeks. The exodus moved so fast British port authorities stopped counting. Fishing boats, cross-Channel steamers, anything that could float brought families wearing only what they'd fled in. Britain took them. Families across England opened spare rooms. Parish halls became dormitories. For most refugees, it was temporary shelter — a few months, perhaps a year, until the war turned.

But by 1916, Britain faced a crisis Belgium could solve. The Western Front consumed shells faster than British factories could produce them. Among the Belgian refugees were men who could help: skilled metalworkers, machinists, engineers — tradesmen who knew how to work a lathe, run a press, handle explosives. Britain wanted them on the production line. The Belgians were willing to work. But they wouldn't come without their families. And Britain couldn't scatter six thousand people across the Midlands in spare rooms and billets and expect them to show up for twelve-hour shifts six days a week.

So Britain built them a town.

In 1916, on open fields in Birtley, Tyne and Wear, construction crews raised an entire settlement from nothing. Not a camp. Not barracks. A town. Streets were laid. Hundreds of homes went up. The Belgians named their streets themselves. Belgian police patrolled under Belgian law. No British constable had jurisdiction inside the town boundaries. When disputes arose, Belgian officers settled them. When crimes were committed, Belgian courts heard them. It was sovereign Belgian territory in everything but treaty — and no treaty covered it, because nothing like it had existed before.

The town had a name: Elisabethville, after the Belgian queen. It had shops, cafés, a church, a school where Belgian children learned in Flemish and French. It had a town square. Belgian workers walked to the mu*****ns factory each morning, worked the presses and lathes turning out shells for British guns, then came home to streets that sounded like Ghent, smelled like Bruges, felt like the country they'd left behind. For three years, Elisabethville existed as a functioning Belgian enclave on English ground. Six thousand people lived there. Britain fed them, housed them, paid them wages. Belgium governed them.

It worked because both nations needed it to. Britain got the mu*****ns output it desperately required — trained workers who showed up, stayed, and produced at rates British factories couldn't match. The Belgians got stability, community, and the dignity of keeping their own laws and language intact while in exile. No one asked whether it was legal. No one wrote a charter. They built it, ran it, and when the war ended in 1918, they dismantled it just as fast.

By 1919, Elisabethville was gone. The Belgian families went home. The homes were torn down or repurposed. The streets returned to fields. Three years of a functioning foreign town on British soil, and when it ended, it left almost no physical trace. A few street names survived in local memory. A commemorative plaque went up decades later. But the town itself — the police, the laws, the cafés, the Belgian square in the middle of County Durham — vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

It was never meant to last. It was an expedient solution to a wartime need, and both sides understood that. But for three years, Britain hosted a piece of Belgium that ran itself, governed itself, and policed itself, all while contributing to the war effort that would eventually return them home. No precedent existed for it. No treaty legitimized it. Britain built it anyway.

The full story is over at Empire Untold — follow the page for more chapters like this.

10/24/2026

🪖 Young Charles Durning landed in the first wave on Omaha Beach in 1944 and miraculously emerged as the only survivor of his unit.

🎖️ He earned three Purple Hearts and a Silver Star after surviving grueling combat, including the brutal Battle of the Bulge.

🎭 The aspiring actor faced harsh rejection after the war, even getting kicked out of drama school by teachers who claimed he lacked talent.

🕺 He spent decades working menial jobs and teaching ballroom dance to survive before finally landing his breakout film role at age 49.

🌟 He went on to earn two Oscar nominations and a Tony Award, proving his critics wrong by becoming one of cinema's greatest character actors.

10/24/2026

The incredible story began in 2012 when French student Anaïs Bordier came across actress Samantha Futerman on YouTube and was immediately struck by their identical looks. Intrigued by the uncanny resemblance, she discovered that they shared the exact same birthday and South Korean birthplace.

Recognizing that they shared these profound biographical details, the two adoptees decided to reach out and connect across the miles.
To resolve the mystery behind their striking similarity, a DNA test was conducted which ultimately confirmed that they were identical twins who were reunited after 25 years apart.

10/23/2026

Thomas Pellow was eleven years old when the Barbary corsairs took him. He would not see Cornwall again for twenty-three years.

It was 1715. A Cornish boy from Penryn aboard his uncle's merchant ship, sailing the familiar trade routes off the Portuguese coast. Then the sails appeared on the horizon — North African corsairs, hunting Christian vessels for the slave markets of Morocco. The fight was brief. The outcome inevitable.

Pellow was chained below deck with the rest of the crew and taken across the Mediterranean. Not to the galleys, as many were. Not to the construction gangs or the quarries. He was brought, still a child, into the court of Sultan Moulay Ismail — one of the most feared rulers in Africa. What followed was not a short captivity. It was twenty-three years inside a world few Englishmen ever saw and survived to describe.

The Sultan's court was vast, brutal, and organised with a discipline that would have impressed a European monarch. Moulay Ismail commanded tens of thousands of soldiers, constructed monumental palaces, and ruled Morocco with an iron grip that extended from the Atlas Mountains to the edge of the Sahara. Pellow did not merely observe this world from the margins. He was forced to convert to Islam. He was trained. He was made to serve. And at times, he was made to fight.

For two decades, Pellow lived under the threat of ex*****on, under the weight of a foreign faith imposed at sword-point, and under the constant temptation to forget England entirely. Many did. Renegades, they were called — European captives who took Muslim names, adopted Moorish dress, and became indistinguishable from their captors. Some rose to positions of power. Some commanded ships. Some never looked back.

Pellow did not forget. Through twenty-three years in Morocco, through battles and palace intrigues and the endless, grinding pressure to simply accept his fate, he held on to the idea of home. Cornwall. Penryn. The England he had left as a boy. In 1738, after more than two decades of captivity, he escaped. The details of how remain extraordinary — a desperate flight across hostile terrain, a passage arranged in secret, the constant risk of recapture and death. But he made it. He reached Gibraltar, then a British garrison, and from there, finally, home.

When Pellow returned to England, he was thirty-four years old. He had left as a child. He came back a man who had seen the inside of a North African sultanate, who had survived where thousands of other captives had died or disappeared. And he did something almost no one else in his position ever managed: he wrote it all down.

His account, published years later, became one of the most detailed records we have of Barbary captivity and the court of Moulay Ismail. It was not propaganda. It was not an adventure tale dressed up for London readers. It was a firsthand chronicle of what it meant to be taken, to endure, and to come back. The slavery, the forced conversion, the punishments, the strange mixture of terror and routine that defined life in the Sultan's service — Pellow recorded it all.

Today, his story is largely forgotten outside specialist circles. But in its time, it was extraordinary. A Cornish boy, taken at eleven, who spent twenty-three years in the heart of one of the most powerful Islamic courts in the world — and lived to tell England what he saw.

The Barbary corsairs took thousands of Europeans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Most were never heard from again. Pellow came home. And he made sure the world knew what had happened to him.

Read the full story over at Empire Untold — link in the first comment.

10/23/2026

Francis Drake took one ship through the Strait of Magellan in September 1578. No English captain had ever done it. The Pacific — Spain's private ocean — lay ahead. He sailed on.

The Golden Hind was battered. Storms had scattered Drake's small fleet on the approach to the strait. Ships turned back. Ships were lost. By the time Drake threaded the channel between Tierra del Fuego and the continent, he was alone. The passage took sixteen days. Magellan himself had called it the most dangerous water on earth. Drake emerged on the far side and kept his course north.

What followed was not exploration. It was a calculated strike into the heart of Spanish power — from a direction Spain never thought to defend.

For half a century, the Pacific had been Spain's ocean. Spanish galleons moved unchallenged between Panama and Peru, hauling Inca silver to the fortified ports on the Caribbean side, and from there across the Atlantic to Seville. The treasure routes were rigidly controlled. No foreign ship had ever sailed them. Spain did not bother to arm the Pacific coast. Why would they? The only way in was through the Strait of Magellan, and no enemy fleet had ever made it through.

Drake understood the arithmetic. One ship. Unguarded ports. A Spanish empire that had grown rich assuming the Pacific was theirs by geography.

He sailed north along the coast of Chile. At Valparaíso he seized a Spanish merchantman loaded with w**e and gold. The harbour had no defences. The Spanish crew did not resist — they thought the ship flying English colours was hallucination or madness. Drake moved on. At Callao, the port of Lima, he cut the cables of every ship in the harbour and kept sailing. Spanish captains scrambled to mount a pursuit, but the Golden Hind was already gone.

Then, off the coast of Ecuador, Drake's lookouts spotted a sail on the horizon. The Spanish called her Nuestra Señora de la Concepción. Drake's men called her Cacafuego — fire-sh*tter — for the cannon she supposedly carried. She carried no cannon. She carried twenty-six tons of silver, eighty pounds of gold, thirteen chests of coins, and crates of pearls and emeralds bound for Panama. Drake took her without a fight. It was the richest prize any English captain had ever seized.

He did not sail home the way he came. The Spanish were awake now. Pursuit ships had been dispatched from Panama. The Strait of Magellan was no longer an option. Drake turned the Golden Hind north, past New Spain, searching for the fabled Northwest Passage — a route back to the Atlantic through the frozen waters above the continent. He did not find it. He got as far as the coast of what is now northern California, claimed the land for Elizabeth, and then made a decision that sealed the voyage in history.

He would sail west. Across the entire Pacific. Into Asian waters no English ship had ever touched. Then southwest through the East Indies, around the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa, and home up the Atlantic. He would circumnavigate the globe.

It took three years. When the Golden Hind finally anchored in Plymouth harbour in September 1580, Drake had sailed 36,000 miles. He had raided Spain's Pacific empire from within. He had proven the Pacific was not a Spanish lake. And he had returned with enough silver and gold to pay off England's entire national debt.

Elizabeth knighted him aboard the Golden Hind six months later. Spain demanded his head. Elizabeth made him a hero instead. The lesson was not lost on the generation of English captains who followed. The world's oceans were not owned. They were sailed. And the Spanish empire — vast, wealthy, and confident — had assumed no one would come from the south.

Drake had come from the south.

The full story, with maps and the route traced in detail, is over at Empire Untold. Follow the page for more chapters on the captains, the ships, and the moments that built the British Empire — one impossible voyage at a time.

10/23/2026

An 88-year-old woman was invited to a Halloween party, so her daughter bought her a bee costume online. The costume was a little oversized on her small frame, but that only made it look even cuter. Complete with wings and a stinger, it transformed her into a cheerful bumblebee and quickly became the highlight of the evening. The daughter later left an Amazon review praising the outfit and describing how much fun her mother had wearing it.

But the best part was her 92-year-old husband. Not wanting his wife to steal all the attention, he dressed up as a beekeeper to match her costume. Together, the elderly couple arrived at the party as a bee and her beekeeper, delighting everyone they met. According to the review, they were a huge hit with the other guests, turning a simple costume purchase into one of the internet’s most beloved wholesome stories.

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