Timeline

If you watch enough horror movies, sooner or later you’ll hear a character utter a variation on the phrase, “Every legend has a basis in fact.” Whether or not that statement is true, it is a fact that many of our most outlandish fables and fictions are rooted, at least ...
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Every child learns at school that the Black Death was spread by rats which carried infected fleas. But the textbooks may need to be changed, as a new study suggests rodents have been unfairly blamed for the plague which killed millions of people across medieval Europe. The Black Death, it ...
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Wycliffe had been born in the hinterlands, on a sheep farm 200 miles from London. He left for Oxford University in 1346, but because of periodic eruptions of the Black Death, he was not able to earn his doctorate until 1372. Nonetheless, by then he was already considered Oxford's leading ...
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A young peasant girl who could neither read nor write, she followed the voices and visions from God and completely reversed the course of the 100 Year War (with England occupying most cities) and kept France from becoming a colony of England. Greatly celebrated by her own people she was ...
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Though it is not certain, many scholars agree that the Gutenberg Bible was published in Mainz, Germany on this day. The printing of the Gutenberg Latin language Bible was one of the most significant events that took place in human history. Prior to 1455, books were mainly in possessions of ...
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AMERICA, we learn as schoolchildren, was named in honor of Amerigo Vespucci, for his discovery of the mainland of the New World. We tend not to question this lesson about the naming of America. By the time we are adults it lingers vaguely in most of us, along with images ...
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Erasmus, with the help of printer John Froben, published a Greek-Latin Parallel New Testament. The Latin part was not the corrupt Vulgate, but his own fresh rendering of the text from the more accurate and reliable Greek, which he had managed to collate from a half-dozen partial old Greek New ...
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William Tyndale, 12 years after he left England, was led from prison to the stake where he was strangled, then his body burned. He had time to utter one last cry: “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.” Tyndale had suffered for the cause “poverty, … exile out of my ...
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In Oxford's St Giles there is a huge Victorian memorial to the Oxford Martyrs, close to the spot where they were burned at the stake. Today marks 460 years since the deaths of two of them, Nicholas Ridley and Hugh Latimer, in 1555. The third, Thomas Cranmer, was burnt five ...
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(Image) One Morning at the Gates of the Louvre, The day after St. Bartholomew’s Eve On this day commenced this diabolical act of sanguinary brutality. It was intended to destroy at one stroke the root of the Protestant tree, which had only before partially suffered in its branches. The king ...
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The Speech to the Troops at Tilbury was delivered on 9 August Old Style, 19 August New Style 1588 by Queen Elizabeth I of England to the land forces earlier assembled at Tilbury in Essex in preparation for repelling the expected invasion by the Spanish Armada. Prior to the speech ...
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Funded by The Virginia Company of England, a group of Englishmen sail to the new, mysterious land, which they called Virginia in honor of Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, and begin a settlement. The company had given them rules that no one was to own private property and that they ...
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The Pilgrims fled from England to Holland in 1607. When Spain threatened to invade Holland, the Pilgrims decided to flee again. They considered sailing to Guyana in South America, as they heard of its tropical climate. Pilgrim Governor William Bradford wrote in Of Plymouth Plantation: “Some … had thoughts and ...
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In 1623, a period of drought was answered by colonists with a proclamation of prayer and fasting. This prayer and fasting was changed to another thanksgiving celebration when rains came during the prayers. Later that year, Governor Bradford proclaimed November 29 as a time for pilgrims to gather and give ...
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Despite the considerable evidence that the Bible provided the necessary intellectual basis for science, atheists often claim that, historically, science and religion have been at war. For centuries, they say, the church opposed the advancement of science and human progress in general. When asked for evidence in support of this ...
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Only eighteen years after the Pilgrims landed in the New World, Harvard College, the first of the Ivy League schools, was established for the sake of educating the clergy and raising up a Christian academic institution to meet the needs of perpetuating the Christian faith. All of the Ivy League ...
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Massachusetts Bay Colony passed the first law in the New World requiring that children be taught to read and write. The Massachusetts School Laws were three legislative acts of 1642, 1647 and 1648 enacted in the Massachusetts Bay Colony with he most famous by far, the law of 1647, also ...
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In 1645, while he was deputy-governor of Massachusetts, John Winthrop and his fellow-magistrates had interfered in a local election of a militia officer. When the dispute flared into a war of words, the magistrates bound over some of the dissidents to the next court and summoned others to appear. In ...
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Anthony Johnson (AD 1600 – 1670) was an Angolan who achieved freedom in the early 17th century Colony of Virginia.  Johnson was captured in his native Angola by an enemy tribe and sold to Arab (Muslim) slave traders. He was eventually sold as an indentured servant to a merchant working ...
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The English Civil War took place 1642 to 1651 between Royalist Anglican supporters of King Charles I and the Puritan Parliamentarian supporters led by Lord Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell. The Puritans won, and Oliver Cromwell had Charles I beheaded. Anglican ministers were demoted, including Rev. Lawrence Washington, the great-great-grandfather of ...
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Slavery is not simply a historical phenomenon.. It persists to this day in modern forms, such as trafficking. Quakers have opposed it from very early on and still do. In the first few years after the Quaker movement began in 1652, slavery would have been outside the experience of most ...
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For purposes of a mainstream account, the official site of the Bank of England provides a flowery version about the background and purported success of the scheme proposed by “William Paterson, envisaged a loan of £1,200,000 to the Government, in return for which the subscribers would be incorporated as the ...
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It may come as surprise that when Yale University was founded on this day, October 16, 1701, it was by Congregationalist ministers unhappy with the growing liberalism at Harvard. It wasn't called Yale then, of course, but rather the Collegiate School. The ministers donated forty books and declared their objective, ...
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"Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such thing as Wisdom; and no such thing as public Liberty, without Freedom of Speech." - The New England Courant, July 9, 1722 ...
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Benjamin Franklin in his 'Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion', November 20, 1728: "It is that particular wise and good God, who is the Author and Owner of our system, that I propose for the Object of my praise and adoration. For I conceive that He has in Himself ...
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