Tag Archives: American Adventure Library

There is a secret in this picture I took last year outside the Summer Palace, Beijing, China. Inside that building, all the doors and windows are blocked by an inside wall so the occupant, the Emperor of China, could not escape. In the year 1898, the Emperor was a prisoner in his own house.      Continue Reading »

If you or I were plantation slaves in Cuba in 1859, our value would have been set by law at $1,000 a person, which is equivalent to $28,316.68 in today’s US currency.   This was a considerable investment by the plantation owner. A large plantation might have around 200 slaves, with a human value in  Continue Reading »

On March 22, 1927, Charles Lindberg became the first man to fly non-stop across the Atlantic from the United States to Europe. He was an instant national hero. While there were many pioneering woman pilots at the time, most people seemed to believe that aviation was a man’s profession.     Amy Phipps Guest disagreed.  Continue Reading »

Ron Howard has just directed a new major motion picture based on the book ” In The Heart of The Sea,” by Nathaniel Philbrick. It is a retelling of the famous sea tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, in 1820, when a giant 80-foot whale became angry at the whaleship and attacked it, bashing in the  Continue Reading »

The brutal murder of the earth’s whale population for many years has had animal rights activists up in arms. Today, most countries have agreed to stop the atrocious killing. Japan, Norway and Iceland are the only three countries which sanction whale hunting. According to the Whale and Dolphin Conservation, these three countries kill 2000 whales  Continue Reading »

In the 1800s, American whaling was a brutal, murderous undertaking. It was carried out by tough crewmen, on tall ships, based in Nantucket and New Bedford, Massachusetts, who were not afraid of huge whales. They were about to learn a frightening lesson.   After the American Revolutionary War, whalers had decimated the whale population in  Continue Reading »

James Norman Hall, a very adventurous author, passed away 63 years ago this month. Hall, with his writing partner Charles Nordoff, wrote a number of well-received books. The most well known today is “Mutiny on the Bounty”,  twice made into successful films. Who can forget Charles Laughton as Captain Bligh?       Other works  Continue Reading »

I ate a convicted murderers final meal last week in San Francisco. A final meal if it were 1850. The dish is called a “Hang Town Fry,” and it was demanded by criminals about to be put to death in Hang Town, known today as Placerville, California. Since a man about to be hung was  Continue Reading »