When Anne Boleyn had her head chopped off on this day in 1536, it was because she’d failed to produce a male heir for her husband, England’s King Henry VII. Only the story is a bit more complicated than that. Henry was still relatively new royalty. His dad’s family line had come to power in the immediate aftermath of the Wars of the Roses (the 30 years’ worth of fighting between the Lancaster and York sides of the Plantagenet family); Henry Tudor was a minor Lancaster relation who’d defeated Yorkist King Richard III and married Elizabeth of York, thereby hoping to put the conflict to rest. Son Henry proved to be a ruthless ruler within days of his coronation, ordering his dad’s advisors arrested and executed.

In fact, Henry VIII’s rule was all about consolidating power. He married his older brother’s widow Catherine, in hopes of maintaining the clarity of succession along with an uneasy peace with her Spanish relations. He loved another, though; Anne, with whom he exchanged torrid love notes, and brought to live at Court while still married to Cathy. When the Pope proved unwilling to annul his marriage, Anne blamed Henry’s Cardinal Woolsey for the failure, and saw to his downfall. Henry then issued a statue in 1533 forbidding any of his subjects to ask the Pope for anything, and a year later declared himself head of his own church (Archbishop Thomas Cranmer then gave him his annulment, though later Catherine’s daughter Mary got back at the prelate by having him burnt at the stake). He and Anne married in secret, which pissed off many religious leaders (they called her a “google-eyed whore,” among other things). The aristocrats saw her French-leaning sympathies as an impediment for an alliance between England and the Holy Roman Empire of Charles V. And the common folk hated her because she was a Protestant heretic, and she and her husband taxed and spent too much on their lavish lifestyles. So when she failed to give Henry a male heir in time to secure his succession plans, his advisors were happy to push a more fecund Jane Seymour on him, whom he married 11 days after Anne’s execution. Jane gave him a son a year later, and died shortly after. His son would reign as Edward VI.

Does the truth depend on who tells it?

The lilitu in ancient Babylon were blood-drinking demons, and some scholars believe that they are the origin of Lilith and her daughters in Hebrew demonology. Though not a character in the Bible, Lilith was Adam’s first wife. She was created at the same time as he was, not like the subservient rib-product second wife, Eve. Lilith left Adam to hookup with archangel Sammael, with whom she preyed on the blood of newborns as he worked as the angel of death. Since then, every civilization has had its own version of spirits, shrouds, revenants and ghouls who drink blood for sustenance. The vampires in Enlightenment Europe were usually human corpses, risen from the grave to roam the world as the eternally dead in an evil mirror-image of the Christian faithfuls’ rise to eternal life after dying.

The label vampire didn’t appear until 1745, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, with an incomplete etymology that could be based on the word for “witch” in various Slavic languages, or an Old Russian name, upyri, used in the 11th century to describe objects of pagan worship. The first vampire story in English was published in 1816 by Dr. Polidori, a drinking buddy of Lord Byron. In The Vampyre, Lord Ruthven is anything but a rotting corpse, but rather a darkly elegant and seductive aristocrat. Variations on this theme followed, culminating in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which was published on this day in 1897 and all but solidified the fashion and feel of the gothic genre. The horror of vampire fiction to this day relies on the combination of desire and loathing that vampires feel for life on earth, and that we of the living feel for them.

It’s interesting how the theme has morphed to suit the tastes of communities throughout history.

But for our conviction that we live on the cusp of a future yet to be invented, there’s considerable evidence that we may forget things as quickly as we discover them. The Antikythera Mechanism is one such hint, discovered on this day in 1902 submerged in a shipwreck between the Greek islands of Kythera and Crete. The device is a finely crafted bronze mechanism consisting of 37 interlocking gears. It resembles a 19th century Swiss clock, only there’s a slight problem: The Antikythera Mechanism was built almost two millennia earlier, sometime before 100 BCE. Researchers are still trying to figure out what it actually did, though there’s some consensus that it was used to calculate the positions of the sun, moon, and visible planets (Roman orator Cicero mentioned that such devices had been built by Archimedes, who was also believed to have built giant mirrors that used sunlight to set distant ships’ sails on fire).

Similarly ancient cylindrical clay pots with sheet copper linings and lead-tin alloy soldering that look (and function) like chemical batteries were discovered near Baghdad in 1936 (and there are carvings on the walls of pharaonic tombs that look a lot like spotlights). Precolumbian golden objects resembling airplanes were discovered along the coastal areas of South America. There’s an iron pillar in Delhi that is 1,600 years old and has never corroded, and a map drawn in 1513 by Turkish admiral Piri Reis that accurately depicts known coastlines with satellite-like accuracy, identifies Antarctica 300 years before it was discovered, and traces its coastline even though it’s covered in ice (it was last visible in 4000 BCE).

I wonder how much of innovation could be simply the act of remembering?

It’s hard to imagine a time when people thought that smoking tobacco was good for you, or that it wasn’t addictive. Christopher Columbus was given a bundle as a welcoming gift on one of his adventures and thought them worthless. But by the mid-1500s, recreational smoking was all the rage (England’s Sir Walter Raleigh was a confirmed smoker), and demand for tobacco would drive the colonization of America. It was also considered to have medicinal uses, like cleansing wounds and soothing skin diseases. A French nobleman suggested it as a cure for the migraine headaches suffered by Queen Catherine of Medici’s son and, when it worked, he shared it with other aristocrats with similarly satisfactory results. His name was Jean Nicot, and his remedy was named nicotiane in his honor.

Thanks to the magic qualities of nicotine, tobacco was considered a salve for nerves, or an energizer for the tired, well into the 20th century. Yet those perceived benefits didn’t come without an equally apparent cost, did they? When the U.S. Surgeon General published on this day in 1988 his conclusion that nicotine was an addictive substance with a power over people similar to that of heroin or cocaine, his office had already been publishing its findings linking tobacco  to respiratory and pulmonary disease for almost 25 years (and research making aspects of the same case dated back to the early 1900s). This data, combined with the readily available experiential proof that smokers coughed a lot and suffered shortness of breath, should have made his announcement no surprise that nicotine addicted cigarette smokers to a habit that caused more than 300,000 premature deaths annually. And it wasn’t. Perhaps that’s why the annual percentage of smokers 18 years or older in America has declined only 4% over the past decade or so.

Habits are more powerful than choices.

Human beings can’t fly. The very idea of being high above the ground challenges our conscious apprehensions, as well as triggers visceral memories of fearing falls out of trees. We know we don’t belong up in the air, and the idea that we shouldn’t fly greatly impeded the growth of the commercial flight in the early decades of the 20th century. The actual experiences weren’t much help, either. Ford’s Trimotor and Boeing’s Model 80 were the workhorses of flight in the late in 1920s, but both planes were uncomfortable (The Trimotor had no ventilation), and couldn’t fly above weather, so flying was usually turbulent. When Stout Airlines hired the first flight attendants in 1926, it gave them the duty of reassuring passengers (along with tending to baggage, ticket reissues and other duties). They were marginally convincing on the reassurance front.

The game changed when Ellen Church decided she wanted to be a commercial pilot, but was turned down by Boeing Air Transport because she wasn’t a man (BAT would one day become United Airlines). Church was also a nurse, and had temerity to pitch the manager of BAT’s San Francisco office that he should hire her, along with eight other nurses,  to work the planes and reassure fliers. She started flying from Oakland to Chicago on this day in 1930. The experiment was a success, and soon all of the airlines followed the same model: Stewardesses had to be registered nurses and be of a smallish height and weight in order to move freely along the narrow aisles of early planes. They also had to be single and/or without children, though I’m not sure why. The nurse requirement was loosened during WWI, as nurses were needed for the war effort. Church only worked 18 months and went back to nursing, serving in the war and earning an Air Medal for valor while in flight.

You could say that stewardesses helped socialize the idea of flying.

I used to stare at images of Space Station V, the double-wheeled platform orbiting above the Earth in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was still under construction in the film which, combined with Hilton operating a hotel and PanAm running the shuttle service, made it seem so cool and real, like it was something I’d get to visit by the time I was an adult. The design was based on an idea proposed by Austro-Hungarian rocket engineer Herman Potocnik in a book he published the year before he died in 1929 entitled The Problem of Space Travel – The Rocket Motor, though space stations had been contemplated by astronomer Everett Hale in 1869, and riffed upon by rocketry pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. They were seen as necessary way stations for exploration, much as ships traveling Earth’s oceans had relied on supply depots along their routes. Leave it to the Nazis to come up with the idea of using a space station as a weapon of war (another pioneer, Hermann Oberth, devised plans for a huge concave mirror to fry earth-borne enemies with concentrated sunlight).

America’s Apollo program proved that Moon travel was possible without a midway stopping point, but a few generations’ worth of contemplation had convinced us that building a space station was a necessary next step if we planned to go to Mars, or beyond (NASA also wanted to keep 40,000 staffers employed after the first Moon landing in 1969). Between frequent budget cuts and a vague mandate, a station design that looked like a tin can took shape, though augmented by interiors including a wardroom and small private quarters courtesy of industrial designer Raymond Loewy. McDonnell Douglas got the contract to build the thing and, on this day in 1973, Skylab was launched into orbit. Much of it was damaged on the way up, and only three manned missions were made to it during its 171 days in space (it orbited the Earth 2,476 times). Hour after hour of “experiments” were conducted and rolls of film shot, but nobody back home had much enthusiasm for the mission. Skylab fell to Earth and disintegrated in 1979, to be followed by other space stations (The Soviet’s Mir, and today’s ISS), but nobody much cared about them either.

I guess humanity woke up from that particular dream once it was made real?

It had been tough time, even by 14th century standards. Rounds of plague had reduced the population of England by as much as a third, and most people alive were chronically malnourished, poorly educated, and felt themselves lucky if they had work slaving away in the muck for their feudal lords. It wasn’t uncommon for Christian believers to ferret themselves away as hermits from the world, to better commune with God about things, as an unnamed woman had done to a cell attached to the Church of St. Julian in Norwich. Sometime in her late 20s, she came down with a severe, life-threatening illness but miraculously survived, recovering on this day in 1373 and bringing back with her from the brink inspired revelations about the nature of all existence. She wrote a short version of her visions soon thereafter, but a longer text — entitled Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love — was published in 1393. It’s the first book in English known to be written by a woman.

The contents of her visions were well within the context of what any faithful Christian could have imagined or seen in her day: God loves humanity, and Christ is pretty much everywhere and everything. She did imagine Jesus as a mother as well as a father figure, which has been a find for feminist theology, and she was less hung up on sin as an indelible stain which humanity had to remove, than she was more interested in forgiveness. Her writing has no poetry or dramatic structure, but speaks in the language of a fevered mind believing death was near (she hallucinates a shining cross hovering over her bed), expressing ideas that may well have been common among the common folk of her era. History doesn’t even record her name; she’s called Julian of Norwich out of convenience. Her anonymity is cited as one reason why she’s never been beatified.

So does the individual speak truth to the group, or does a community speak its beliefs through an individual?

By the time of the early 1960s, America had lived with the Soviet threat for over a decade. Diplomacy had failed to resolve conflicts around the world, and military intervention was looming in Vietnam and South America. Communism seemed on the march everywhere, including here at home, as Joe McCarthy’s Congressional hearings in the 1950s had left lingering suspicions that communists were among us, as well as in distant outer space, as Sputnik’s successful launch in 1957 had taken the Cold War to the heavens. The failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 had been followed by the Cuban missile crisis in late 1962, during which both we and the Soviets walked to the brink of nuclear war.

Americans were scared and angry, which led to the creation of the John Birch Society in 1958 (one of its co-founders was Fred Koch, father of the founders of today’s Tea Party). The John Birch Society’s sole purpose was to combat communism in every way conceivable, real or imaginary. To them, nobody could be trusted, including President Eisenhower, who it believed was a communist agent. The UN? It was a front for a conspiracy to build a collectivist One World Government. Society membership totaled somewhere close to 100,000 by mid-1961, and its grassroots political activism was huge: One campaign opposing a conversation between the US and USSR (it would be its second summit) generated 600,000 protest postcards. These facts inspired Bob Dylan to compose a satirical song, entitled Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues, which he was scheduled to debut on the top-rated Ed Sullivan Show, broadcast live on this day in 1963. But when studio execs heard it in rehearsal that morning, they insisted he sing something different for fear of “libeling” the Birchers. Dylan walked off the stage and refused to perform. This made his record label (CBS) scared of reprisals from the powerful Bircher activists, so they deleted the song from his upcoming album. It went on to be a live and bootleg favorite for the next 40-plus years.

He who yells the loudest always commands political advantage, even if only in the short term.

Siam was a country in Southeast Asia with a land mass slightly larger than that of Spain. It could trace its human habitation back to the Paleolithic period, and the people who lived there considered themselves Thais, or “Tais” (which meant “people” or “freedom”). Sometime in the 12th century, their neighbors and then oppressors of the Khmer Empire called them “Siam,” a derivation of which in Sanskrit means “dark” or “brown,” and added them to the bas-relief sculptures at their temples in Angkor Wat. That’s why the nation-state that emerged there in the late 1700s called itself “Siam.”

It couldn’t resist the fascism that took hold around the world in the 20th century, however. A major irredentist movement emerged — irredentism is the belief that lands should be controlled by ethnic or cultural ties versus the sometimes arbitrary lines drawn by nation states — and it was led by Major-General Luang Wichitwathakan, who saw a Thai Race inhabiting not only Siam but Burma and Southern China. He equated the ethnic Chinese living in his country to the Jews in Germany. A fiercely nationalistic prime minister came to power in 1939 (named Palek Pibulsonggram), who cut deals with Japan and issued 12 Cultural Mandates dictating how people should dress and act and, most importantly, that the country’s new name of Thailand was a “country, people, and nationality.” A fierce guerrilla resistance arose to these policies, and the Japanese pretty much walked over the country, so it reverted to being Siam after the war ended. When it renamed itself Thailand again on this day in 1949, Pibulsonggram still harbored fantasies of a greater Thai people, but the country was already on its way to becoming a practicing, if not dysfunctional, democracy.

Cambodia renamed itself Democratic Kampuchea. The British Empire became the Commonwealth of Nations. Kingdoms become republics. Colonies become countries. There’s always another name.

There is no scientific debate over whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable. There’s no theory that has believers and disbelievers, no inconclusive bit of missing observation or discovery. The tomato is a fruit because it contains the ovary and seeds of a flowering plant called Solanum Lycopersicum. They’re less sweet than many other fruits because of where they form on the vine, so they aren’t eaten as a dessert or stand-alone fruit, and more as an ingredient in salads or main courses. Perhaps this is why they were taxed in the US as a vegetable under the Tariff Act of March 3, 1883, which tax-wise was an improvement over earlier protectionist legislation, but still slapped an onerous cost on imported vegetables.

So four guys named Nix decided to sue the tax collector of the Port of New York to recover back taxes paid for their improperly classified fruit. The case went to the Supreme Court, where judges heard counsel from both sides cite dictionary definitions and, we must assume, reviewed the scientific facts. Nevertheless, on this day in 1893, the court unanimously found in favor of the defense, reasoning that tomatoes were vegetables because people ate tomatoes as if they were vegetables and, while they were at it, the use of the term “vegetable” in the tariff act was generic enough to cover not only tomatoes but other food items, such as beans and peas, which are technically seeds. This deference to “common speech” over scientific fact resolved the case, but not the continuing confusion. Today, the tomato is the state vegetable of New Jersey, the state vegetable and fruit of Arkansas, and the state fruit of Ohio.

So community decides truth?