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In 1836, President Andrew Jackson received a surprising gift in the form of an enormous wheel of cheese. Of course a huge presidential cheese might occasion comment in and of itself, but perhaps even more surprisingly, it wasn’t even the first ridiculously large wheel of cheese delivered to an American president.
In 1891, British humorist Jerome K. Jerome wrote that “Whenever five or six English-speaking people meet round a fire on Christmas Eve, they start telling each other ghost stories.”
The Reconquista, or Christian reconquest of Iberia, took nearly 800 years. The fighting did not come without great attempts by Muslim powers across the strait trying to reestablish their presence in mainland Europe. The last gasp of that effort came in the 1330s, when the powerful Marinid sultanate of what is modern Morocco invaded in an attempt to reverse Christian gains and secure the perilous position of the Sultanate of Granada.
The plot of the Rue of Saint Nicaise and its use of an infernal machine played a vital role in the career of Napoleon Bonaparte, and transformed the very concept of assassination, resulting in a new definition of a word all too familiar today: terrorist.
