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Gigot or leg of mutton sleeves were first seen in the sixteenth century. They became fashionable again in the late 1820s and early 1830s (approximately 1824 to 1836) and then once again in the 1890s. Gigot is French for an animal’s leg, particularly a sheep or a lamb, and as that was what the sleeve…

Charles Julius Guiteau’s plan to assassinate President James Garfield happened on 2 July 1881 as the President was walking through the Sixth Street Station of the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad in Washington D.C. The assassin, Guiteau, who was an American writer and lawyer, falsely believed he had played a major role in Garfield’s election victory…

Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte was an American socialite who married Jerome Bonaparte, Napoleon Bonaparte’s youngest brother, on 24 December 1803. Elizabeth, who was often referred to as Betsy, was the daughter of Dorcas Spear and William Patterson, who had been born in Ireland in 1752 and who had immigrated from Donegal to North America before the…

Thomas Jefferson’s love affair with the Italian-English Maria Cosway began after Jefferson’s wife, Martha Wayles Skelton, died. He had married the widowed Martha in 1772 and they had several children, but weakened by childbirth, she died several months after the birth of her last child in 1782. Of the six children the couple had only…

The spa town of Aix-les-Bains is situated about ten miles from Chambery, about three quarters of a mile from the lake of Bourget, and between two spectacular mountains: Revard and the Mont du Chat. Even though the medicinal waters became popular in Roman times, beginning in the 17th century people became more fully aware of…