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1. Charles West and Florence Nightingale: Children’s healthcare in context

At the dawn of the children’s hospital movement in Europe and the West (best epitomised and exemplified by the opening of London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children (GOSH) on 14 February 1852), the plight of sick children was precarious at all levels of society. After a long campaign by Dr Charles West, Great Ormond Street hospital was the first establishment to provide in-patient beds specifically for children in England.

The post Charles West and Florence Nightingale: Children’s healthcare in context appeared first on OUPblog.

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2. Queen Victoria’s Children’s Book Finally Published

Victoria, Britain’s queen during the better part of the 19th century, wrote a children’s book when she was 10 years old.

That book, The Adventures of Alice Laselles, is now finally getting published. The book is about a 12-year-old girl away at boarding school. The Royal Collection released the title last week. Here is more about the book:

The young royal author tells the tale of Alice, a twelve-year-old girl who is sent away to boarding school after her father remarries.  It reveals Princess Victoria’s natural flair for writing, and tendency towards the dramatic.  When Alice learns she is to leave her home for Mrs Duncombe’s school, Victoria writes, ‘Oh do not send me away dear Pappa’, exclaimed Alice Laselles, as she threw her arms around her Pappa’s neck; ‘don’t send me away, O let me stay with you.’ And she sobbed bitterly.  She introduces a host of characters living at the school, including a ‘poor little French orphan'; Ernestine Duval, and Barbara, the clever daughter of a rich London banker.

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3. Happy Victoria Day! We are Amused...

When I was a girl, I used to call Victoria Day, ‘Firecracker Day’ for obvious reasons. I always loved going to watch the firework displays with my family during my childhood. There was something nostalgic and magic about it. Loved getting those sparklers and writing your name in the air with them too! Ahhh, the good old days…

But was it really that good back then for Queen Victoria during her reign? This got me thinking about her Royal Highness Vicki. So, I thought I’d do a little digging on some facts you may not know about her. This is what I found:

1. She was barely five feet tall. For an outspoken broad with an imposing reputation, this tidbit surprised me. In later years, her girth almost caught up to her height. Some accounts claim she had a 50 inch waist by the end of her life. Queen Vicki would have been a shoe-in for the Biggest Loser reality show!

2. She proposed to hubby, Prince Albert, and not vice versa. Vicki was only 16 when she met her first cousin Albert (yup, they were related) and was immediately smitten with him. Her uncle Leopold suggested that she propose to Albert since she was the queen, and he couldn’t propose to her. Guess it must have been true love—after all, they had nine children together!

3. She was raised by a single mom, and later became a single mom herself. Her father, Edward, Duke of Kent died of pneumonia in 1820 when poor Vicki was less than a year old. She was left to be brought up by her mother who was under the influence of her advisor, and not out for her daughter’s best interests. When Vicki was crowned queen, she booted mommy-dearest out of the limelight and to a distant set of apartments. Oh yeah, and she fired that useless advisor too. Royalty has its perks.

4. She was the first known carrier of hemophilia, an affliction that would become known as the ‘Royal disease’. Who knew marrying into the family gene pool would weaken it too? Hemophilia is a blood clotting disorder passed along the maternal lines within families; men are more likely to develop it, while women are the carriers. Bummer. Sufferers can bleed excessively, since their blood does not proper coagulate, leading to extreme pain and even death. Her son Leopold and three of her grandsons died from the disease. Presently, hemophilia appears to be extinct in the European royal lines. Someone got smart enough not to push the DNA envelope anymore.

5. She had at a least six serious assassination attempts made against her during her reign—most while she was riding in a carriage. At least two of the trigger-happy gents were found not guilty by reason of insanity. Another would-be assassin fired a gun loaded with paper and tobacco at the queen, but the charge was insufficient. Hmm…maybe he should have been chucked in the insane asylum too. One man even tried to hit the queen with his cane. She wasn’t amused. However, looking for the silver lining, every time there was an assassination attempt on Queen Vicki, her popularity soared among the British public. In these days, guess that would be the same as getting more likes on Facebook. Go, Queen Vicki, go!

6. Finally, she was an artist and writer. Knew I liked the old broad! Queen Vicki began drawing as a child, and throughout her life continued to sketch and paint. She also enjoyed writing, and wrote daily entries in a diary. Her daily journals eventually spanned more than 120 volumes, and this Queen Bee wrote about 2500 words a day. Can you say prolific?


Whatever you decide to do this Victoria Day, take a moment to think about how far we’ve come since Queen Vicki’s rule, then give her silent thanks when you see the burst of color streaking through the sky as you watch the firework display with your family or friends. Salute!

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4. Royal teeth and smiles

Much of the comment on the official photographic portrait of the Queen released in April this year to celebrate her 88th birthday focussed on her celebrity photographer, David Bailey, who seemed to have ‘infiltrated’ (his word) the bosom of the establishment. Less remarked on, but equally of note, is that the very informal pose that the queen adopted showed her smiling, and not only smiling but also showing her teeth.

It is only very recently that monarchs have cracked a smile for a portrait, let alone a smile that revealed teeth. Before the modern age, monarchs embodied power – and power rarely smiles. Indeed it has often been thought to be worrying when it does. Prime Minister Tony Blair’s endlessly flashing teeth caused this powerful statesman to trigger as much suspicion as approval. The negative reaction was testimony to an unwritten law of portraiture, present until very recently in western art. According to this, an open mouth signifies plebeian status, extreme emotion, or else folly and licence, bordering on insanity. As late as the eighteenth century, an individual who liked to be depicted smiling as manifestly as Tony Blair would have risked being locked up as a lunatic.

The individual who broke this unwritten law of western portraiture was Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun whose charming smile –- at once twinklingly seductive and reassuringly maternal – was displayed at the Paris Salon in 1787. It appears on the front cover of my book, The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Paris. The French capital had witnessed the emergence of modern dentistry over the course of the century – a subject that has been largely neglected. In addition, the city’s elites adopted the polite smile of sensibility that they had learned from the novels of Samuel Richardson and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Madame Vigée Le Brun’s smile shocked the artistic establishment and the stuffy court elite out at Versailles, who still observed tradition, but it marked the advent of white teeth as a positive attribute in western art.

queen elizabeth
Young Queen, Elizabeth II, by Lee J Haywood. CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Flickr.

Yet if Vigée Le Brun’s example was followed by many of the most eminent artists of her day (David, Ingres, Gérard, etc), the white tooth smile took much longer to establish itself as a canonical and approved portrait gesture. The eighteenth century’s ‘Smile Revolution’ aborted after 1789. Politics under the French Revolution and the Terror were far too serious to accommodate smiles. The increasingly gendered world of separate spheres consigned the smile to the domestic environment. And for most of the nineteenth century, monarchs and men of power in the public sphere, following traditional modes of the expression of gravitas, invariably presented a smile-less face to the world.

Probably the first reigning monarch to have a portrait painted that revealed white teeth was Queen Victoria. This may seem surprising given her famous penchant for staying resolutely ‘unamused’. Yet in 1843, she commissioned the German portrait-painter Franz-Xaver Winterhalter to paint a delightfully informal study, that showed the twenty-four year-old monarch reclining on a sofa revealing her teeth in a dreamy and indeed mildly aroused smile. Yet the conditions of the portrait’s commission showed that the seemly old rules were still in place. For Victoria had commissioned the portrait as a precious personal gift for her ‘angelic’ husband, Prince Albert. What she called her ‘secret picture’ was hung in the queen’s bedroom and was not seen in public throughout her reign. Indeed, its display in an exhibition in 2009, over a century after her death, marked only its second public showing since its creation. This was three years after Rolf Harris’s 2006 portrayal of the queen with a white-tooth smile, a significant precursor to David Bailey’s photograph.

If English monarchs have thus been late-comers to the twentieth-century smile-fest, their subjects have been baring their teeth in a smile for many decades. As early as the 1930s and 1940, the practice of saying ‘cheese’ when confronted with a camera became the norm. Hollywood-style studio photography, advertising models and more relaxed forms of sociability and subjectivity have combined to produce the twentieth century’s very own Smile Revolution. So it is worth reflecting whether the reigning monarch’s early twenty-first century acceptance of the smile’s progress will mark a complete and durable revolution in royal portraiture. Seemingly only time – and the Prince of Wales – will tell.

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5. Celebrating Victoria Day

Monday, 19 May is Victoria Day in Canada, which celebrates the 195th birthday of Queen Victoria on 24 May 1819. In June 1837, at the age of 18, Victoria became Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, as the Empire was called then.

Queen Victoria would reign for more than 63 years, longer than any other British Monarch to date. The Victorian Era, as it came to be known, was a time of expansion of the British Empire, as well as modernization and innovation following the Industrial Revolution of the early 19th century.

To celebrate Victoria Day, we’ve chosen a few of her most famous quotations to illustrate her life and legacy.

Royal Queen Victoria

On being shown a chart of the line of succession, 11 March 1830
Theodore Martin The Prince Consort (1875) vol. 1, ch. 2

Queen Victoria no defeat

On the Boer War during ‘Black Week’, December 1899
Lady Gwendolen Cecil Life of Robert, Marquis of Salisbury (1931) vol. 3, ch. 6

“The Queen is most anxious to enlist every one who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of ‘Women’s Rights,’ with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety.”
–Queen Victoria, letter to Theodore Martin, 29 May 1870. From Oxford Essential Quotations.

Queen Victorias wedding

“What you say of the pride of giving life to an immortal soul is very fine, dear, but I own I can not enter into that; I think much more of our being like a cow or a dog at such moments; when our poor nature becomes so very animal and unecstatic.”
–Queen Victoria, letter to the Princess Royal, 15 June 1858. From Oxford Essential Quotations.

The Little Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (5th ed), edited by Susan Ratcliffe, was published in October 2012. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (7th ed), edited by Elizabeth Knowles, was published in 2009 to celebrate its 70th year.

Oxford Reference is the home of reference publishing at Oxford. With over 16,000 photographs, maps, tables, diagrams and a quick and speedy search, Oxford Reference saves you time while enhancing and complementing your work.

Images: 1. Queen Victoria in her Coronation Robes by George Hayter. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons. 2. Portrait of Queen Victoria, 1843 by Sir Francis Grant. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons. 3. Wedding of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert engraved by S Reynolds after F Lock. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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6. German Christmas traditions

By Neil Armstrong


In recent years German Christmas markets have been promoted to the English as the epitome of a traditional and authentic Christmas. As germany-christmas-market.org.uk suggests, “if you’re tired of commercialism taking over this holiday period and would like to get right away for a real traditional and romantic Christmas market you might want to consider heading to Germany.” If a trip to Germany is impossible, a visit to a German Christmas market nearer to home is more feasible. Beginning with Lincoln in 1982, German Christmas markets have appeared in a number of British towns and cities.

The Queen’s Christmas tree at Windsor Castle published in the Illustrated London News, 1848, and republished in Godey’s Lady’s Book, Philadelphia in December 1850. via Wikimedia Commons.

One of the largest markets outside of the German-speaking world now takes place in Birmingham. In 2006 the Daily Telegraph reported on this, commenting: “The late Queen (Victoria) would have almost certainly have been thinking of her beloved Albert, who is credited with introducing a number of German Christmas traditions to Britain, and who was famously pictured with his then young bride and children beside a decorated tree — a custom which has since become an established norm the length and breadth of the country.” The link between Christmas and Germany automatically conjures the image of Prince Albert and the persistence of the myth of his role in the making of the modern English Christmas. Even before the death of the Prince Consort, children’s books such as Peter Parley’s Annual were making unproblematic claims that the Christmas tree was “introduced” to Britain by Prince Albert. The royal Christmas tree at Windsor Castle was not the first to appear in England, though the appearance of the lithograph representation in the Illustrated London News in 1848 undoubtedly did much to promote the custom.

Pinpointing the precise moment when a ritual practice appears in a new culture for the first time is often difficult. One way of examining the cultural transfer of customs is to look at the activities of artistic and literary elites. The first reference to German Christmas customs to appear in England was Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s account of the Christmas he spent in the German town of Ratzeburg in 1798. He described a Christmas Eve custom according to which children decorated the parlour with a yew bough, secured to a table, fastened little tapers to it, and then laid out presents for their parents (the children received their presents on Christmas Day). This account was published in the periodical The Friend in 1809, and was regularly reprinted during the first half of the nineteenth century. Reaction to it varied. Whilst Thomas de Quincey dismissed the “stage sentimentality” of a description which emphasized the potential of Christmas to promote much “weeping aloud for joy” on the part of parents touched by their children’s conduct, the poet Felicia Hemans took a great interest in German customs and attempted to imitate the tree ritual.

From 1840 a number of German Christmas stories for children were translated and published in England. These books emphasized the Christmas tree as being at the heart of a family-centred celebration, though by this time children were now the main recipients of seasonal gifts. The stories served as a reminder of the German origins of the Christmas tree, a fact which was often repeated when the tree was discussed in the popular press. For example, in his periodical Household Words, Charles Dickens described the tree as “that pretty German toy.” The majority of references to the German Christmas customs were not followed by any commentary of the significance of these origins. More occasionally, writers would eulogise the Germans as a simple, domestic and sentimental people, precisely the characteristics which were increasingly ascribed the festive English hearth. Consequently, the English were able to quickly adopt and naturalize the Christmas tree by making it palatable to the national story.

Despite growing Anglo-German rivalry in the years leading up to the First World War, the English view of the German Christmas persisted at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was played out in the press coverage of the famous Christmas truce of 1914, when British and German troops exchanged cigarettes and food, showed one another pictures of their families, and organised football matches. The best known image of the ceasefire appeared in the Illustrated London News in 1915, featuring a German soldier holding aloft a miniature tree as he approached two British soldiers; this was not only a symbol of peace but also of the values of domesticity and indulgence of childhood.

Whilst the Christmas truce has claimed a prominent place in the mythology of the Great War, it was followed by an abrupt change in Anglo-German relations, which were subsequently defined by anti-German propaganda, the legacy of Nazism, and post-war football rivalry. It is perhaps surprising then, that Germany should re-emerge as a spiritual home of the authentic and traditional Christmas in the English imagination. However, this is testimony to the inherent dynamic of nostalgia embedded in the festival. As I argue in Christmas in Nineteenth-Century England, laments for the loss of Christmases past have been present in festive discourse since the early seventeenth century.

German customs play an important role in the development of the English Christmas, but this argument can only be taken so far. After all, in the nineteenth century the English were no strangers to domesticity and the romanticization of childhood. Furthermore, Christmas is a transnational festival, and all modern Christmases are the product of a multiplicity of cultural transfers.

Neil Armstrong is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Gloucestershire. He is the author of “England and German Christmas Festlichkeit, c.1800–1914″ in German History, which is available to read for free for a limited time.

German History is renowned for its extensive range, covering all periods of German history and all German-speaking areas. Every issue contains refereed articles and book reviews on various aspects the history of the German-speaking world, as well as news items and conference reports. It is an essential journal for German historians and of major value for all non-specialists interested in the field.

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7. Interview with Ann Lewis, Author

Born and raised in Waterford, Michigan, Ann Margaret Lewis attended Michigan State University, where she received her Bachelor’s degree in English Literature. She began her writing career writing tie-in children’s books and short stories for DC Comics. Before Murder in the Vatican: The Church Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes, she published a second edition of her book, Star Wars: The New Essential Guide to Alien Species, for Random House.

 Ann is a classically trained soprano, and has performed around the New York City area. She has many interests from music to art history, to theology and all forms of literature. She is the President of the Catholic Writers Guild, an international organization for Catholic Writers and the coordinator of the Catholic Writers Conference LIVE. After living in New York City for fifteen years, Ann moved to Indianapolis, Indiana with her husband Joseph Lewis and their son, Raymond. Together they enjoy their life in the heartland.

 Now for some questions for this author!

 Interview with the Ann Lewis

 First, tell us a bit about Murder in the Vatican!

Ann: I have a tagline I like to use that also appears in the trailer: A sudden death in the Vatican. An international incident over stolen artifacts. A priest’s wrongful imprisonment for murder.” But really, Murder in the Vatican is a collection of three stories (novellas) that tell “untold tales” from the Sherlock Holmes canon. “Untold tales” are stories that Watson mentions, but never gives us the details. With this book, Watson alluded to three Church-related cases, two of which deal directly with the Pope of his time, Pope Leo XIII. “The Vatican Cameos” is mentioned in The Hound of the Baskervilles, “The Case of Cardinal Tosca” is mentioned in “The Adventure of Black Peter,” and “The Second Coptic Patriarch” is mentioned in “The Retired Colourman.” So fans of the original stories can go back and find those references if they are so inclined.  

 Has anyone ever tried this sort of story before?

A: “Pastiche” writing, or writing Holmes stories in imitation of Conan Doyle’s style, has been done by many authors. Nicholas Meyer, Isaac Asimov and even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s own son Adrian have given it a try. There are literally thousands of these kinds of stories published. (Curious folks and find an exhaustive database of Holmes-related fiction here: http://www.michael-procter.com/holmes/_index.html .) Many of these are takes on “untold tales” and all three of these very church mysteries have been tackled by other authors independently. But no one has written all three of the church mysteries mentioned in the original stories and collected them together in one volume.

 It’s obvious that you imitate Doyle’s voice in this book (it wouldn’t be a Holmes story otherwise), but you also write in the voice of the Pope.  What did you do to create a “voice” for someone who really existed?

A: You mean Holmes isn’t real? {Big cheesy grin} Seriously, though, Pope Leo was a writer himself, in fact one of the most prolific popes in history. So I read his writing—encyclicals mainly.

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8. Ten Seconds

1. What album was the second released by The Beatles in the U.K.?

2. What is the second largest planet in the Solar System?

3. Who was the second U.S. President to be assassinated?

4. And, as a follow-up to the previous question, who was the second assassin of a U.S. President? 

5. Who was the second person to fly solo, non-stop across the Atlantic Ocean?

6. Of the World’s continents what is the second largest in area?

7. What was the title of the second film in the James Bond series made by Eon Productions?

8. Mount Everest is the highest but what is the second highest mountain?

9. Queen Victoria has the longest reign in British history but who has the second longest?

10. Apollo 11 with Neil Armstrong & Buzz Aldrin made the first manned Moon landing, what mission, and what astronauts made the second manned Moon landing?

ANSWERS

1. What album was the second released by The Beatles in the U.K.?

With The Beatles was the second album released by the group.  Like the first (Please Please Me) it was released in 1963, amongst its 14 tracks were Lennon and McCartney’s All My Loving and I Wanna Be Your Man.

Image from Wikipedia

2. What is the second largest planet in the Solar System?

Saturn. Jupiter is the largest of the planets and Saturn is approximately one-third of Jupiter’s mass whereas it is 95 times the mass of Earth.  It is the sixth planet from the Sun and takes approximately 29.5 (Earth) years to orbit the Sun.

Image from Wikipedia

3. Who was the second U.S. President to be assassinated?

James A. Garfield who was not only the second U.S. President to be assassinated, after Abraham Lincoln, he was also the one who had the second shortest tenure in presidential history, after William Henry Harrison.

 

Image from Wikipedia

4. And, as a follow-up to the previous question, who was the second assassin of a U.S. President?

Charles Guiteau. John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s assassin, being the first. 

Image from Wikipedia

5. Who was the second person to fly solo, non-stop across the Atlantic Ocean?

Amelia Earhart was the second to achieve this feat, after Charles Lindbergh.  Her time for her flight was 14 hours 56 minutes, which was a record at that time. She had previously become the first woman to fly across the Atlantic albeit as a passenger.

Image from Wikipedia

6. Of the World’s continents what is the second largest in area?

Africa is second in size after Asia.  Africa 11,668,598.7 sq mi (30,221,532 sq km) compared to Asia 17,212,000 sq mi (44,579,000 sq km).

Image from Wikipedia

7. What was the title of the second film in the James Bond series made by Eon Productions?

From Russia with Love, released in 1963, followed its predecessor Dr. No.  It was the also the second to star Sean Connery in the role of 007.

Image via Wikipedia

8. Mount Everest is the highest but what is the second highest mountain?

K2 (other names Mount Godwin Austen, Qogir Feng, Dapsang or Chogori) at 28,251 feet (8,611 metres)is the world’s second highest mountain.  Situated in the Karakoram Range K2 is located on the border of and lies partly in the Uygur Autonomous Region of Xinjiang of China and partly in the Kashmir region of Pakistan.

Image from Wikipedia

9. Queen Victoria has the longest reign in British history but who has the second longest?

George III is the second longest reigning monarch in British history having reigned for 59 years 96 days.  Victoria reigned for 63 years 216 days.  If she was still on the throne on 12th May 2011 Elizabeth II would surpass George III and become the second longest reigning British monarch.

Image from Wikipedia

10. Apollo 11 with Neil Armstrong & Buzz Aldrin made the first manned Moon landing, what mission, and what astronauts made the second manned Moon landing?

Apollo 12 with Pete Conrad & Alan Bean.  Between 1969 and 1972 Apollo’s 11, 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17 landed on the Moon each carrying a two man crew meaning that 12 Apollo astronauts walked on the Moon’s surface.  In July 1969 Neil Armstrong of Apollo 11 became the first man to walk on the Moon and in December 1972 Eugene Cernan of Apollo 17 was the ‘last man on the Moon’.  An on-board explosion meant that Apollo 13 had to abandon a Moon landing while trying to make repairs that would allow them to return to Earth.

 

Image from Wikipedia

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9. Ten Seconds

1. What album was the second released by The Beatles in the U.K.?

2. What is the second largest planet in the Solar System?

3. Who was the second U.S. President to be assassinated?

4. And, as a follow-up to the previous question, who was the second assassin of a U.S. President? 

5. Who was the second person to fly solo, non-stop across the Atlantic Ocean?

6. Of the World’s continents what is the second largest in area?

7. What was the title of the second film in the James Bond series made by Eon Productions?

8. Mount Everest is the highest but what is the second highest mountain?

9. Queen Victoria has the longest reign in British history but who has the second longest?

10. Apollo 11 with Neil Armstrong & Buzz Aldrin made the first manned Moon landing, what mission, and what astronauts made the second manned Moon landing?

ANSWERS

1. What album was the second released by The Beatles in the U.K.?

With The Beatles was the second album released by the group.  Like the first (Please Please Me) it was released in 1963, amongst its 14 tracks were Lennon and McCartney’s All My Loving and I Wanna Be Your Man.

Image from Wikipedia

2. What is the second largest planet in the Solar System?

Saturn. Jupiter is the largest of the planets and Saturn is approximately one-third of Jupiter’s mass whereas it is 95 times the mass of Earth.  It is the sixth planet from the Sun and takes approximately 29.5 (Earth) years to orbit the Sun.

Image from Wikipedia

3. Who was the second U.S. President to be assassinated?

James A. Garfield who was not only the second U.S. President to be assassinated, after Abraham Lincoln, he was also the one who had the second shortest tenure in presidential history, after William Henry Harrison.

 

Image from Wikipedia

4. And, as a follow-up to the previous question, who was the second assassin of a U.S. President?

Charles Guiteau. John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s assassin, being the first. 

Image from Wikipedia

5. Who was the second person to fly solo, non-stop across the Atlantic Ocean?

Amelia Earhart was the second to achieve this feat, after Charles Lindbergh.  Her time for her flight was 14 hours 56 minutes, which was a record at that time. She had previously become the first woman to fly across the Atlantic albeit as a passenger.

Image from Wikipedia

6. Of the World’s continents what is the second largest in area?

Africa is second in size after Asia.  Africa 11,668,598.7 sq mi (30,221,532 sq km) compared to Asia 17,212,000 sq mi (44,579,000 sq km).

Image from Wikipedia

7. What was the title of the second film in the James Bond series made by Eon Productions?

From Russia with Love, released in 1963, followed its predecessor Dr. No.  It was the also the second to star Sean Connery in the role of 007.

Image via Wikipedia

8. Mount Everest is the highest but what is the second highest mountain?

K2 (other names Mount Godwin Austen, Qogir Feng, Dapsang or Chogori) at 28,251 feet (8,611 metres)is the world’s second highest mountain.  Situated in the Karakoram Range K2 is located on the border of and lies partly in the Uygur Autonomous Region of Xinjiang of China and partly in the Kashmir region of Pakistan.

Image from Wikipedia

9. Queen Victoria has the longest reign in British history but who has the second longest?

George III is the second longest reigning monarch in British history having reigned for 59 years 96 days.  Victoria reigned for 63 years 216 days.  If she was still on the throne on 12th May 2011 Elizabeth II would surpass George III and become the second longest reigning British monarch.

Image from Wikipedia

10. Apollo 11 with Neil Armstrong & Buzz Aldrin made the first manned Moon landing, what mission, and what astronauts made the second manned Moon landing?

Apollo 12 with Pete Conrad & Alan Bean.  Between 1969 and 1972 Apollo’s 11, 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17 landed on the Moon each carrying a two man crew meaning that 12 Apollo astronauts walked on the Moon’s surface.  In July 1969 Neil Armstrong of Apollo 11 became the first man to walk on the Moon and in December 1972 Eugene Cernan of Apollo 17 was the ‘last man on the Moon’.  An on-board explosion meant that Apollo 13 had to abandon a Moon landing while trying to make repairs that would allow them to return to Earth.

 

Image from Wikipedia

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