The Imaginary Realms of

Gilbert M. Stack

On this day (May 23) in 1430, Joan of Arc was captured by the Burgundians as she led the rearguard covering the retreat of her force into the city of Compiegne. The governor of Compiegne, Guillaume de Flavy, ordered the city gates closed before the rearguard entered the city. Whether this was an act of treachery to keep Joan from reaching safety or an act of prudence to keep the Burgundians from overwhelming the rearguard and capturing the city has been debated ever since. The Burgundians wou...

On this day (May 21) in 1758, ten year old Mary Campbell was kidnapped by the Lenape during the French and Indian War. She was probably adopted by a Lenape family. Six years later the British forced the Lenape to return Mary to her family along with many other captive children (60 names are recorded). To the shock of both the British and the families of these children, about half of them tried to return to the Lenape. The forced return of these children was the subject of two fictional novels...

On this day (May 20) in 794, King Aethelberht of East Anglia was murdered. He was on a visit to his fiancé, Princess Aelfthryth of Mercia, at the Mercian court of Sutton Walls when he was taken captive by Aelfthryth’s father, King Offa, and beheaded. It’s not clear why he was murdered, but one theory is that he was trying to exert East Anglia’s independence from Mercia. The story quickly developed that his severed head fell off a cart and cured a blind man. He was event...

On this day (May Eighteen) in 1896 the Supreme Court established the standard of "separate but equal" in the case Plessy vs Fergusson. (Homer Plessy had been arrested for taking a seat in a “white’s only” railroad car in Louisiana.) The ruling permitted the establishment of the Jim Crow era in the south which institutionalized segregation of the races at every level of society. It wasn't overturned until 1954 in Brown vs Topeka Board of Education.

On this day (May 17) in 1792, 24 stockbrokers met beneath a buttonwood tree on Wall Street in New York City and formed the New York Stock Exchange. They pledged only to deal with each other in sales and to fix their commissions on sales at 0.25%. The early New York Stock Exchange was all about limiting competition among brokers to preserve their income.

The First Snows, the second novel in my Winterhaven series, is now available for pre-order at 25% off the cover price.

Sane men spend the winter season bundled up in their homes near the fire praying for spring to come, so insanity must be on the rise in Winterhaven. With the tenuous unity of the Great Lords fractured by the failures of the Duke’s army in the west and the accusations of heresy against his son, new armies are secretly mobilizing even in this bitterest o...

On this day (May 14) in 1607 Jamestown was founded. It was the first permanent English settlement in North America. It almost didn't make it. Only 60 out of 900 settlers survived the first three years.

On this day (May 13) in 1862 an African-American slave named Robert Smalls succeeded in taking over the steam ship CSS Planter and steering it through Confederate controlled waters to the U.S. blockade where he surrendered the vessel to the union. As a reward, he was made captain of the ship (now called USS Planter) when the vessel was put into U.S. service. He went on to become a Representative to Congress for South Carolina after the war despite massive efforts by whites in South Carolina t...

Happy Mother’s Day everyone! We owe this holiday to the hard work of Ann Jarvis and her daughter, Anna Jarvis. Ann struggled to make an official holiday to celebrate mothers as part of her work to reunite families after the Civil War. There were several local observances of Mother’s Day in the decades that followed (usually attached to the temperance movement or some other cause) but she died in 1905 without succeeding in making it a national movement. Her daughter, Anna, picked u...

On this day (May 11) in 1894, 4000 workers of the Pullman Car Company went on strike to protest wage cuts. The workers lived in a company owned town with rents slightly higher than those in the surrounding communities. When Pullman reduced wages and began laying off workers in response to the Panic of 1893 he did not lower the rents of his workers, causing great hardship. (Pullman claimed he could not lower the rents because he opposed charity.) After efforts to negotiate a compromise failed ...