1. The show was created by producer Jay Ward and cartoonist Alex Anderson, who had worked together on the Crusader Rabbit series. Their initial vision was a show called The Frostbite Falls Revue about a group of animals running a TV station, but the project never got beyond the proposal stage. The next attempt at a new series began with the pilot Rocky the Flying Squirrel. General Mills came on as a sponsor and Rocky and His Friends was born.

2. Instead of hiring animators when production of Rocky and His Friends got rolling, Ward convinced some friends at Dancer, Fitzgerald, & Sample, an advertising agency that had General Mills as a client, to buy the Mexican animation studio Gamma Productions so he could outsource the animation. The plan saved money and the Mexican studio churned work out quickly, but quality was an issue. In early episodes of the show, it’s not uncommon to see characters’ facial hair, costumes and skin tone change color.

3. Bullwinkle is named after Jay Ward’s friend Clarence Bullwinkel, a Berkeley landlord and owner of an Oakland Chevrolet dealership.

4. The name of the time machine featured in “Peabody’s Improbable History” is sometimes incorrectly written out as the “Way Back Machine,” but the correct name is the WABAC machine, a play on early computers like UNIVAC,

5. Rocky and Bullwinkle live in the town of Frostbite Falls, Minnesota. The population of Frostbite Falls is variously given as 23, 48, 29, 31.5 and 4001 over the course of the series.

6. Bullwinkle is originally from the state is Moosylvania, a small island in the Lake of the Woods, and is actually its governor. The ownership of the state is the subject of dispute between the United States and Canada, with each country claiming it belongs to the other. As a publicity stunt, Ward and Bill Scott, the show’s head writer and voice of Bullwinkle, bought a small island on a Minnesota lake, named it Moosylvania and started a national tour and petition drive to campaign for Moosylvania’s statehood. After visiting 50 cities and collecting signatures, they went to Washington to present President Kennedy with their petition. At the White House gate they declared, “We’re here to see President Kennedy. We want statehood for Moosylvania.” They were escorted from the property at gunpoint and didn’t learn until days later that they had shown up during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. On the show, Rocky and Bullwinkle had much better luck getting their petition delivered.

7. Rocky and Bullwinkle share the middle initial “J,” but their middle names are never revealed. Matt Groening gave the three male members of the Simpson family –- Bartholomew J., Homer J. and Abraham J. –- the same initial as a tribute to Rocky and Bullwinkle.

8. There’s really no difference between Rocky and His Friends and The Bullwinkle Show. When the show moved to NBC in 1961, the network simply wanted it retitled and the new series continued where Rocky and His Friends, left off. Many of the syndicated packages, as well as the official DVD release, contained cartoons from both original network series.

9. The features of Fearless Leader, the dictator of Pottsylvania (who was known to carry the entire Pottsylvanian treasury on his person at all times), were inspired by World War II anti-Nazi propaganda posters.

10. Pottsylvanian spy Boris Badenov—whose surname is a play on 16th-century Russian Tsar Boris Godunov—was revealed in an advertisement as an active member of Local 12 of the Villains, Thieves, and Scoundrels Union.

11. Aside from their gift for puns, Rocky and Bullwinkle each had talents that served them well in their adventures. Rocky, a flying squirrel, could glide, hover and carry objects through the air. He honed these skills at the Cedar Yorpantz Flying School. Bullwinkle possessed superhuman strength, referred to as his “mighty moose muscle,” and the ability to remember every single thing he ever ate.

Fifty years ago, Berry Gordy, a songwriter for local Detroit acts like The Matadors and Jackie Wilson, borrowed $800 from his family and founded two record labels that became incorporated a year later as Motown Record Corporation. In its half-century of existence Motown forged an unmistakable sound in popular music, turned a number of artists into superstars and legends (from 1961 to 1971 alone, the label churned out 110 top 10 hits), and helped bridge the racial divide with songs that everyone, regardless of their color, could dance to.

To celebrate the last 50 years and, we hope, many more to come, here are some of my personal favorite (highly subjective and whittled down from a much larger list) Motown classics, plus a few surprises at the end.

Too Busy Thinking About My Baby

“Too Busy Thinking About My Baby,” written by Motown songwriters Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong and Janie Bradford (the receptionist at Mowtown’s Hitsville U.S.A. studio who helped Strong write Motown’s first big hit, “Money (That’s What I Want)”, while the two were still in high school) was first recorded by The Temptations and later by Jimmy Ruffin and Marvin Gaye. Gaye’s 1969 is my favorite of the three, mostly because the bass line that drops in 10 seconds into the song hits you like kick in the chest.

I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch)
“I Can’t Help Myself” was written and produced by Lamont Dozier and brothers Brian Holland and Edward Holland, Jr., who were Motown’s main production team and considered by many critics to be one of pop music’s greatest songwriting teams (I concur). The Four Tops recorded the song in 1965 and it hit number one on the R&B charts and the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart for two non-consecutive weeks. Rolling Stone ranked the song #415 on their list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

Baby Love
Another Holland-Dozier-Holland composition, “Baby Love” was recorded by the Supreme in 1964. It was the groups most successful single, reaching number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for four weeks, number one on the UK Singles Chart for two weeks and #324 on Rolling Stone’s list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. This song also made the Supremes the first Motown artists to have more than one number-one single (they continue to hold the record for most number-one hits with twelve).

Ball of Confusion
I’m putting up two videos for this song. One is a live version from The Smokey Robinson Show, because why bother doing a Motown video post if you don’t get to see the Temptations dance? The other is an imovie project that falls into my favorite YouTube genre: music video for a song that is composed of generic images of things mentioned in the lyrics.

The Tears of a Clown
Stevie Wonder and his producer Hank Cosby wrote the music for “The Tears of a Clown,” but wonder struggled with a song to go with the instrumental track. He brought it to the 1966 Motown Christmas party to see if Smokey Robinson could come up with anything for it. Robinson noted that the song “sounded like a circus,” and ran with it. The song became the number-one hit on both the pop and R&B charts was The Miracles only #1 hit during Robinson’s time as lead singer. Fun fact: Robinson has two children named Berry (after Motown founder Berry Gordy) and Tamla (after the Motown subsidiary label).

Dancing in the Street
The idea for the song came to producer William “Mickey” Stevenson after watching kids in the Detroit streets open up fire hydrants to keep cool in the summer. While Martha Reeves’ recording was intended as a party song, “Dancing in the Street” took on additional meaning during the Civil Rights movement when organizers used it as an anthem at demonstrations. The Martha and the Vandellas’ version of the song is preserved by the Library of Congress to the National Recording Registry.

Uptight (Everything’s Alright)
“Uptight” was the first Stevie Wonder single that Wonder actually had a hand in writing. It also saved his career. The then-fifteen-year-old singer had had only one number-one hit and only two other singles in the Top 40. To top things off, his voice was changing and Berry Gordy worried that Wonder wouldn’t be commercially viable anymore. Wonder was in danger of being dropped from the label, but “Uptight,” based around an instrumental riff that Wonder had written, hit the top of the Billboard R&B Singles chart and sat there for five weeks. This video is from a 1972 Rolling Stones concert. Wonder and his entire band join the Stones for “Uptight” and then kick into “Satisfaction.”

Standing in the Shadows of Motown
Standing in the Shadows of Motown is a 2002 documentary about some of the great unsung heroes of pop music. The Funk Brothers were an uncredited collection of studio musicians who performed on Motown Records’ recordings between 1959 and 1972. According to the film, they played on more number-one hits than The Beatles, Elvis Presley, The Rolling Stones, and The Beach Boys combined.

The Motown Song
I’m not normally a fan of Rod Stewart. However, seeing as we’re both white guys who love soul music and can’t dance, I have a soft spot for this song (and its video) about how awesome Motown is. Also: The Temptations. In a flying Cadillac. OMG. WTF. [Because this last video may start to play automatically, I've stuck it on its own page. Click the "2" below.]

Meredith, if you plan to have a boat captain officiate your wedding (how Jim and Pam of you), I hope you read this before leaving port. While a good sailor knows that the captain is the ultimate authority on a ship, his or her power extends only so far. At one point, the United States Navy explicitly stated, “The commanding officer shall not perform a marriage ceremony on board his ship or aircraft.”

What about non-Navy captains, though? Well that depends on the captain. They can’t perform marriages at sea (or on dry land) by virtue of their maritime license alone, and no state has enacted a statute explicitly authorizing ships’ captains to officiate marriages. However, if a captain also falls into one of the categories of “persons qualified to solemnize marriages” prescribed in laws of the state they’re in, then they’re good to go.

In the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, my home sweet home, these qualified persons are:

• Active or retired justices, judges or magisterial district judges of the Commonwealth

• Active or senior judges or full-time magistrates of the District Courts of the United States for the Eastern, Middle or Western District of Pennsylvania

• Active, retired or senior bankruptcy judges of the United States Bankruptcy Courts for the Eastern, Middle or Western District of Pennsylvania who are residents of the Commonwealth

• Active, retired or senior judges of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit who are residents of the Commonwealth

• Mayors of any cities or boroughs of the Commonwealth

• Ministers, priests or rabbis of any regularly established church or congregation

Other states have their own qualified persons. In Florida, public notaries make the list. New Jersey allows “every minister of every religion” to officiate weddings, even those without “established churches or congregations” (i.e. people who get ordained through the Universal Life Church’s website). Massachusetts law allows the governor to “designate non-clergy individuals to solemnize a marriage, such as a friend or a family member,” which means just about anyone (even sea captains) can officiate a marriage if they fill out an application and submit a letter of recommendation and $25 fee.

Despite what the laws say, some people have gone ahead and gotten married by plain old boat captains anyway, and the courts have been pretty inconsistent when ruling on the validity of these marriages. In one well-known case, Fisher vs. Fisher, a court ruled that a particular marriage solemnized by a ship’s captain was valid (and more generally that, absent a statute stating otherwise, an exchange of vows between two consenting parties constituted a valid marriage). In another case, Norman vs. Norman, a court came down on the opposite side of the fence.

So, kids, if you’re planning on having a wedding at sea, make sure your captain is qualified. Or just do it and let the courts sort it out later. Or, if you’re in New Jersey, I’d be happy to be ordained in the Universal Life Church and perform an official mental_floss wedding for you. I’ll take requests via Twitter.

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Dry ice is the colorless, odorless, solid form of carbon dioxide, first reported in 1834 by the French chemist Charles Thilorier, who opened a container of liquid carbon dioxide needed for an experiment and observed that most of the liquid CO₂ quickly evaporated, leaving a solid form on the bottom of the canister.

The surface temperature of dry ice is −109.3 °F. As it warms up, it sublimes, or transitions from the solid to gas form with no intermediate liquid form (a process called sublimation). These two characteristics make it an excellent coolant and since 1925, when solid CO₂ was trademarked and sold as “Dry ice” by the DryIce Corporation of America, it’s been used to flash freeze and refrigerate food and biological samples, make ice cream, bait mosquito traps (they’re attracted to CO₂) and make fog for theater productions, Sunn O))) concerts and haunted houses.

That fog is made by quickly changing the CO₂ into its gas form. In an ice chest, dry ice sublimes at an average rate of 5-10 pounds every 24 hours. But placing dry ice in hot water accelerates sublimation considerably and turns the solid CO₂ into CO₂ gas. The cold CO₂ gas meets the surrounding air and drops its temperature enough for condensation to occur and tiny droplets of water to form in the air and, voila, you have fog. Because carbon dioxide is heavier than air, and cold air is denser than warm air, the fog stays low to the ground for that extra creepy effect.

Why do we get goosebumps?

Goose bumps, also called goose flesh or goose pimples and known to medical professionals as cutis anserina (“cutis,” skin + “anser,” goose = goose skin) involuntarily develop on our skin when we become cold or experience strong emotions in a reflex called horripilation or piloerection. Whether we’re freezing or getting the bejesus scared out of us, our sympathetic nervous systems pick up on a fight-or-flight situation and release adrenaline, muscles at the base of our body hairs contract, pull the hair erect, and create a shallow depression on the skin surface that causes the surrounding area to protrude. A goose bump is born.

In mammals with plenty of body hair or fur (chimps, otters, mice, cats, etc.), horripilation serves two purposes. One, erect hairs trap air, create insulation and aid heat retention. Two, erect hairs make an animal appear larger and helps intimidate enemies. In humans, horripilation as a response to cold or fear provides no known benefit since we lost most of our body hair some time ago.

What’s the best candy container for trick-or-treating?

What sort of container will provide you with maximum space for your candy haul? A bucket? A bag? The ol’ pillow case? The guys (Guys? Gals? Robots? Not a whole lot of info available on who runs it.) at My Science Project conducted an experiment to find out.

First, the researchers accounted for the wide variety of candies available to the average trick-or-treater. They divided candy into three categories: “‘premium’ (fun-sized candy bars), ‘meh’ (chewy boxed candies like Milk Duds), and ‘bottom of the barrel’ (hard candy, gumballs, Dum Dum pops),” mixed roughly equal amounts by weight of top, middle, and bottom tier candies, and threw them into the containers by the handful, in order to give the candy a natural spatial distribution.

Each container was filled to a capacity where it could be reasonably carried without spilling and then weighed on a hanging spring scale (adjusted to account for the weight of the container).

Their results…

A 10-quart bucket held a total of 9.5 lbs of candy, consisting of 375 pieces.
*
A standard white 5-gallon plastic bucket allowed for 20 lbs of candy in 675 pieces.
*
A double-bagged, regular brown paper grocery bag held 25 lbs of candy, consisting of 885 pieces. The researchers found that the bag’s unreliable handles were problematic once the bag was full.
*
A standard size pillow case, allowing enough empty room at the top so that it may be grasped and picked up with two hands, held a whopping 47.75 lbs of candy in the form of 1690 pieces.

Next, they wanted to know if it would be possible to even collect that much candy in one night of trick-or-treating. How far would one need to walk and how many houses would they have to hit?

The researchers picked two different middle-class residential areas representative of suburban America at large to use in the experiment. Campbell, California, in Silicon Valley is an older area with dense housing, and St. Peters, Missouri, a suburb of St. Charles, is more rural and contains many newer developments. The researchers used data from City-Data.com to approximate the number of houses per square mile and constructed several different trick-or-treating scenarios, varying the values for the number of candies received at each house, and the percentage of houses distributing candy. In their worst case scenario, they figure a trick-or-treater would have a 50% success rate and receive an average of 2.5 pieces of candy per house, while a decent trick-or-treating run would see a 75% success rate and 3.5 pieces of candy per house.

They researchers then used Google maps to work out what sort of mileage a candy hunter would have to clock. Assuming the first scenario, a trick-or-treater would have to visit approximately 1352 houses and cover .42 square miles in Campbell, given the housing density, to fill their pillowcase. Under the more favorable conditions of the second scenario, it would take visits to 644 houses and .2 square miles to fill a pillowcase. Looking at the their map, the researchers estimated roughly 1 linear mile of street distance per every .036 square miles, meaning one would walk about 11 miles to fill their candy bag in the worst case scenario.

In the better scenario in St. Peters, the lower density of housing necessitates that someone cover .6 square miles to fill a pillowcase. That’s more walking than in the worst case scenario in Campbell—and since the researchers’ housing densities are based on statistical averages and don’t account for undeveloped land, a trick-or-treater would likely need to cover a lot more ground. [Image courtesy of MyScienceProject.com. They've got some fabulous stuff on their site. Who among us hasn't wondered whether Viagra keeps flowers fresh?]

After a big game in any sport, from a league championship to the World Series, Super Bowl, Stanley Cup, etc., people are going to be clamoring for commemorative merchandise. So it would make sense to have two sets printed up—declaring each team the winner.

The major sports leagues all produce official hats and shirts for the players and staff of each team in championship games—usually about 300 items per team. Manufacturers and retailers must produce enough product to meet fan demands. Based on the strong sales after the Chicago Bears’ 2007 NFC Championship win, Sports Authority printed more than 15,000 shirts proclaiming a Bears Super Bowl victory before the game even started. And then the Colts beat the Bears, 29-17.

That’s a lot of misprinted merch. Fortunately, there’s World Vision.

The international Christian humanitarian aid group works with Major League Baseball, the NFL, and the NBA to collect misprinted merchandise and distribute it to people living in impoverished nations.

(MLB used to require the destruction of shirts and hats proclaiming the wrong champions, but two years ago they began donating their postseason apparel).

The merchandise doesn’t go to waste, people living in poverty receive new, clean clothes, and the clothing makers recoup some of their losses—they get tax credits for the charitable donations. Why don’t the clothes go to needy families in the United States? Overseas donation is part of the agreement between World Vision and the leagues. The farther away the clothing is, the less likely it is to offend a losing player (or heartbroken Buffalo Bills fan).

This question was asked by my girlfriend and fellow blogger Erica during a recent Phillies game. If you have questions you’d like to see answered on mentalfloss.com, feel free ask them if you’re ever watching baseball at my house. Alternately, you can email me at flossymatt AT gmail DOT com, or contact me on Twitter.

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The Bo Diddley beat, counted out as a two-bar phrase, goes a little something like this: “One and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and, etc.,” but you might know it better simply as an incessant, earth-shaking “Bomp, bomp, bomp…bomp, bomp” that gets pounded out through a song (often by multiple instruments) until the speakers are ready to burst into flame.

Big bad Bo’s signature rhythm has been traced by musicologists to such diverse sources as church tambourines, West African drum circles and hand-clapping rhythms that accompanied slaves’ work chants. Diddley has variously claimed that he heard it as an Indian chant in a cowboy movie or that he stumbled upon it while trying to learn Gene Autrey’s “I Got Spurs That Jingle Jangle Jingle” or Claude “Curly” Putman Jr.’s “The Green Green Grass of Home” on guitar.

Wherever the beat ultimately comes from, it’s become a permanent part of rock and roll’s DNA, regularly used and adapted by artists across a wide musical spectrum. For example…

Elvis Presley’s “His Latest Flame”

Bruce Springsteen’s “She’s the One”

George Michael’s “Faith”

The Police’s “Deathwish”

The Stooges’ “1969″

“Weird Al” Yankovic’s “Party at the Leper Colony”

Smokey Robinson’s “Mickey’s Monkey”

Bo Diddley’s “Bo Diddley”

We’ll end with the man himself, busting a move harder than anyone else on that stage or on this list even though its obvious that he was already an AARP member when this filmed.

Turns out that bats are quite the romantic crooners, using “love song” vocalizations to attract females (and in some cases, to scare away intruding males). According to a new study*, their love songs are more complex than previously thought and have a number of musical rules. The researchers—from the Department of Biology at Texas A&M University, the Section of Neurobiology at the University of Texas at Austin and Bat World, a bat sanctuary and rehabilitation center in Mineral Wells, Texas—spent close to four years recording and analyzing the songs of two populations of Brazilian free-tailed bats (also known as Mexican free-tailed, scientific name Tadarida brasiliensis). The first group was a captive colony of about 60 bats in Austin, maintained by one of the study’s authors. The second group was a wild colony of approximately 100,000 to 250,000 bats within Texas A&M’s athletic complex in College Station.

After examining a total of 412 songs from 33 bats and comparing song variation within and across individuals and between the two different colonies, the researchers determined the male bats use several types of syllables with  individual sounds to create three easily recognizable phrases:

Chirps are complex phrases composed of “A” and “B” syllables**.
*
Trills are composed of short (mean = 3.4 ms) downward FM syllables that can be connected or are separated by short silent intervals.
*
Buzzes are composed of short (3 ms) downward FM syllables that are never connected.

These phrases, in turn, are used in different combinations to produce songs. The researchers found that particular phrase sequences kept coming up and identified several rules governing phrase order:

1) Songs begin almost exclusively with chirps.

2) Trills do not follow buzzes, but instead always follow chirps or another trill.

3) The majority of buzzes (90%) are followed by another buzz or occur at the end of the song (songs containing a buzz ended in a buzz 84 % of the time).

This may not seem like very impressive music theory, but complex songs and specific structural “language rules” are rare among mammals; previous mammalian research hasn’t gone much further than determining that song elements are used in a non-random order. These bats’ songs and the rules that govern them, though, may be “more analogous to those of some birds than to other mammals,” say they researchers. Birds and their songs have long been the basis for understanding vocal production and the evolution of vocal complexity as well as the physiology of vocal production. With this new study, there’s a foundation for future research into mammalian vocals, “a model not only to study communication similarities in other animals, but also human speech,” says lead author Kirsten M. Bohn.

Here’s a video featuring the vocal stylings of Sid the bat, with commentary by researcher Dr. George Pollak:

* Bohn KM, Schmidt-French B, Schwartz C, Smotherman M, Pollak GD. (2009). Versatility and Stereotypy of Free-Tailed Bat Songs. PLoS ONE 4(8):e6746. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0006746

** “A” syllables are short (5 ms) downward frequency modulated (FM) sweep syllables. “B” syllables are longer (17ms) and more complex, often beginning with an upward FM followed by a longer downward FM and sometimes ending with another upward FM.

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1. Kazimierz Michał Wacław Wiktor Pułaski

Pułaski was born in 1745 to a family of wealthy nobles in the village of Winiary. He studied at a college in Warsaw and became a page of one of the vassals of the Polish king. Not long after Pułaski began the job, though, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth became a protectorate of the Russian Empire and the court was expelled by Russian forces occupying Poland.

In 1768, Pułaski, along with his father, became one of the co-founders of the Bar Confederation, an association of nobles that aimed to defend the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from both the Russian Empire and Polish reformers attempting to limit the power of the Commonwealth’s nobility. Pułaski became a commander of confederate soldiers and engaged Russian forces in combat for the next four years.

In 1771, Pułaski helped organize an attempt to kidnap King Stanislaus Augustus Poniatowski, who supported the Russian occupation. The kidnapping plot failed and Pułaski was sentenced to death in absentia for attempted regicide. He fled the Commonwealth and found no state that would accept him. He finally settled in France illegally, where he encountered Benjamin Franklin.

Franklin recommended to General George Washington that Pułaski, “renowned…for the courage and bravery he displayed in defense of his country’s freedom,” be recruited for the American cavalry. Pułaski accepted the American offer and arrived in Philadelphia in 1777, taking part in the Battle of Brandywine just a few months later. Washington acknowledged Pułaski’s skills and bravery with a promotion to the rank of brigadier general of the American cavalry and gave him command of four light cavalry regiments.

The 111th Congress has, as of 10/09, passed resolutions in each house proclaiming Pułaski an honorary citizen of the United States. The House bill and the Senate bill will have to be reconciled before President Obama can sign a bill. If the rest of the process goes smoothly, Pułaski will be only the seventh person to receive honorary citizenship. Winston Churchill was the first in 1963, followed by Swedish diplomat and Holocaust hero Raoul Wallenberg, Pennsylvania co-founder and governor William Callowhill Penn and his wife Hannah, Mother Teresa, and Marquis de Lafayette.

Pułaski’s poor grasp of English and domineering personality caused difficulties in his new position, which he soon resigned. But Washington allowed Pulaski to organize an independent corps, dubbed the Pułaski Cavalry Legion. Pułaski led the legion for the rest of his involvement in the war, dipping into his personal finances to furnish equipment for his troops when money from Congress was scarce. The legion fought at the Little Egg Harbor massacre in New Jersey, the Siege of Charleston, South Carolina, and the Battle of Savannah, Georgia. During this last battle, in 1779, Pułaski led a cavalry charge while probing for weaknesses in the British line and was wounded by grapeshot fired from a cannon. He was carried from the battlefield by his troops and placed aboard a merchant ship. He was buried at sea.

One month later, Washington paid tribute to Pułaski by issuing a challenge-and-password set to the Continental Army for identifying friends and enemies when crossing military lines: “Query: Pulaski, response: Poland.”

In 1929, Congress passed a resolution to recognize October 11 “General Pulaski Memorial Day,” in order to recognize the “father of the American cavalry” and celebrate the heritage of Polish Americans. Several states and cities—Kentucky, Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana, Grand Rapids, Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadlephia and New York City among them—also have memorial days or parades that commemorate Pulaski’s birth or death.

2. Andrzej Tadeusz Bonawentura Kościuszko

Kościuszko was the youngest son of a Polish noble living in the village of Mereczowszczyzna (in what is now Belarus, but was then part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth). In 1765, he enrolled at the newly created Szkoła Rycerska (Knight Academy) in the Corps of Cadets, studying military subjects and the liberal arts. After graduating, Kościuszko and a colleague received royal scholarships and went to Paris, where Kościuszko studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts. He decided that he did not want to be a painter, but could not transfer to a French military academy because he was a foreigner. He earned his own French military education, though, by going to free lectures and visiting the libraries of Paris’ military academies.

When Kościuszko returned home in 1774, there was no position for him in the army, which had been drastically reduced in the First Partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. He took a job tutoring the family of a governor instead and fell in love with the governor’s daughter. The two planned to elope in the American colonies, but were tracked down and stopped by employees of the girl’s father. Kościuszko received a beating from them which would inform his views on social pretense and class inequality.

The following year, he again left the Commonwealth, for Paris, where he learned about the war in the American colonies. Kościuszko went to America and volunteered for the army. In 1776, Congress commissioned him as a Colonel of Engineers was then named head engineer of the Continental Army. He was sent to Pennsylvania to work on the fortification of Philadelphia. There, he constructed Fort Billingsport and fortified the banks of the Delaware River. He also got a chance to read the Declaration of Independence—he was so moved by it, he sought out a meeting with Thomas Jefferson. The two eventually became close friends.

From there, Kościuszko went on to oversee the construction of forts and military camps along the Canadian border, was given command of the military engineering works at West Point by George Washington and then oversaw more fort construction in the Southeast.

In 1783, Kościuszko was promoted to the rank of brigadier general and received American citizenship, a parcel of land, and memberships in the Society of the Cincinnati and the American Philosophical Society. The next year, he returned to Poland and settled in his home village. He would later defend his homeland in the Polish-Russian War of 1792 and receive Poland’s highest military honor, the Virtuti Militari medal, for his actions at the Battle of Zieleńce.

Kościuszko’s body is interred in a crypt at Wawel Cathedral in Kraków, the final resting place of many Polish kings and national heroes. His heart, removed from the body during embalming, is kept at a chapel at the Royal Castle in Warsaw.

When King Stanislaus Augustus Poniatowski surrendered to the Russians in August of that year, Kościuszko fled to Leipzig, where Polish commanders and politicians were preparing an uprising against Poland’s Russian occupiers. Kościuszko made a trip to Paris during this time to accept honorary citizenship in France, and to gain French support for the uprising in Poland.

The Second Partition of Poland in 1793, and the subsequent reduction of the army and mass arrests of Polish politicians and military commanders by Russian agents, forced Kościuszko to begin the uprising earlier than planned. After early victories, Kościuszko’s forces were outnumbered at the Battle of Maciejowice, and Kościuszko was wounded and imprisoned in Saint Petersburg. The uprising ended with the Siege of Warsaw, Tomasz Wawrzecki’s (the new commander of the uprising) surrender.

In 1796, Tsar Paul I of Russia pardoned and freed Kościuszko, who settled in France and remained politically active among the Polish émigrés. He died of typhoid fever in Solothurn, Switzerland, in October, 1817.

Kościuszko’s global freedom fighting made him a national hero in Poland, Lithuania, and the US, so he has received his fair share of tributes around the world, both great and small: from Kosciuszko Street in Nanticoke, Pennsylvania, to Mount Kosciuszko in Australia; from Thomas Jefferson calling him “as pure a son of liberty as I have ever known,” to an occasional salute from a certain blogger as he passes Kościuszko’s statue on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia.

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