Trivia

While America's Great Depression began in 1929, it got an early start in Montana. The Great Depression began in Montana in 1918, almost 10 years before the rest of the nation. While the rest of America was thriving, Montana was struggling. Between drought and the reduced demand for agricultural products, due to the end of the "Great War" (aka First World War, from 1914 to 1918), many farmers suffered greatly. As a result, Montana farmers would default on wartime loans which lead to widespread bank failure throughout the state. Between 1921-1925, half of the farmers in Montana lost their land. By 1925, 70,000 of the 82,000 homesteaders in Montana left. In addition, 200 banks in Montana failed. Not only were crops affected by the drought, it was followed by locusts infestation and cattle succumbing to contagion.

The reason that cattlemen are leery of sheep is the concern that this livestock in particular are voracious herbivores, as in they will tear into the grasslands all the way down to root, leaving very little for others to consume.

The most famous case in Africa of big cats preying on men was described in the auto-biographical account of John Henry Patterson called The Man-Eaters of Tsavo. The Tsavo man-eaters were a pair of male lions in the Tsavo region of Kenya, which were responsible for the deaths of many construction workers on the Kenya-Uganda Railway between March and December 1898. The pair was said to have killed 135 people in total, but modern estimates place it at 35. It was one of the most notorious instances of dangers posed to Indian and native African workers of the Uganda Railway where hostile wildlife and diseases both were frequent sources of deaths in the 1890s-1900s. The account was also given a film treatment, The Ghost and the Darkness (1996), starring Michael Douglas and Val Kilmer.

A coffin ship (Irish: long cónra) was any of the ships that carried Irish immigrants escaping the Great Irish Famine, or the Great Hunger of 1845, and Highlanders displaced by the Highland Clearances (occurred between 1750-1860 where large landowners drove out smaller farmers to enclose or fence in more land under their control). Many died on the journey to a better life in the United States or Canada.

During the First World War (1914-1918), countless soldiers developed a condition called "shell shock" (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), which is the result of prolonged exposure to combat. These veterans tend to relive the trauma, and are triggered by the slightest of provocation due to unprocessed trauma. Incidentally, pre-industrial societies like the early Greeks, and some Native American tribes hosted purification or intensification rituals for its warriors before they rejoined their families at the end of conflict.