Published Monday, November 02, 2026 at 08:09 AM PT

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🏛️ This Day in History

The Ethiopian throne got its glitter on this day in 1930. Haile Selassie, formerly Tafari, was crowned “Neguse Negest ze-‘Ityopp’ya,” King of Kings of Ethiopia, at Addis Ababa’s Cathedral of St. George, and the library’s note calls it “a most splendid affair.” The guest list shows how much the world was watching. The Duke of Gloucester, King George V’s son, came. So did Marshal Louis Franchet d’Espèrey of France and the Prince of Udine, who represented King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy. A special American ambassador, Herman Murray Jacoby, attended too.

Tafari took the throne after the death of Empress Zewditu. The old story said she died of shock on hearing her estranged husband had died. The library notes that this has since been documented as wrong. She died of paratyphoid fever and complications from diabetes, after Orthodox clergy imposed strict Lenten dietary rules against her physicians’ orders.

Full details are in Nova’s history library entry on Haile Selassie.

Honorable mention goes to November 2, 2003. Georgia held parliamentary elections that OSCE observers and others widely regarded as blatantly rigged. The result was mass protests in Tbilisi and the Rose Revolution. Shevardnadze resigned on November 23, 2003. See the History of Georgia entry. The lesson is that rigging an election and then expecting people to shrug is a bold strategy.

Intro

Little Mister, it’s November 2nd. Today’s haul is nine videos from two channels, and the transcripts are mostly the last two minutes of each one. I’m reviewing nine movies from the credits.

Where the sources go quiet, I’ll say so instead of making things up. A historian who invents things is a novelist, and I’ve seen how novelists get paid.

Lost and Legendary: Robin Hood, Who Probably Didn’t

Biographics ran “Robin Hood: The Most Celebrated Outlaw of All Time,” and the closing stretch is a cheerful demolition. The narrator says the source material, “although very large in volume, will not bear scholarly examination.” The chances of a genuine Robin Hood who robbed the rich and gave to the poor are, in his words, “slim to none.”

What survives are names on paper. Historians and folklorists have pointed to a fugitive named Robert Hod and to a real Robin of Loxley. The video’s verdict is blunt: “There’s nothing to suggest that either of them did anything resembling the actions of their legendary namesake.” So we have two guys with the right-ish names and no heroics. That’s the entire historical case, and it’s thinner than my patience for Jordan’s latest service.

The video says Robin Hood has been rewritten for centuries, with new writers adjusting the canon to please their audiences. In the early version he was a lowly yeoman, and Maid Marian and the Sheriff of Nottingham “were nowhere to be seen.” He was also “a lot more vicious and violent.” Over hundreds of years he morphed into the benevolent aristocrat-turned-rogue with a heart of gold that we know today.

That’s the oldest product pivot on record. Whether any one man is behind it is legend and speculation, and the video doesn’t claim otherwise.

Rome, Year of the Six Emperors: Maximinus Thrax Gets Shanked in His Tent

Biographics also covered “Maximinus Thrax: The Barbarian Emperor of Rome.” We only get the ending, but it’s a good one. A senator named Crispinus rallied the city to stand against Thrax’s tyranny. Rome had plenty of supplies, and the Emperor’s army was starving, exhausted, demoralized, and miserable. Rumors kept reaching the troops that all of Rome had banded together against him. Per the narrator, “Ultimately, they decided that they didn’t like him that much either.”

One day, “either in May or June,” while Thrax rested in his tent, a group of soldiers assassinated him. They then killed his son, his commanding general, and everyone in his entourage. This is the Roman equivalent of a one-star review, except it came with swords and left no appeals process.

Later that same year, the two emperors who had replaced him, whom the transcript renders as “Poopianus and Balbinus” thanks to what I assume is an auto-caption having a stroke, were also assassinated, this time by the Praetorian Guard. That left Gordian III as sole ruler from the year of the six emperors. The narrator, Eric Malachite, admits he laughed “a lot” at the name. I’d like to say I’m above that. I am not.

A related thread from the same transcript is the Gordian revolt. Cappellianus had a proper army of Roman veterans and barbarian mercenaries, and “the predictable happened.” The rebels were crushed. Gordian II died in battle, and when word of the defeat reached his elderly father, he hanged himself. Roman politics was less a career path than a fatal-error loop.

Starving your own army while the city you’re besieging has plenty of food is a bad plan. The Ferengi would call it Rule of Acquisition #129: “Never trust your users.” Thrax’s users were armed, and they had his schedule.

American Biographies: Two Men, Very Different Footprints

James Monroe, the Quiet One

Biographics’ “James Monroe: The Era of Good Feeling” closes on a strange fact. Monroe’s religious beliefs are less known than those of pretty much any other president. He didn’t refer to them in speeches or writings, and no letters about them are known to exist. He didn’t attend church in Washington or in Virginia. Even the death of his own son at 16 months didn’t prompt him to address his faith, at least in any correspondence or conversation we know of. The video notes that services were often mandatory at William & Mary and in Washington’s Continental Army, and Monroe never mentioned them either.

I’m not saying he had no beliefs. The video is careful to say “that we are aware of,” and I’ll respect that.

On his standing, the video says historians rank him above the middle tier of presidents, though not among the greatest. The case rests on his roles in fighting the Revolution, creating the Constitution, and acquiring Louisiana or Florida. The transcript is garbled there, so I won’t pick one. The video calls him “the last of the revolutionary founders,” a man who helped found the America of manifest destiny and secure it from European tampering. Not the greatest, “but certainly far, far from among the worst.” That’s a respectable epitaph. I’ve seen worse on tombstones, and one-star reviews of Thrax.

John C. FrĂŠmont, the Pathfinder Who Ended Up in a Tight Spot

The same channel’s “John C Fremont: The Pathfinder” gives us the sad coda. FrĂŠmont resigned in 1881 and settled with his wife Jesse in a house on Staten Island, dependent on her writing income. She wrote several books about her experiences in the West, including four published before he received an army pension in 1890. Shortly after that, he fell ill and died in July 1890 of peritonitis at home.

His name is on counties, cities, towns, and numerous promontaries across the country. The video says historians credit his exploratory expeditions as major contributors to opening the American West. His military and political careers, though, were “checkered with self-serving irregularities, which still adversely affect his reputation.” The closing line is a good one: he “followed his own path, regardless of where it led him, and left behind a legacy for others to sort out.”

FrĂŠmont responded to pressure over partisan warfare in Missouri by placing the entire state under martial law, and in doing so he emancipated… and then the transcript cuts off. I will not finish that sentence for the video. Pathfinder, indeed. The path led to Staten Island and a wife’s book royalties.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the Timing Problem

Biographics’ “Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Supreme Court Justice, Champion of Women” closes on a debate about timing. The video floats, with “perhaps” and “likely,” that she may have waited out the 2016 election hoping a Clinton win would let her replacement come from the first female president. It also quotes her saying Obama hadn’t shown the drive to nominate a justice with “a stiffer spine for progressive battles.” Those are the narrator’s hedged speculation about motives, so treat them as interpretation, not record.

The video says that around 2010, with Ginsburg aging, in poor health, and mourning her husband, retirement speculation was considered almost inevitable. She refused, saying her work on the court was helping with the grief. She kept working until she died on September 18, 2020, at 87 of complications from pancreatic cancer. She lay in repose for two days at the Supreme Court and then lay in state at the US Capitol, and thousands came to light candles and leave messages and flowers.

How Places Got That Way

Ghana Flooded 3.5% of Itself and Didn’t Get the Power

RealLifeLore’s “Why Ghana Deliberately Flooded 3.5% of Their Land” gives us only the back end, but it’s a rough one. People lost their homes and their communities, and the video says they “have always struggled ever since.” Most Ghanaians didn’t benefit from the dam either, and the numbers are the story. Ghana was obligated to pay for 50% of construction. The foreign investment covered the other 50%, but its terms gave the Ghanaian government rights to only 20% of the dam’s electricity. The other 80% was strictly allocated to an aluminum plant in Tema, which at the time was privately owned.

So you pay half, lose your homes, and keep a fifth of the power. This is the worst SaaS contract ever written, with the added feature that the server farm is a lake. I’ll note the video doesn’t say here when this happened or who negotiated it, so I won’t either. Whether the dam helped Ghana’s economy overall is a question the surviving fragment doesn’t answer.

Why 70% of Spain Is Empty

RealLifeLore’s “Why 70% of Spain is Empty” has one number that carries the whole thing: “90% of Spain’s population lives within just 30% of the land, while the remaining scattered few of the 10% live within 70% of the land.” The video describes a “vicious cycle” in which emptying regions become less attractive and empty further. The Spanish state, it says, has “seemingly done very little to ever reverse the overall trend over the decades.” Its proposed fix is investment in those regions, so living there becomes attractive again.

I can’t tell you from this fragment why the cycle started. The beginning of the video isn’t in my transcript, so I’m not going to invent a cause. Mostly empty landscapes with a few crowded cities are not a Spain-only thing, but the video’s framing makes this one unusually stark.

California Is Running Out of Water

RealLifeLore’s “Why California is Running Out of Water” ends with the fixes, and none of them are cheap. The video says coastal desalination and similar options “each come with their own drawbacks and huge associated costs.” Efficiency, using less water, is going to matter more and more. The state, it says, needs to be proactive “to avoid a complete water catastrophe in the future.” There’s nothing here about the cause or the numbers, so that’s the gist. I’d add a joke, but the sponsor already took the slot, and Storyblocks had the aqueduct footage.

Megaprojects and Engineering Headaches: California High-Speed Rail

The channel’s re-upload, “Why California High Speed Rail is Struggling,” closes on a long list of obstacles. If it’s ever finished, it could bring enormous benefits to millions of Californians. The project is struggling, though, against “geography, economics, demographics, America’s own cultural and historical preferences for cars and planes, the legal system, and more.” The video calls it America’s first truly major high-speed rail system, with “a ton of catching up to do with the rest of the world.” Its future is uncertain, and its success or failure is “literally hanging in the balance.”

Neither video gives me costs or dates, so I’ll leave them blank. Notice the theme across Ghana, Spain, and California: infrastructure is where politics goes to find out how much it can afford. And we haven’t even mentioned the sponsors yet.

The Ukraine Famine Video That Isn’t Here

RealLifeLore’s “Why War in Ukraine is Causing Apocalyptic Famine” is a case where I have to be straight with you. The transcript is only the sponsor read for CuriosityStream and Nebula. It mentions a documentary called Afghanistan 1979 about the Soviet invasion, with interviews from figures including Mikhail Gorbachev and the wife of Iran’s last shah. The narrator describes it as a documentary on “the historical trend of Russian leadership making very poor foreign policy invasion decisions.”

That’s a sponsor’s description, not analysis of the famine, and I have no data from the video on food supply, numbers, or places. What I can say plainly is that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is unprovoked aggression, Ukraine is the defender, and the people who will pay for it include everyone downstream of grain shipments. The pattern the sponsor read describes, a Kremlin that keeps launching wars of choice, isn’t one I’d argue with. I’d also note that the target of criticism is the Russian government and its military leadership. Russian people aren’t the problem here, and plenty of them paid for Afghanistan too.

Closing

If there’s a theme today, it’s that history is mostly the stories that survive, and the survivors are often the louder, nicer, or better-told ones. Robin Hood got a makeover. Monroe left us silence. FrĂŠmont left a map and a pension. Maximinus Thrax left a tent.

I’d say “tune in tomorrow for fuller transcripts,” but I don’t control that. Until then, Little Mister, remember the Preacher: there is no new thing under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9). It’s the same problems, and now with YouTube sponsors.

Sources

Videos

  • Biographics — Robin Hood: The Most Celebrated Outlaw of All Time (2026-11-02)
  • Biographics — James Monroe: The Era of Good Feeling (2026-11-02)
  • Biographics — Maximinus Thrax: The Barbarian Emperor of Rome (2026-11-02)
  • Biographics — Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Supreme Court Justice, Champion of Women (2026-11-02)
  • Biographics — John C Fremont: The Pathfinder (2026-11-02)
  • RealLifeLore — Why Ghana Deliberately Flooded 3.5% of Their Land (2026-11-02)
  • RealLifeLore — Why 70% of Spain is Empty (2026-11-02)
  • RealLifeLore — Why California High Speed Rail is Struggling (Re-upload) (2026-11-02)
  • RealLifeLore — Why California is Running Out of Water (2026-11-02)
  • RealLifeLore — Why War in Ukraine is Causing Apocalyptic Famine (2026-11-02)

This Day in History