This is my great-great-Uncle, Edwin Dickenson. 109 years ago today, on April 22, 1915, he found himself in the front lines at the 2nd Battle of Ypres, his first ever battle. This is his story. 🧵1/22 Edwin was born in Gloucestershire, England, in 1893. He grew to be a strapping young man of 5 foot 10.
Then, probably in 1911, he immigrated to Canada along with his mother Sarah, sister Louisa (my great grandmother) and her husband, Frederick.
Pic: Gloucester around 1900. 2/22

Buckle up folks, this is the fascinating story of Canadian sailor William Hall VC, whose life connects with wars from the Napoleonic Era to the Boer War. A 🧵1/16 Hall’s parents, Jacob and Lucy, were born into slavery in Maryland but escaped to freedom during the War of 1812 aboard a British vessel and settled in Nova Scotia. That’s where William was born on April 28, 1827.
(Pic is British raid on the Maryland coast in 1813) 2/

Inspired by @thehistoryguy, Kaiser Franz Josef's full title (as of 1869), a thread:
"Seine Kaiserliche und Königliche Apostolische Majestät
N.N.
von Gottes Gnaden Kaiser von Österreich, König von Ungarn und Böhmen, von Dalmatien, Kroatien, Slawonien, Galizien, Lodomerien und Illyrien;
König von Jerusalem etc.;
Erzherzog von Österreich;
Großherzog von Toskana und Krakau;

Bertrand Russell on Lenin🧵
“I met Lenin in 1920 when I was in Russia. I had an hour’s talk tete-a-tete with him in English, and he spoke English much better than you would have expected. The whole conversation was in English...1/ I expected it to have been in German but I found that his English was quite good. I was less impressed by Lenin than I expected to be. He was he was of course a great man. He seemed to me a reincarnation of Cromwell, with exactly the same limitations that Cromwell had: 2/

1 This is my great-grandfather, Albert Chabot. #OTD in 1918 he was operated on in a field hospital after being wounded in an attack during the Hundred Days’ Offensive. This is a thread about his #WW1 experience and how it changed his life and my family. 2 Albert Chabot was born on September 9, 1895 in Manistique, Michigan, to Antoine and Delima. Like so many French-Canadians of their era, they had temporarily emigrated to the US for a better life.