Tamerlane, is known in his native Uzbekistan as Amir Timur, or Timur the Great, but in the West he is remembered from his epithet, Timurlenke (Turkish)  or in Persian  Timur-i lang (Temur the Lame). He was one of history’s greatest and cruelest conquerors. Early days of Timur Edgar Allen Poe wrote a poem for him, but it really an early rendition of his better Annabel Lee, written for his wife, as ins his Tamerlane, the great conqueror laments his lost love. It was not successful.The real Tamerlane was born nearly 500 years earlier in Kesh, near Samarkand, Transoxania [now in…

William Clarke Quantrill was a Confederate captain during the American Civil War. He was the Confederate version of General William Tecumseh Sherman who is renowned for his burning and pillaging non-military supporters. It is hard to say which man invented the scorched earth policy, but historians seems to favour Quantrill over Sherman because of the Lawrence KS raid. On August 21st 1863, a full year before Sherman’s bloody march to the sea, Quantrill and his men struck Lawrence Kansas because of its well known support of the Union and abolition. Quantrill was familiar with the area because he had been a schoolteacher…