Trip home was great, if a bit exhausting. Tremendous apologies to those I did not get to connect with while I was in town, but the 10-day trip I had originally planned was cut down to 5 days due to my ever-looming thesis and the pressing travel schedule of my globe-trotting mentor. I'll be back for Thanksgiving and Xmas.

Your oddball factoid of the day is that today is the 178th birthday of General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, one of my favorite historical figures.

Chamberlain was a professor of rhetoric at Bowdoin College who eventually taught every subject in the curriculum except for mathematics. He was fluent in nine languages other than English: Greek, Latin, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac. In 1862, Chamberlain was commissioned as the Lieutenant Colonel of the 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry during the American Civil War, and he is best remembered for his military exploits.

On the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg, Chamberlain used an unlikely textbook maneuver to hold Little Round Top, and then broke the enemy lines with a bayonet charge. He was critically wounded at the Battle of Petersburg and was promoted to Brigadier General on the battlefield by General Grant. His wounds were so serious that the promotion was believed to be posthumous, and his obituary even ran in the paper the following day, but Chamberlain survived and returned to lead his troops in the final campaign of the war. He was the commander chosen to receive the formal surrender of the Confederate Army at the end of the Appomattox Campaign.

Chamberlain went on to be Governor of Maine and president of Bowdoin College, before finally succumbing to the effects of his Petersburg wound in 1914 (50 years after his doctors pronounced the injury mortal).