History
Discover facts about history. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
History
Did Victorians really measure grief with tear bottles
Performative grief didn't start on social media. During the hyper-morbid Victorian era, mourning was basically a competitive sport. Widows supposedly used…
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Medieval bathhouses served food to naked guests
Aggressively eating a massive feast while sitting entirely naked in a tub of warm water with strangers was completely normalized in medieval society.
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The first commercial radio broadcast read election results
You'd think the debut of mass broadcast technology would feature sweeping music or a profound speech, but no, it was just dudes reading data. On November 2,…
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Cathedral relics turned out to be antelope horns
Authenticating holy relics was apparently not a terribly rigorous scientific process. Great cathedrals prominently displayed massive, curved talons strictly…
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Baseball once doubled as an excuse to drink
Before multimillion-dollar contracts and slow-motion replays, the diamond was just a massive pub. Early games were heavily intertwined with local breweries,…
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Dong Ho paintings use crushed seashell paper
Because standard paper is incredibly dull. Vietnamese artisans figured out how to grind up scallop shells and mix them into tree bark paste, creating a…
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Andean weavers created water-resistant ponchos
Long before synthetic raincoats existed, high-altitude weavers tightly spun local fibers to create garments so dense that water literally bounced off them. It…
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Chinese artisans painted inside tiny glass bottles
Painting on a flat canvas was apparently far too easy for Qing dynasty artists. Instead, they took miniature glass snuff bottles and used bent brushes with…
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Romans kept lifelike masks of their dead
Instead of flipping through photo albums, noble households proudly displayed eerie, ultra-realistic masks of their deceased relatives in their living rooms…
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Why the Incas blew crushed seashells into the wind
Because the high Andes mountains are painfully landlocked, seashells were considered impossibly rare, magical artifacts. When the rains failed, Inca priests…
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First reflective telescopes used mirrors made of speculum
Why use clear glass when you can polish a highly toxic chunk of metal? Early astronomers abandoned glass lenses for speculum, a brittle alloy of copper and…
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Why ancient Persians debated decisions drunk and sober
Honestly, modern Congress could probably learn a thing or two from this methodology. Herodotus recorded that whenever the ancient Persians had to make a…
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Hegel fled cholera—then returned too soon
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel spent his life explaining the absolute progression of time, but his personal timing was tragically bad. When cholera hit Berlin,…
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Victorian museum visitors damaged the exhibits
Apparently, nineteenth-century crowds had zero respect for curated exhibits. Patrons routinely poked holes in canvases with their umbrellas or chipped pieces…
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The eruption that caused a year without summer
When Mount Tambora blew its top in 1815, it ejected so much ash into the atmosphere that the following year became known as the "Year Without a Summer." Frost…
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When pregnancy tests involved injecting urine into frogs
Before plastic sticks existed, the absolute best way to check for a growing fetus involved terrifying amphibians. Doctors discovered that injecting the potent…
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Why whiskey literally means “water of life”
If you ever needed proof of how seriously the Celtic monks took their alcohol, just look at the dictionary. The modern word whiskey is an anglicization of the…
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Families once held weddings for the dead
Families of unmarried departed people would arrange elaborate posthumous ceremonies to ensure their loved ones weren't wandering the afterlife totally single…
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Roman sailors ran the Colosseum's giant sunshade
Long before modern stadiums bragged about their mechanical domes, the Romans already had the ultimate climate control. The Colosseum was equipped with the…
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Some scholars once thought the Sun was made of ice
Sometimes the brightest minds generate the absolute worst theories imaginable. Struggling to completely understand celestial thermodynamics, some…
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France once punished people for speaking Breton
Nothing screams national unity like locking people up for talking. In an aggressive push to standardize language in the 18th and 19th centuries, the state…
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Hachiko returned to Shibuya Station for nine years
Because humans absolutely do not deserve dogs. After his owner suddenly passed away, an Akita faithfully returned to Shibuya Station every single day for…
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The warrior monks who ruled a Baltic state
Taking a vow of poverty and chastity usually means a quiet life of prayer, unless you're a Teutonic Knight. This military order essentially carved out their…
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Edgar Allan Poe invented detective fiction for a paycheck
The father of gothic poetry was chronically broke and drowning in debt. Seeking a quick paycheck from magazines, Poe wrote 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' in…
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