Before the Flapper, There Was the Gibson Girl

Before the flapper came about as the embodiment of 1920s femininity, women in the late 1800s and early 1900s had a different role model from which to take cues – the Gibson Girl. She was the feminine ideal of this era and socially, the Gibson Girl had a very defined role. She was upper class, educated, athletic,…

One of Canada’s Biggest Tourist Attractions Was a Set of Quintuplets

When Yvonne, Annette, Cecile, Emilie and Marie Dionne were born in a rural Ontario house with no running water or electricity in 1934, no one expected them to survive. They were two months premature and at a combined 14 pounds, were each small enough to fit in one hand. But with the help of neighbors…

This Flapper’s Dollhouse Cost More than Most People’s Homes

Of her most famous film, Jazz Age icon F. Scott Fitzgerald proclaimed, “I was the spark that lit up Flaming Youth, Colleen Moore was the torch.” She was a chief rival of Clara Bow and became one of the highest-paid and most fashionable movie stars in 1920s Hollywood. Colleen Moore had two passions: movies and dolls. Over…

Swimming with Ghosts at the Spectacular Sutro Baths

Water parks used to be a lot different before the days of chlorine pools, lifeguards, and road trips. Take, for example, San Francisco’s Sutro Baths… The Sutro Baths were built in Lands End in 1894 by wealthy San Franciscan Adolph Sutro, a German immigrant who had made a fortune by figuring out how to drain and…

The Futuristic Dwelling Machine that Could Have Been

If a real estate listing described a house with two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a spacious living/dining room that was self-heating, self-cooling, self-cleaning, self-powering, environmentally friendly, and priced at the cost of a Cadillac, it probably wouldn’t take very long before it was snapped up off the market. But plans for such a house exist,…

The Vault

The Lost American Museum that Had It All

He may be best known for the famous circus that bears his name, but before its founding, P.T. Barnum was the creator and owner of one of the largest, strangest attractions to ever exist. Barnum’s American Museum wasn’t what we think of as a museum today. In one five-story building, Barnum offered many different forms…

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Before Photoshop, There Was the Disturbing Art of Spirit Photography

Ever since technology has allowed people to capture pictures, photographers have been using photo-editing techniques to trick people. One of the most fascinating early examples is spirit photography. William Hope (c) National Media Museum Spirit photography was a trend in which a photographer edited pictures to make ghosts or spirit-like figures appear alongside the human…

There’s a Miniature Earth in the Desert of Arizona with a Very Strange Story

It may sound (and look) like something from a sci fi movie, but it’s a real place. In the middle of the desert, beneath a glass dome, are wetlands, savannah grasslands, a rainforest, fog desert and an ocean with a coral reef. Constructed between 1987 and 1991 in Oracle Arizona, Biosphere 2 remains the largest…

The Hollywood Canteen where Movie Stars were at your Service

Hours away from being shipped off to Europe’s battlefields or back on US soil for a brief reprieve, there wasn’t a single American serviceman passing through Los Angeles in the 1940s that wouldn’t have lined around the block for an evening at the Hollywood Canteen. Set up in an abandoned nightclub near Sunset Boulevard, if you were wearing…