15 49.0138 8.38624 both 0 bullet 0 4000 1 0 horizontal https://www.messynessychic.com 300 4000

Category / Obscure history

Beauties and their Bombers: Meet the “Top Gun” Heroines of WW2

The term war hero doesn’t usually bring to mind images of it-girls or front page glamour shots… But the ladies of the female section of the British Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) singlehandedly transformed the idea of what it meant to be a war hero. They were the glamour girls of the Second World War, but they were…

The Black Woman’s Forgotten Fight against the Laws that Banned her Hair

There are many reasons why it’s not “just hair” for Black women. Before the “Black is Beautiful” and natural hair movement emerged during the 1960s, anti-Black hair sentiment in Western society existed for centuries, most contentiously in colonial Louisiana when a series of laws actually banned Creole women from displaying their hair in public. Introduced…

Victorian Prudes and their Bizarre Beachside Bathing Machines

Picture that moment when you finally get to the beach after a long winter, excitedly peel off your clothes, run madly towards the water and crash into the salty waves without a care in the world … this is not that. If you were a beachgoer in Georgian or Victorian times, more specifically, a female…

The Overlooked Occult Movie Legend who holds Hollywood’s Darkest Secrets

As an artist and an outsider, Kenneth Anger was the West Coast’s answer to Andy Warhol – a California boy who hosted rituals for the Church of Satan in his San Francisco mansion, and introduced the Rolling Stones to the occult; a man who found a muse in Mick Jagger, but a bigger one in…

Harlem’s Forgotten Fight to Save Africa’s Last Uncolonised Nation from Mussolini

Harlem, New York, the summer of 1935. Years before the United States or even Allied Europe has entered World War II. Large crowds of African Americans are gathering around a registration desk, volunteering to take on a fascist Italian dictator who is soon to become Hitler’s fiercest collaborator. No doubt, Black Americans have enough battles…

The Dandy Suit that America Banned and Caused a Riot

You know the zoot suit. It’s the suit that bad guys are usually wearing in comical mid-century gangster movies, but there’s much more to this story than a stereotype. In the 1940s and 50s, zoot suits were worn by Mexican-American hipsters who embraced the flamboyant oversized style of dress to express their desire for freedom from discrimination and racism as an underclass. The zoot suiters became a…

The All-Black Utopian Ghost City that Lost its Soul

In the heart of what was North Carolina’s old tobacco and cotton-field industry, lies the remains of Soul City, an unrealised utopia born in the midst of America’s 1970s urban crisis, intended to encourage black empowerment in a new all-African American planned community. Bankrolled by Nixon’s Republican government, “built by black people and for black people”, Soul City was projected to…

Vintage Muse du Jour: Princess Elizabeth of Toro

Today, we’re formally inviting you to shift your gaze to a lesser-known royal, deserving of her own spotlight: Elizabeth of Toro, the Ugandan Princess, lawyer, actor, top model, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Ambassador to the US, Germany and the Vatican in the 1960s. Her life reads like a trophy wall, and that’s only half…

How She Kept her Husband with Lysol, the Disinfectant of Choice for Feminine Hygiene

“Inject disinfectant into the human body” sounds like the words of someone who flew over the cuckoo’s nest, doesn’t it? Well, once upon a time, women were encouraged to do exactly that, all to accentuate their “dainty femininity” and keep a rein on their man. And, if you were astute enough to read between the…

An Ode to the Unexpected Whimsy (and Strength) of Your Mail Delivery

It was the Little Mail Truck Who Could. An odd American vehicle – looking more like a patriotic Good & Plenty than a post truck – but by the 1960s, the “Mailster” made up one-third of the post’s vehicular fleet, according to The Smithsonian, somehow schlepping 500 lbs of brown paper packages tied up with…

NEWER POSTS 1 … 24 25 26 … 55 OLDER POSTS