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Category / Obscure history

Our Zoom Date with the Guy Who Bought a Ghost Town & is Now Quarantined There (Alone)

In 2018, Brent Underwood and his pal, Jon Bier, spent their life savings on the purchase of a California ghost town, “Cerro Gordo” – and life has never been the same since. Underwood’s virtual tour of the town and its stories – equal parts Clint Eastwood Western, Twin Peaks, and The Shining – brought its…

Classrooms without Walls: A Forgotten Age of Open-air Schools

This old black and white photograph pops out at me every now and again on the internet, and it just about sums up my feelings on what my education should have looked like. The photograph was taken in 1957 in the Netherlands where open air schools were quite popular at the time. The idea of an al fresco classroom should…

Secrets of Belleville

Paris: The Birthplace of Communism explained Belleville is a neighbourhood in the East of Paris that has a vibrant multicultural community. It’s French, it’s Chinese, it’s Vietnamese, it’s Moroccan, Tunisian, it’s Jewish, it’s Muslim, it’s Christian, it’s even part hipster too. And they all co-exist here peacefully. On the main boulevard, you’ll find a hodgepodge…

What made these Forgotten Ancients build Glorious Cities only to Burn Them Every 60 Years?

Forget Atlantis, we want to know more about the mysterious, ancient Cucuteni-Trypillians, who were not erudite space lizards, despite their name, but Neolithic humans whose settlements were so advanced, and so vast, that they pioneered the concept of the city as we know it in Eastern Europe. The trouble is, unlike the cool kids over…

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 Radium Girls and the Generation that brushed its Teeth with Radioactive Toothpaste

The Radium Girls were so contaminated that if you stood over their graves today with a Geiger counter, the radiation levels would still cause the needles to jump more than 80 years later. They were small-town girls from New Jersey who had been hired by a local factory to paint the clock faces of luminous watches, the latest new…

Even With a Name Like Aloha Wanderwell, You’ve Probably Never Heard of Her

You could say she was the female Indiana Jones, except of course, Indie was a fictional character, and Aloha Wanderwell was very much the real deal. After landing a seaplane on an unexplored stretch of the Amazonian River, she captured the first-known visual recordings of Stone Age peoples while living amongst the Bororo tribe, and when…

In the Grand Scheme of Things

As you can imagine, I collect a lot of images from the internet. And sometimes, I need to unload them to clear some space on the old laptop. So this is me, doing that, in a meaningful way. I hope you’ll find the theme of today’s spring clean larger than life… Above: A security guard walking down US…

Sex Worker Brides & the Rise of “Millionaires” in the Twisted Tale of a Forgotten Economic Crash

Once upon a time, in pre-revolutionary Paris, French prisoners were set free under the condition that they married prostitutes and emigrated with them to Louisiana. The newlyweds were chained together, escorted to the port and sent to the land of the free. This bizarre and little-known anecdote of history comes from the story of one…

The Story behind “Keep Calm and Carry On”

It’s one of the most recognizable posters in the world, an internet meme reinvented thousands of times over and yet do any of us actually know the story behind it? This excellent little video schools us on the origins of the wartime poster and how it was actually lost in history until 2000 when it…

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