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Category / Obscure history

America’s Last Snake-handling Cults

I wandered into the weird part of the internet again this morning, through the doors of a snake-handling church in the Appalachian mountains of West Virginia, to be specific. I stumbled upon a peculiar documentary from 1977, an in-depth portrait of a snake cult that exists still to this day, in a tiny unincorporated community…
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Sneaking into the Forbidden City with our Travel Heroine du Jour

“Why isn’t her face on a bank note yet?” is one of several slack-jawed questions you’ll ask yourself when reading about Alexandra David-Neel, the Franco-Belge éxploratrice whose life reads like an Oscar-winning film. She was an opera singer, and an anarchist; a student of philosophy, feminism and (rumoured) seductress of monks. And when she wasn’t meeting in…

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Trolling Nazis (and the world) with Forged Art

The accepted number of authenticated Vermeer paintings today is 34, but that number became mysteriously higher during World War II. Hermann Göring himself, a leader of the Nazi party and notorious art looter, traded 137 of his prized stolen paintings for a newly-discovered Vermeer, one of several 17th century works that had suddenly emerged in…

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Meet the Neighbourhood Slot Car King & Queen of Brooklyn

They’re kind of Brooklyn’s Romeo and Juliet. He was made of slot car stock, and she was, well, not. At least, that’s what she’ll tell you — but it’s clear that Dolores, who’s one-half of the legendary couple behind Buzz-a-Rama, is a slot car queen. “Oh this whole thing?” she jokes, a boot propped up…

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Meet Benjamin Franklin’s Girlfriends

Sure, on the surface, Benjamin Franklin might have all the sex appeal of a hedgehog, but back in the day, the Founding Father was renowned for an unparalleled charm that not only made him America’s most valuable asset in foreign affairs, but a major hit with the ladies. Especially with French ladies. In 1776, a 70-year-old…

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The Women Who Walked on Wings

Gladys Roy, pictured above on the far wing, is probably the only woman in the world who could say she’s played tennis on an airplane– at least in our circle of friends. As it turns out, a lot of women did some pretty crazy stuff on airplanes in the 1920s… Take Gladys Ingle, for example…

Why China Keeps Its Pyramids a Secret

It’s 1945, and US Airforce pilot James Gaussman is just trying to focus. He’s flying a leg of his journey between India and China, when suddenly, a glimmer catches his eye. Emerging from the plains of China’s heartland, he spots it: a tremendous pyramid that would put Giza’s to shame. “It was pure white on…

The Canary Girls and the WWI Poisons That Turned Them Yellow

At lunchtime, the women had to be separated in the cafeteria because everything they touched turned yellow. They were called the “Canary Girls” because of their bright yellow skin and green or ginger-coloured hair. With the nation’s men at war and male labour in short supply, Britain’s women had been recruited to ramp up production ammunition and were…

How an Untrained Architect Made Oklahoma the Capital of Kitsch

Meet the latest maverick of the architecture world to steal our hearts, Bruce Goff. Lesser known amongst design laity, but just as groundbreaking as his fellow Midwesterner and mentor, Frank Lloyd Wright, Goff’s work was quite simply jaw-dropping. Case in point? The domed, technicolour house above. It might look like a groovy LA pad from the 1970s,…

Remember When You Could Mail Order an Entire House in a Giant DIY Kit?

Sears was once the largest and most powerful retailer in the United States of America before Walmart stole the title in 1989. It first began as a mail ordering catalog company in 1892, when they started peddling watches, then expanding into hardware, furniture and nearly anything else the American household could desire, focusing business in small…
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