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Category / Obscure history

Dinner at the Drive-Through Eiffel Tower

We’ve seen it dressed up every which way; painted yellow, used as a giant advertising billboard; and we even peered inside its hidden apartment, but we’ve never seen the Eiffel Tower looking quite like this. Ladies and gents, you’re looking at the 1936 Eiffel Tower that never was, a mock-up to turn Paris’ Iron Lady into……

The Towns That Were Moved by Horses

They say “it takes a village,” but if it was 1920-something, it took a horse– maybe a couple. As absurd as it seems today, if necessary, entire towns were known to relocate all their buildings via horse-and-buggy to proverbially greener pastures. With the rapid railway and urban development boom at the turn-of-the-century, lots of folks…

Mods vs Rockers in Brighton’s Battle of the Beach Chairs, 1964

One of my favourite things to come across when I’m researching is a snapshot from history that I’m completely unfamiliar with. A forgotten story to re-discover, another clue to the bigger picture or just a bizarre anecdote from the past; these are my little treasures hiding under rocks. And today, I found these baffling and beautiful photographs of what I can only…

Princess Bonaparte’s Orgasmic Quest

Every family has its black sheep. For the Bonaparte clan, it was Napoleon’s great grandniece, Princess Marie (1882-1962). She was not only a pioneer of psychoanalysis who actually saved Freud from the Nazis, but a staunch advocate for women’s sex research on some pretty taboo topics. You see, she was on a war path —…

Whatever You Do, Don’t Tell the French About Tarrare

(A word of caution: this is not an article to read on your lunchbreak). He could wrap his empty stomach around his waist like a belt, and began eating his bodyweight in meat every day as a child. His lips were nearly non-existent, and his mouth was so wide, it could hold 12 eggs at…

The UNESCO Treasure Made of Living Humans

Behold Catalonia’s best collective party trick: assembling hundreds of supple Spaniards into a giant tower, or castell, up to 10 stories high. And this isn’t just empty acrobatics. It’s a UNESCO sanctified treasure (even though it’s made out of humans) with a story that has both mirrored, and challenged, the nature of its country’s patrimony… We can…

The Grandma Who Went for a Walk Alone Through 14 States

At the age of 67, Emma Rowena Gatewood told her adult children she was going out for a walk. Little did they know that her “walk” would make her the first woman to hike the 2,168-mile Appalachian Trail from Mount Oglethorpe in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine solo, and in one season. She was a farmer’s wife from Ohio,…

How Does Your Atomic Garden Grow?

Have you ever seen a strangely misshapen tomato growing in your vegetable garden? A uniquely pigmented plant in your backyard that’s just not like others, able to thrive even in the harshest of seasons? There’s a very good chance that it could be an atomic heirloom from a forgotten atomic garden of the 1950s and 60s. While…

Johnny Cash’s White Witch of Montego Bay

Where’s your husband Annie? Where’s number two and three? Are they sleeping neath the palms beside the Caribbean Sea? At night I hear you ridin’ and I hear your lovers call And still can feel your presence round the great house at Rose Hall… –Johnny Cash Something unsettling sleeps in the walls of Jamaica’s seductive Rose…

The Cautionary Tale of the Harlem Hoarders

New York City fire fighters still use the term “a Collyer’s mansion situation” as code for a hoarder’s house fire. It usually means it’s not safe for them to enter the building. In 1947, it took police five hours to plough through the junk and find the first Collyer brother’s body. It took them three…

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