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Category / Obscure history

Dining with Alligators

The strangest thing about this terrible tourist attraction, is that I couldn’t find a single newspaper clipping or record of an incident involving a visitor being bitten by an alligator. For almost half a century, more than 1,000 exotic gators were the snap-happy neighbours of a tight-knit community in Lincoln Heights, Los Angeles. A major tourist attraction…

The Creepy World of Vintage Michelin Men

He’s been around since 1894 and is one of the world’s oldest and most famous mascots. But it’s a wonder how Michelin managed to sell anything in the early 1900s when these creepy photographs were taken. Michelin man looks more like a zombie mummy than cuddly mascot… By the 1970s, he looked a little less…

London’s Female Shoplifting Mafia of Yesteryear

We think of the corsets and voluminous petticoats of the 1800’s as painfully limiting to the women who wore them, but a group of female gang members in 20th century London would be inclined to disagree. Enter the “Forty Elephants”, also the “Forty Thieves”, an all-female gang that terrorized London and the surrounding area for…

Shark Observes an Underwater Ping Pong Match

(c) Bettmann/Corbis. The New Yorker magazine put together a slideshow of historical exercise photos. The bizarre line-up includes this underwater ping pong match (being observed by a sand shark at the marine studios in Orlando, Florida, 1947), playing golf in medieval armour and making the bed on one leg. See the full slideshow here.

Lost Masterpiece Discovered in Coco Chanel’s Ritz Suite

The Ritz Hotel in Paris is arguably a museum in itself with all the clandestine history that went on behind those doors, but it turns out the hotel has been hiding one very expensive piece of art history in particular all these years– not in a dusty attic but in Coco Chanel’s former suite no…

A Letter of Rejection to Andy Warhol c.1956

One of his artworks is counted amongst the top 10 most expensive paintings ever sold ($100 million for “Eight Elvises”), but in 1956, the director of collections at The Museum of Modern Art in New York rejected Warhol’s submission, a drawing, simply titled, “Shoe”, informing him that it could picked up from the museum at…

That Christmas When Parisians Ate the Zoo

As a Parisian, I’ve learned a lot about the second time the German army occupied the French capital during the Nazi invasion of WWII. But what about the first time the Germans took hold of the city of Paris? One forgets they managed it twice. The winter of 1870-1871 was a traumatic time for Parisians, an ordeal that…

That Time Mickey Mouse Was a Drug Dealer

In the 1950s, non-medical use of stimulant and sedative drugs was widely accepted and promoted in the mainstream media– so widely in fact that they even made it into a children’s Walt Disney 1951 comic book starring Mickey Mouse as a speed dealer who just loves his own product. In ‘Mickey Mouse and the Medicine Man’,…

The Secret Treasures Museums Don’t Display

When I take my nose out of the encyclopedic rabbit hole that is the internet long enough to read an actual book, it’s got to be for something really special. And since we have so much in common, you and I, perhaps you might be interested in the book MessyNessy will be packing for a…

The Secret Newspaper Published from inside a Prison

Doftana Prison sits abandoned near Romania’s Carpathian mountains. Its foundations have been rocked by earthquakes, its roofs have been brought down by heavy snow and storms, and every winter the building crumbles a little more. There is still enough remaining to show the scale of the place and a sense of how a prisoner’s life was,…

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