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Category / Obscure history

Online Shopping in the 1950s

Today, shopping while sitting in a comfy chair instead of aimlessly wandering around a store is becoming second nature to a lot of us, but in 1950, yes more than 65 years ago, it was already a hot new concept– albeit a concept the world perhaps just wasn’t ready for… We’re in midcentury Pembroke, Ontario where a local business…

That time President George H. W. Bush Escaped Cannibals

In WW2 nine airmen escaped from their planes after being shot down during bombing raids on a tiny island 700 miles south of Tokyo. Eight of these men were captured, tortured, beheaded and eaten. The 9th man was George H. W. Bush, the only one who survived. I came across a particularly astounding insert on Wikipedia…

Where the Statues of Paris were sent to Die

The stony gaze of the statue upon his executor says it all. Most of the bronze “men” that once watched over Parisian streets and public squares of the French Third Republic met a most undignified end many years ago, snatched from their pedestals and erased from the history books. During the Nazi occupation of France in World War II, the…

A Groovy Fashion Show in 1960s Afghanistan

Kabul, Afghanistan was once known as the Paris of Central Asia. During the late 1960s, goat-skin coats were Afghanistan’s biggest fashion export, gracing the pages of Vogue and copied by designers for the chicest hippies longing for adventure along the Silk Road. For a December 1969 Vogue issue, photographer Fred Maroon and a team of American stylists arrived in Kabul…

10 Reasons Why Archeology is the Coolest Job Ever

Indiana Jones may have exaggerated a little bit about the job, but you still get to dress like Alan Grant from Jurassic Park, travel all over the world and uncover some mind-blowing relics of the past. Here’s 10 reminders of why this is the coolest career going. 1. That time they discovered the Easter Island Statues have Bodies There…

How Batman Obsessively Labelled his Gadgets in the 1960s

If you thought Bruce Wayne was doing anything other than clearly labelling all of his Bat possessions in between his and Robins crime-busting escapades during the 1960s, you’d be very mistaken… Batman had convenient little labels on absolutely everything when he was on television between 1966 and 1968. Even his arch enemies were super meticulous about indicating…

Season Swapping at the Sun Cafe, 1948

It’s snowing outside and the boardwalk is an icy accident waiting to happen, yet inside the Sun and Star rooftop café in Atlantic City, temperatures appear to be a little unseasonal for this time of year… Visiting Atlantic City in January, you most likely wouldn’t have your bikini and sunglasses in tow, but in the…

The Sleazy 70s Game Show for Husbands Sleeping with their Secretaries

If you were watching American television between 1979 and 1980, you might have heard of a little game show called “Three’s a Crowd,” whose tagline was “Who knows a man better: his wife or his secretary?” The implication was always that the men were sleeping with their secretaries. Hosted by Jim Peck and packaged by Chuck Barris productions,…

America’s Prehistoric High Rise Apartment Complex

They call it the Montezuma Castle, but the 90ft high monument should never have been named that. The thing is, the Aztec emperor who the ruins were named after, Montezuma, mistakenly believed to have been connected to their construction, was not even born until the cliff dwellings had already been abandoned for several decades. The European-Americans who…

Take a Tour of a 1964 Underground Fallout Home

I found this little gem of a photo series on my weekly fish through the LIFE archives, accompanied by just a few clues to the full story behind it. Filed under “Underground House in Denver, photographed in 1964 by Robert W Kelley”, I did a quick Google search of underground homes built or exhibited in 1964. The most…

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