Interesting Times

This week’s episode has a slightly different format from previous entries. We sat down with food historian Heather Arndt Anderson, author of Breakfast: A History, and talked about this history of breakfast. Topics ranged from how orange juice became a […]

Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days is not strictly science fiction, but it is a book that speculates about technology (specifically steamships and railroads) and what it’s capable of. Verne’s 1973 novel made the eighty day time look […]

In 1880s New York Nellie Bly (born Elizabeth Jane Chochrane)reported on the conditions inside an insane asylum by pretending to be mentally ill and getting herself checked into one. Bly’s account of Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum caused a sensation when […]

The Anglo-Zanzibar war comes up all the time on lists of curiosities, records, weird things, etc., as the shortest war in recorded history. It certainly is a historical curiosity, but it was still an actual, real war, with stakes and […]

Happy New Year! It’s January First, 2015, and you probably have a new calendar. Calendars tend to be irregular, weird, and uneven, but some folks have attempted to smooth that out throughout history. Below is the Soviet Calendar. Workers were […]

Maximilian’s rule over Mexico was never truly solidified or legitimized, and the would-be emperor faced relentless resistance from liberal Mexican forces led by reformist president Benito Juarez. Eventually the emperor (always just a puppet of the French) would lose his […]

One of the most definitive and dramatic struggles against European monarchy happened in Mexico. France attempted to install Maximilian, a member of Austrian royal family as a puppet emperor of Mexico in the 1860s. The would-be emperor, though, was resisted […]

Defining what is and is not a country, state, or nation can sometimes be sort of difficult. China, obviously, is a country. So are Brazil and Morocco. Some states, like Kosovo, East Timor, and Vatican City, are independent and sovereign […]

Maps used to have blank spots. California used to be drawn as an island. The Mercator projection makes Greenland look fat. One of the biggest and strangest cartographic errors of all time, though, has to be the Mountains of Kong, […]

The United States has been a divided nation plenty of times. It’s been divided about slavery, about politics, about culture and, very importantly, about when to celebrate Thanksgiving. Related Links: Holiday Highlights, a 1940 Merrie Melodies cartoon, showed the date of […]

Before and during World War II Japan (just like Britain, France, and the United States) had a considerable empire. The Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere encompassed the Korean peninsula, several Pacific Islands, and holdings in China. Probably the strangest part […]

Scientists are motivated by curiosity, by the desire to help their fellow humans, by compulsion and, sometimes, by irrational personal vendettas. Edward Drinker Cope and Othneil Charles Marsh were two leading paleontologists during the late 1800s, and discovered approximately 130 […]

The Olmecs are the oldest known Mesoamerican civilization, and we know little about them compared to, say, the Mayans or Aztec. Several people, though, have made a few outlandish claims about who the Olmecs were, and where they came from. […]

The Korean Demilitarized Zone is a strange place. In 2008 I was a tourist visiting the peninsula, and I learned about one of the strangest incidents in the DMZ’s history. It was something straight out of a slasher movie, and […]

A famed artifact, the Cyrus Cylinder, has often been cited as an early proclamation of human rights. The Shah of Iran, the UN, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, and an American president all hailed Cyrus the Great as an early […]