Cryptography gardening
If you want to decipher an encrypted message, it’s helpful to plant some plaintext seeds.
Category: 20th century history
Cities at the bottom of the sea
423,000 people live in Flevoland, a province of the Netherlands. Before 1957, the entire area did not exist.
Feed sack dresses
When US farmers bought seeds or flour during the Great Depression, the most important question was this: what patterns were printed on the sack?
Pre-nuclear steel
If you want to build a Geiger counter you need to first find a shipwreck from before 1945.
Hands of Perón
In 1987 the tomb of Argentinian president Juan Perón was broken into and his hands dismembered and stolen. A ransom note was received but never paid, and the hands were never seen again.
Secret war on malaria
As part of a secret government project begun in 1967, the Chinese scientist Tu Youyou discovered an ancient herbal remedy that would end up saving millions of lives.
Human letters
In 1909 two suffragettes mailed themselves to the the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
Second human in orbit
Yuri Gagarin may have been the first person to orbit the Earth in space, but Gherman Titov was the first to orbit the Earth more than once, the first to pilot a spacecraft, and the first to throw up in space.
The endless break
At a dance party in 1972 Bronx New York, DJ Kool Herc mixed the breaks from James Brown, British rock music, and a bongo band – and in doing so, laid the foundations of hip hop.
Exploding lake
On August 21, 1986, seventeen hundred people who lived around Lake Nyos in Cameroon suffocated overnight – victims of an extremely rare and silent natural disaster.
Fascist jazz
Between 1941 and 1943 Germany broadcast propaganda jazz music with altered lyrics into Britain.
Hotel for ransom
In 1980 three men placed a bomb packed with 450kg of dynamite in a Nevada hotel, hoping to collect a three million dollar ransom.
The final tsar
In 1946 Simeon II, the last person to bear the title “tsar,” was deposed and exiled from Bulgaria. Fifty years later, he returned and was elected prime minister.
Bisbee deportation
In 1917 a 2,200-strong posse kidnapped 1,300 striking miners from Bisbee in Arizona, loaded them into trains, and sent them to New Mexico. The sheriff then sealed off all the entrances to Bisbee and began purging the town.
First Antarcticans
Three people can lay claim to being the first person born in Antarctica: the first born in Antarctic waters, the first born on an Antarctic island, and the first born on the Antarctic mainland.
Suffragette jujutsu
Edith Margaret Garrud trained British suffragettes in Japanese martial arts so that they could evade capture by the police.
The Generalist Academy 