The second trip to the moon
An iconic image of silent film: a space ship approaches the face in the moon and crashes into its… mouth? In 1908 a competitor made a nearly identical shot-for-shot remake of Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon.
Category: Europe
The long winter
In Norse mythology Fimbulwinter is the great winter immediately preceding Ragnarök. It may have been inspired by the horrifying real-life events of 536 CE.
The war of souls
In Psychomachia, one of the most popular poems of Medieval Europe, the personifications of Christian virtues fight the vices in a bloodthirsty battle royale. Decapitation, strangulation, squished eyeballs, vomiting bloody teeth…
Road of iron, road of hell
The Vatican City has the shortest national railway line in the world, but it almost had none at all.
Medieval sleep
The historian A. Roger Ekirch has argued that in Medieval Europe, and in many places prior to the Industrial Revolution, people would habitually wake up for an hour in the middle of the night.
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.
First hippo
When he arrived in London in 1850, Obaysch was the first hippopotamus in Europe for more than a millennium.
Baroque perspective
There is a courtyard gallery in the Palazzo Spada in Rome that is designed to fool the eye. It looks like it should be 37 metres long, but in fact it’s only 8 metres in total.
Suffragette jujutsu
Edith Margaret Garrud trained British suffragettes in Japanese martial arts so that they could evade capture by the police.
Kilt ban
The kilt was banned in 1746, forcing the Scots to wear “the unmanly dress of the Lowlander.”
Monet’s haystacks
Monet’s 1890-1891 painting series Les Meules à Giverny captured haystacks at multiple times of the day, seasons, and weather conditions. He did this by painting several canvases at once, swapping them as the day changed.
Book smugglers
From 1864 to 1904, a vast underground network smuggled illegal books into Russian-controlled Lithuania.
Workers on the board
In Germany, by law, all public and private companies with more than 2,000 employees must have half of their board of directors elected by those employees.
One lifetime
The saeculum was a measurement of time used by the Etruscans and Romans to represent a single lifetime: no-one who witnessed the beginning of a saeculum would see its end, by definition.
Ancient brain
In 2008 archaeologists dug up a 2,800-year-old skull in Yorkshire, and discovered an extremely well preserved brain still inside.
Yo ho ho, a sailor’s life for me
Zeppelins, U-boats, the Titanic, Dunkirk, the Klondike Gold Rush, the Great Smog, castaways, cowboys, and hobos all had one thing in common: Charles Lightoller.
The Generalist Academy 