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.
Category: Places
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.
Bird spikes
A tree in New Zealand grows downwards-facing spikes for the first 15 or 20 years of its life; this is thought to be a remnant defence against gigantic now-extinct birds.
Fire birds
Several bird species have been implicated in the spread of wildfire in Australia.
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.
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.
Hidden Christians
Christianity was banned in Japan in 1614. For the next 250 years, the Kakure Kirishitan (hidden Christians) worshipped in secret.
Skyscraper squatting
The Centro Financiero Confinanzas skyscraper was unfinished at the time of the 1994 Venezuelan banking crisis. In 2007, squatters moved in.
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.”
Mongolian Beatles
In 1971, Mongolia’s Minister of Culture decided that the country needed its own rock band, and so Soyol Erdene was born.
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.
Vulture crisis
The use of the anti-inflammatory drug Diclofenac on cattle led – very indirectly – to the rise of rabies and leopards in India. And it’s all because of vultures.
The Generalist Academy 