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The Dutch and English spent years warring over nutmeg.

Gunung Api on the Banda Islands
Credit: Universal History Archive/ Universal Image Group via Getty Images
Author Timothy Ott
February 6, 2025

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While nutmeg today is a common kitchen spice used to jazz up vegetables or top holiday favorites such as pumpkin pie and eggnog, it was once also highly valued for its medicinal properties and its alleged power to ward off the Black Plague. As such, the Banda Islands of Indonesia, which were flush with nutmeg trees, became a prime target of European business interests in the Late Middle Ages.

By the beginning of the 17th century, members of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) arranged what they thought were exclusive trade agreements with several Banda chiefs. However, many of the Banda continued dealing their valuable wares to other buyers, including those from the English East India Company (EIC). Although the Dutch mainly channeled their hostility over this toward the Banda instead of the EIC, the two European powers threatened each other until forging a treaty that ostensibly shared control of the islands in 1619. But the treaty failed to diffuse tensions, as the Dutch continued their aggressive behavior in the region, including a brutal massacre of much of the Indigenous population in 1621, while extorting extra funds from the English for protection and administration of the islands.

As the tensions boiled over, the “nutmeg wars,” as they are sometimes known, also produced an interesting geopolitical development that became far more relevant the following century. As part of the Treaty of Breda, which ended the second Anglo-Dutch War in 1667, the English agreed to officially transfer ownership of what remained of their holdings in the Banda Islands, while the Dutch ceded formal control of New Netherland, a little-used territory across the Atlantic Ocean that included modern-day New York City.

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A pig nearly started a war between the U.S. and Great Britain.

In the 1850s, a mix of American settlers and British employees of the Hudson’s Bay Company lived in an uneasy truce on San Juan Island, one of a string of islands that were disputed territory between Britain's Vancouver Island and the mainland U.S. That truce was shaken in June 1859 when an American farmer named Lyman Cutlar shot and killed a Hudson’s Bay-owned pig that had been rooting around his property.  Cutlar’s attempt to compensate the company was rebuffed, and after an angry mob threatened him with retribution, a U.S. Army garrison led by future Confederate officer George Edward Pickett was sent to San Juan Island to assert American authority. That, in turn, prompted the arrival of a pair of British warships, and then three more after additional American troops turned up. It required the negotiation capabilities of U.S. Army Commanding General Winfield Scott to de-escalate the situation that autumn. Thirteen years later, an independent arbitration commission awarded San Juan Island to the United States, ending the chances of a global conflict over farm animals in the area.

Only one U.S. president worked as a national park ranger.

Gerald Ford in park ranger uniform
Credit: Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum, National Archives and Records Administration
Author Nicole Villeneuve
July 14, 2026

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Theodore Roosevelt is the only U.S. president with a national park named after him, but Roosevelt never actually worked as a park ranger — in fact, the only U.S. president to do so was Gerald Ford.

In the summer of 1936, Ford worked a seasonal job as a ranger at Yellowstone National Park. His duties included everything from checking vehicle registrations to serving as an armed guard on the park’s now-retired bear-feeding truck. The experience clearly left an impression: Ford later called it “one of the greatest summers of my life” and said he reminisced about it with his family for years afterward.

Ford’s summertime stint took place long before he entered politics. At the time, he was in his mid-20s and still mapping out his future after graduating from the University of Michigan with a Bachelor of Arts in economics. He spent several years coaching boxing and football at Yale while working toward a law degree, which he eventually earned in 1941. 

The future president went on to serve in the Navy during World War II before eventually returning home and entering public life, being elected to Congress in 1948. Decades later, as president, Ford signed legislation expanding the National Park Service, adding 18 sites to the system in which he had once spent a memorable summer as a young ranger.

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Yosemite National Park used to create waterfalls of fire.

For nearly 90 years, California’s Yosemite National Park featured a strange recurring summer attraction: a human-made firefall. Visitors gathered in Yosemite Valley in the evening and watched as glowing embers from burnt red fir bark were pushed over the edge of Glacier Point. From below, the effect resembled a cascade of fire rushing from 3,200 feet above, briefly illuminating the grand granite wall before fading into darkness.

The firefall, which was believed to have first started in 1872, was originally promoted to attract visitors to Yosemite; eventually, however, it drew more crowds than the park could manage, and by the 1960s, concerns over traffic, litter, and damage to fragile valley ecosystems led the National Park Service to reconsider the spectacle. The final firefall took place in 1968, and the NPS moved toward managing the park with preservation at the forefront.

Lighters were invented before modern matches.

Antique flintlock fire starter
Credit: William Scott/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Sarah Anne Lloyd
February 6, 2025

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Lighters seem, on the surface, to be a little more advanced than your standard pack of matches. But lighters were actually invented before matches as we know them today. Until the early 19th century, “matches” were flammable sticks made to carry fire from one place to another, not make fire on their own. Early self-igniting matches were too dangerous to be practical. The earliest, invented in 1805, involved dipping potassium chlorate into sulphuric acid. Another, created in 1816, was a sulfur-tipped match scraped inside a phosphorus-coated tube. 

Some of the earliest lighters, meanwhile, date back to the 17th century and were modified versions of flintlock pistols, but instead of igniting gunpowder (and launching a bullet), they ignited tinder. In the 18th century, Italian chemist Alessandro Volta created an “inflammable air” (hydrogen) lighter that used water to force hydrogen past a striker, where it was lit by a spark. But Volta’s lighters required scientific knowledge to use. The Döbereiner’s lamp (also called a “tinderbox”), a table lighter invented in Germany in 1823, also used hydrogen gas, but could be used easily by anyone. More than 20,000 of these more practical lighters were sold that decade. Lighters, of course, continued to advance from there: Zippo lighters emerged in the mid-1930s, and Bic disposable lighters hit the market in 1973.

The first friction matches, which were tipped in potassium chlorate-antimony sulfide paste and ignited with sandpaper, were invented in 1826. Phosphorus gained popularity in the 1830s, as did the widespread use of white phosphorus, a deadly chemical that led to the death and disfigurement of many match factory workers. Phosphorus sesquisulfide, a less toxic alternative, emerged at the turn of the 20th century, and it’s still in the classic Diamond Strike Anywhere matches we use today.

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Mirrors were used to start fires in ancient China.

You’ve probably heard of setting leaves on fire with a magnifying glass, and indeed people have been using this basic principle — concentrating sunlight into a small, focused point — to start fires for millennia. As far back as 3,000 years ago, concave mirrors made out of bronze called yang sui were used to start fires in China. Chinese philosopher Confucius even wrote of boys attaching the mirrors to their belts when they got dressed so they could start fires later in the day.

The word ‘boycott’ comes from a person’s name.

Drawing of land agent Charles Boycott
Credit: Historic Collection/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Timothy Ott
January 23, 2025

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Although people have sought to effect change through economic and social pressure since at least the 1700s, the concept became more widely known in the latter years of the following century, earning its moniker by way of one of the individuals targeted.

From 1879 to 1882, Ireland’s first Land War pitted rural tenants, reeling from years of economic downturn, against the rental policies of wealthy and often-absentee English landlords. Caught in the crossfire was former English army officer “Captain” Charles Boycott, whose position as a land agent for one such landlord in County Mayo came with the responsibility of evicting delinquent tenants. Organized locals made life miserable for Boycott by behaving coldly toward him in public, refusing to provide him with goods and services, and harassing his employees into quitting, a process dubbed “boycotting” by parish priest John O’Malley.

After Boycott’s complaints about the situation were published in London’s The Times in October 1880, around 50 volunteers from Ireland’s northern border journeyed to County Mayo to help the short-staffed officer harvest his farm crops. However, these charitable souls required the protection of a Royal Irish Constabulary regiment, whose members proceeded to trample the grounds and poach the livestock during their two-week stay at Boycott’s property. Although the volunteer mission was successful (albeit at an estimated cost of £10,000 to harvest £350 worth of crops), Boycott’s abandonment of his farm in late November marked a victory for the tenants and the effective method of persuasion that rapidly earned recognition under its new name.

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Film audiences boycotted a killer Santa Claus in 1984.

The box-office success of Halloween spawned a boom of slasher flicks in the late 1970s and early ’80s, providing audiences with the now-familiar trope of a villain violently wreaking havoc on an unwitting community. While the antagonists took on a variety of forms across these largely indistinguishable and forgettable productions, a segment of the population drew the line at the concept of the killer Santa portrayed in 1984's Silent Night, Deadly Night.  Calls for a boycott were especially loud in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where one mother formed an advocacy group called Citizens Against Movie Madness (CAMM) that organized protests of the film's screenings. Even famed critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert were swept up in the outrage, singling out the producers of the "sick, sleazy, and mean-spirited" movie by name on their TV show. The protests seemingly paid dividends, as the film's distributor, Tri-Star, yanked the feature from theaters after just a few weeks. Then again, Silent Night, Deadly Night became a popular home video release before spawning four sequels.

Anesthesia was invented after a laughing gas party.

Laughing gas party, 1800s
Credit © Doctor Snuggle Juggles/Alamy
Author Nicole Villeneuve
July 9, 2026

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Before modern anesthesia, surgery was an agonizing experience. Procedures were done quickly and often with alcohol, opium, or nothing at all. That began to change in 1799, when 20-year-old English chemist Humphry Davy started experimenting with nitrous oxide — better known as laughing gas.

Davy didn’t experiment alone. He invited friends to inhale the gas during get-togethers in the drawing room above his laboratory. The effects were immediate: laughter, euphoria, and shifts in bodily sensation all around. Davy recorded these findings and published them in 1800. 

These parties caught on across the U.K. and the United States, where ether was favored over laughing gas (the effects were similar and it was easier to obtain). Decades later, in 1844, American dentist Horace Wells decided to try nitrous oxide as an anesthetic for a tooth extraction. Though his early attempts weren’t successful, he inspired a colleague to attempt a similar procedure using ether. In 1846, dentist William Morton successfully demonstrated using ether as an anesthetic, ushering in the first widely accepted form of modern anesthesia.

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The first local anesthetic was cocaine.

By the 1880s, anesthetics had already started transforming surgery, but pain control was still limited. In 1884, Austrian ophthalmologist Carl Koller demonstrated that a cocaine solution could numb the surface of the eye, allowing surgery to be performed without pain, and without putting a patient fully to sleep.

Cocaine became widely used in medical procedures in the U.S. and Europe. But by 1886, cocaine’s toxicity was coming under fire, with concerns of complications and addiction. At the end of the 19th century, advances in organic chemistry led to safer synthetic alternatives. Early compounds such as procaine helped reduce reliance on cocaine, followed by a wave of new local anesthetics in the early 20th century.

Rome’s first gladiator battle was not entertainment — it was held at a funeral.

Gladiator fight in ancient Rome, Italy
Credit: © Sunny Celeste/Alamy
Author Michael Nordine
July 9, 2026

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You’ve probably never heard of Decimus Junius Brutus Pera, but the prominent aristocrat’s death inspired one of ancient Rome’s most famous attractions: the gladiator. 

When he died in 264 BCE, his sons Marcus Junius and Decimus Junius took it upon themselves to honor his memory by organizing a fight between three pairs of enslaved people. The public event, which preceded the opening of the Colosseum by hundreds of years, was held at Rome’s cattle market (better known by the amazing moniker of Forum Boarium). 

The spectacle, which also included meat and wine, was a kind of public sacrifice in Pera’s honor. This became common practice at Roman funeral pyres in the ensuing decades and centuries, with the fighters themselves known as bustuarii and holding a lesser status than the gladiators who fought at larger public gatherings; though many gladiators became celebrities in their own right, their position wasn’t considered a noble one. 

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One gladiator reportedly won his freedom four times and refused it each time.

Spartacus is probably the most famous gladiator, but he wasn’t the best fighter the Colosseum ever saw. That may have been Flamma, a Syrian soldier-turned-gladiator whose name meant “the Flame” and who according to some reports survived 34 different matches (far more than most competitors) with a final record of 21 victories, nine draws, and four defeats. (Most battles didn’t actually end in death.) 

By the time he died at age 30, he had been granted his freedom on four separate occasions and turned it down each time, according to his gravestone. No record exists stating why. The gravestone reads, “Flamma, secutor, lived 30 years, fought 34 times, won 21 times, fought to a draw 9 times, won reprieve 4 times, a Syrian by nationality. Delicatus made this for his deserving comrade-in-arms.”

‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ posters were never actually released during WWII.

WWII "Keep Calm and Carry On" poster
Credit: Rawdon Wyatt/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Michael Nordine
January 23, 2025

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“Keep Calm and Carry On” posters and their variants have become ubiquitous over the last two decades, a symbol of the United Kingdom’s stoic resilience during World War II. But while more than 2 million posters were printed by the Ministry of Information in the leadup to World War II, they were never officially released during the actual conflict. Two other slogan posters were designed in the same style, neither of which has achieved the same prominence despite being seen by far more people during the war. They were: “Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution — Will Bring Us Victory” and “Freedom Is in Peril; Defend It with All Your Might.”

The “Keep Calm and Carry On” posters were meant to be held in reserve until the situation grew especially dire and the public needed a morale boost, but officials found the other designs effective enough on their own. It wasn’t until the owner of a bookstore in Alnwick, Northumberland, found a batch of “Keep Calm” posters in a box of secondhand books he’d won that the posters achieved their current fame. The bookseller framed one in his shop, and it drew so much attention from the public that he began selling copies.

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The bestselling poster in history is Farrah Fawcett in a red swimsuit.

Even if you didn’t have one on your bedroom wall growing up, you’ve surely seen it: Charlie’s Angels star Farrah Fawcett in a red swimsuit, smiling at the camera in profile. The iconic poster was released in 1976, selling more than 6 million copies in its first year at the modest price of $3. More than 12 million total have been sold, making it the bestselling poster of all time and an enduring symbol of the 1970s. A copy of the poster, and the swimsuit itself, can now be found in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. 

The skinniest house in the U.S. is a historic ‘spite house.’

Spite house in Alexandria, Virginia
Credit: Elizabeth Lankes/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Sarah Anne Lloyd
January 24, 2025

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In 1830, brickmaker John Hollensbury lived in a handsome two-story home in what’s now the Old Town district of Alexandria, Virginia. He had one small problem, however. There was an alley about 7.5 feet wide running down one side; horse-drawn carriages would try to squeeze through and end up scraping against his wall, and loiterers would mill about in the area. Hollensbury’s drastic solution? Fill in the alley with a very, very small house to spite the riffraff outside.

This is how the Alexandria Spite House was born — not to create something, but to take something away. But regardless of Hollensbury’s motivations, he built a cute, functional, two-story home, albeit one that’s wedged in so tight that the neighbors’ exterior brick walls serve as its interior walls. It stretches around 25 feet back into the alley, and has a 325-square-foot interior spread out over two stories. The first floor has a sitting area and a small kitchen. Upstairs, there’s a small bedroom and bathroom with a clawfoot tub.

The diminutive home’s creature comforts are ample enough that people have used it as a long-term primary residence. One couple even lived there for the better part of 25 years. The most recent owner purchased it in 1990 for $130,000; as of 2008, he used it as a pied à terre.

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Two 5-foot-wide “spite houses” were built in New York City.

In New York City in 1882, construction of Lexington Avenue had split some lots into itty-bitty pieces. One corner lot at 82nd Street, owned by eccentric developer Joseph Richardson, was just 5 feet wide and 100 feet long. When the owners of the adjacent lot decided to build apartment homes there, they offered Richardson $1,000 for the lot. He countered with $5,000, and the other party decided to not buy the parcel — after all, they thought, what could Richardson even build there that could block their residents’ views?

Unfortunately for them, Richardson called their bluff and built two 50-foot-long, 5-foot-wide houses right along the eastern wall, and even moved into one himself. Richardson died in 1887, and the buildings — the two spite houses and the apartment building next to them — were demolished in 1915.

The Trojan horse is barely mentioned in the ‘Odyssey’.

Trojan Horse at the Gates of Troy
Credit: © C.P. CUSHING—ClassicStock/Alamy
Author Michael Nordine
July 9, 2026

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Along with the Cyclops and Odysseus’ confrontation with the many would-be suitors of his wife, the Trojan horse is one of the famous narratives people often associate with the Odyssey. There’s just one problem: It’s barely even mentioned in Homer’s epic poem, and never by name. 

There are a few brief references to the tale in the Odyssey. In one, Homer writes, “Sing of the building of the horse of wood, which Epeius made with Athena’s help, the horse which once Odysseus led up into the citadel as a thing of guile, when he had filled it with the men who sacked Ilios.” Other passages mention Greeks “hidden in the horse” and the Trojans’ “fate to perish when their city should enclose the great horse of wood.”

Considering the Trojan horse isn’t in the Iliad either, a question naturally arises: When and where was the story actually told?

The answer has to do with the Epic Cycle, a series of a dozen or so ancient Greek epic poems that have been either lost entirely or preserved only in fragments. The Iliad and the Odyssey are the only two that survive in full, but two non-Homeric poems, Little Iliad and The Sack of Troy (The Sack of Ilium), mention the Trojan horse. 

The epic that goes into the most depth about it isn’t Greek at all, but Latin: Virgil’s Aeneid, which recounts the story in full. It’s from the Aeneid that the famous line “timeō Danaōs et dōna ferentēs,” or “I fear the Greeks even when bearing gifts,” originates, as well as nearly everything else we know about the Trojan horse.

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Odysseus doesn’t appear until the fifth book of the ‘Odyssey.’

Homer’s epic is divided into 24 sections, or books, the first four of which aren’t actually about Odysseus — at least not directly. Those four books, better known as the Telemachy, focus instead on his son Telemachus as he leaves Ithaca in search of news about his long-missing father. Odysseus finally appears in person in the fifth book, and it isn’t what you would call a heroic entrance. When we first meet him, he’s trapped on Calypso’s island and spends much of his time crying while gazing out to sea — an understandable reaction to his arduous journey, to be sure.

Until 1956, French children attending school were served wine with their lunch.

French child with glass of wine
Credit: adoc-photos/ Corbis Historical via Getty Images
Author Michael Nordine
January 21, 2025

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Lest you doubt France’s commitment to wine, know this: Until 1956, French schoolchildren were served it during lunch. Even the ban that came into effect that year applied only to enfants under the age of 14, and alcohol wasn’t banned from schools entirely until 1981. Photos and videos of the practice can still be found, most of which are remarkable for how casual they are — as though choosing between red and white was as normal for a second grader as deciding between plain and chocolate milk. 

That’s probably because it was. Wine has been an integral part of French culture for more than 2,000 years, and you don’t have to be a sommelier to know that France is widely considered the best wine-producing country in the world. And though consumption has been consistently dropping in the country as younger generations across the globe have opted to drink less than their parents and grandparents, wine is still a staple of daily life.

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The earliest known winery was in Armenia.

Though hardly synonymous with wine in the same way France is, Armenia has been producing it longer than any other country, as far as archaeologists know. The oldest-known winery was discovered in an Armenian cave in 2007, and dates back 6,100 years. A wine press, cups, withered grapes, and vessels used for fermentation and storage were all unearthed at the Areni-1 cave complex, as the site is known, which is also where the oldest known leather shoe was discovered. Today, the country’s best-known alcoholic export is brandy, which is produced by distilling wine and has a higher alcohol by volume (ABV) content.

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