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The Mongol Empire is the largest contiguous land empire in history.

  • Statue of Genghis Khan
Statue of Genghis Khan
Strelyuk/ Shutterstock
Author Michael Nordine
December 7, 2023

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There was a time when the sun never set on the British Empire and all roads led to Rome, but there has never been a larger contiguous land empire than that of the Mongols. Established in 1206 by Genghis Khan — who was born Temujin and whose name, also transliterated as Chinggis, means “universal ruler” — the empire eventually reached a size of at least 9 million square miles. To call this unlikely would be an understatement. Temujin rose to power from a tumultuous childhood, and the Mongols were a nomadic people whose territorial expansion came about largely due to brutal military tactics and fierce pragmatism.

At its peak, the empire included all of modern-day China and Mongolia in addition to parts of Armenia, Georgia, Russia, Ukraine, Romania, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, and Korea, among others. (This map offers a sense of its vastness.) For all of Genghis’ savvy, however, his descendants proved a fractious bunch who fought among themselves and oversaw his empire’s decline; with the exception of his grandson Kublai Khan, few others in the dynasty are recalled fondly. Even so, Genghis’ massive effect on the world might best be summarized by two staggering statistics: He was responsible for the deaths of as much as 11% of the world’s population at the time, and 1 in every 200 men living today are his direct descendants.

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No one knows where Genghis Khan is buried.

Though Genghis Khan was one of history’s most consequential figures, there are two things no one knows about the famed leader: what he looked like and where he’s buried. The first is easy enough to explain, as he lived nearly 1,000 years ago and contemporaneous accounts of his appearance differ. The latter is a bit more unusual. Genghis wished to be buried in secret, and the army that escorted his body is said to have slain anyone it came across en route to his final resting place, lest those passersby tell anyone what they saw. After the burial, those same soldiers rode 1,000 horses over Genghis’ grave to bury any trace of it along with him. There are also stories, most likely untrue, that the enslaved people responsible for burying him were then slaughtered so they couldn’t share their knowledge, and that the guards who carried out this act were themselves killed by a second group of soldiers, who then took their own lives. Though the exact location of the grave remains a mystery, scholars believe Genghis is buried somewhere near Burkhan Khaldun, a mountain considered sacred by the Mongols. 

The myth that carrots improve your eyesight comes from WWII.

  • A bunch of carrots
A bunch of carrots
Credit: Mike Kenneally/ Unsplash
Author Michael Nordine
October 24, 2024

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Carrots offer many health benefits, but improved eyesight isn’t one of them. The myth that superhuman vision is attainable if your diet resembles that of Peter Rabbit persists all the same, and it has a surprising origin: World War II. While it’s true that everyone’s favorite orange vegetable is good for your eyes if you’re deficient in vitamin A, this truth was stretched past its breaking point by British propaganda during the war. 

With meat, sugar, and other foods rationed for the war effort, carrots were among the vegetables that citizens were encouraged to grow and eat more of in their victory gardens, and Britain ended up with a large carrot surplus. This resulted in a promotional campaign led by Doctor Carrot, “the children’s best friend” who encouraged Britons to cook vegetable-heavy recipes and reduce the surplus, and a Disney cartoonist went so far as to create an entire family of anthropomorphic carrots based on the character. Britain’s Food Ministry told citizens that carrots could help them see in the dark during blackouts, which were common at the time in order to avoid German bombers. The myth may have served another purpose, too. It’s often reported that in order to conceal the invention of on-board Airborne Interception Radar from the Germans, the British attributed their pilots’ skills — particularly, the ability to hit targets in darkness — to the habit of eating lots of carrots. 

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“Radar” is an anacronym.

The term “RADAR” was originally coined as an acronym that stood for “radio detection and ranging,” but like certain other acronyms it eventually came to be treated as an uncapitalized common noun. This is an example of an anacronym, which occurs when an acronym is used so often as to become a word itself. Other examples include “laser” (light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation), “scuba” (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus), and “taser” (Thomas A. Swift’s electric rifle) — all of which, perhaps not coincidentally, were novel technologies that proved so successful, they became a part of everyday life.

Communal sleep was the norm in the Middle Ages.

  • 15th-century couple in bed
15th-century couple in bed
Credit: PRISMA ARCHIVO/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Michael Nordine
October 17, 2024

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If you miss sleepovers, you may have been born in the wrong century. Communal sleep was commonplace during the Middle Ages, with entire families sharing the same bed. There was even a standard arrangement in some families, though it wasn’t always adhered to: In many Irish households, for instance, it was typical for mom and dad to be in the middle, daughters on the side of the bed closest to the wall, and sons on the other side. The youngest would be closest to the parent they were nestled next to. Visitors, servants, and friends might join in as well — there wasn’t exactly a surplus of memory-foam mattresses at the time, so sleeping under the same roof tended to mean sleeping in the same bed.

The practice extended to inns and other roadside accommodations, where the individual rooms we enjoy today were much less common and complete strangers were often strange bedfellows for the night. This certainly came with its downsides — you never know how hygienic a fellow traveler might be, to say nothing of whether or not they snore — but “social sleeping” also led to many a late-night conversation that even nobles who could afford their own beds actively sought out. 

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Some people dream in black and white.

It wasn’t just broadcast quality that changed when color television became commonplace in the middle of the 20th century. Dreams changed, too. Three-quarters of Americans rarely or never saw color in their dreams as recently as the 1940s, a number that shrunk to just 12% by a 2008 study. It’s believed that color TV is the reason. Perhaps tellingly, the majority of respondents who said they sometimes dreamt in black and white were 55 or older, and grew up with limited access to a technology that has since become ubiquitous.

Marie Antoinette had several adopted children.

  • Marie Antoinette and her children
Marie Antoinette and her children
Credit: © The Print Collector—Heritage Images/Alamy
Author Michael Nordine
March 17, 2026

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Marie Antoinette never said “Let them eat cake” about the people of France, but she might have said it about her adopted children — of which she had several. The Austrian-born queen of France had four biological children with King Louis XVI, only one of whom survived childhood, and adopted several others. 

The couple adopted Armand Gagné (born François-Michel Gagné) in 1776, when the boy was 5, after the queen’s carriage nearly ran him over and she learned he was an orphan. Jean Amilcar was born in 1781 in French Senegal, enslaved as a child, and given to Marie Antoinette as a gift; she freed, baptized, and adopted him.

Ernestine Lambriquet’s parents were servants at Versailles, which led to her being a playmate of the king and queen’s daughter Marie-Thérèse; after the girl’s mother died in 1788, she was also adopted by the monarchs. So, too, were Jeanne Louise Victoire (better known as Zoë) and her two older sisters, whose father was an usher for the king and who were orphaned and then adopted in 1790. Only Armand, Ernestine, and Zoë actually lived with Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, however — the rest were more akin to foster children whom the royal family supported financially.

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Marie Antoinette apologized to her executioner.

Marie Antoinette may have been out of touch with her people, but let it not be said that she was impolite. After being tried and found guilty of three charges (including high treason) by the Revolutionary Tribunal on October 16, 1793, she was sentenced to death by guillotine. After accidentally stepping on the foot of her executioner, Charles-Henri Sanson, while climbing the scaffold, she spoke her last words: “Pardonnez-moi, monsieur. Je ne l'ai pas fait exprès,” or “Pardon me, sir, I meant not to do it.” She was initially buried in an unmarked grave in Madeleine cemetery, but the remains of her and Louis XVI were exhumed and reburied at the Basilica of Saint-Denis in 1815, during the Bourbon Restoration.

The ‘Mona Lisa’ used to have eyebrows.

  • The “Mona Lisa” at the Louvre
The "Mona Lisa" at the Louvre
Credit: © Torval Mork/stock.adobe.com
Author Michael Nordine
March 24, 2026

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There’s a reason you’ve heard of a “Mona Lisa” smile but not “Mona Lisa” eyebrows: She doesn’t have any. The world’s most famous painting was created by Leonardo da Vinci at the beginning of the 16th century. That was, to put it mildly, a long time ago — long enough for the eyebrows that Leonardo originally painted to have faded, according to at least one expert. French engineer Pascal Cotte made a 250-megapixel scan of the portrait in 2007 and spent an estimated 3,000 hours analyzing his data after being allowed to use the Louvre’s laboratory, concluding that the painting originally included both brows and lashes.

People (especially women) have been plucking and shaving their eyebrows for thousands of years based on fashion trends, but that doesn’t appear to be the reason that the subject of the “Mona Lisa” — widely thought to be Lisa del Giocondo — is sans eyebrows in her portrait. Her husband is believed to have commissioned the painting, which Leonardo ultimately kept; some historians have speculated that he was simply never paid for his work, while others believe he became personally attached to it. In any case, Cotte also concluded that the woman’s face initially appeared wider, and her smile more expressive, in the drafting stages, with her famously sedate, evocative look coming later.

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The “Mona Lisa” wasn’t world-famous until it was stolen.

Though it’s always been well regarded, the painting’s level of fame was closer to its subject’s expression for the first 400 years of its existence. That changed forever when the portrait was stolen from the Louvre in 1911, a sensational crime that led to Pablo Picasso being suspected of carrying out the heist. He didn’t; it was actually a former Louvre employee named Vincenzo Perugia, who wanted to return the “Mona Lisa” to Italy. But the painting’s profile rose astronomically in the more than two years it was missing. By 1919, the El Paso Herald referred to the heist as “the most colossal theft of modern times,” and the painting had become the most colossal artwork of its time.

Men used to wear corsets.

  • Men’s corset advertisement, 1880
Men's corset advertisement, 1880
Credit: Marcus Harrison - adverts/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Sarah Anne Lloyd
October 10, 2024

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The classic lace-up, waist-cinching corset is endlessly versatile and an absolute mainstay of any Renaissance fair outfit. The historical garment is generally thought of as women’s wear — but it wasn’t always that way. During England’s Regency era at the turn of the 19th century — a setting you may be familiar with from Jane Austen novels or, more recently, the Netflix series Bridgerton — men’s fashion moved away from powdered wigs and elaborate, stiff fabrics. Dandyism came into style in Europe, and the most fashionable gentlemen went for a sleek, streamlined look as ornamentation took a backseat to precise tailoring. Collared linen shirts, fitted trousers, and waistcoats were all the rage.

Just like how some shapewear can make a dress drape just so, the cut of a bespoke jacket and breeches could be complemented by the right corset. To get the exact shape they were after, well-coiffed men would not only wear corsets, but also add padding around their chest and shoulders. The famously plump George IV was known to wear a corset, too — one almost made him faint at his 1821 coronation.

Exaggerated silhouettes remained in fashion until the 1830s, but corsets weren’t necessary for the increasingly understated mainstream menswear of the 1840s. While dandy culture never fully went out of style — famed dandies such as Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde rose to prominence after 1840 — the Regency-era masculine corset did. 

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Suffragettes popularized the union suit.

Even if you’re not familiar with the name, you’ve probably seen a union suit before: It’s that one-piece long underwear with a butt flap. It’s typically associated with rugged working men of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but it actually has its roots in the mid-1800s women’s suffrage movement. Women eager to ditch restrictive undergarments such as corsets, hoop skirts, and bustles tried switching to a flannel ensemble sometimes called a “chemiloon.” The legs reached down to the ankle, eliminating the need for garters and stockings. Some models even had buttons for attaching layers of light skirts that could replace heavy petticoats. Although they were in use much earlier, the first of these garments was patented in 1868 as the “emancipation union under flannel,” as it “emancipated” women from restrictive clothing. Later versions were advertised as thriftier and more hygienic alternatives to traditional women’s fashion. The garments proved controversial at the time for women, but they were also very comfortable and easy on the wallet — so when a men’s version emerged, it was extremely popular.

One of the most popular breakfast cereals was invented by accident.

  • Bowl of Corn Flakes
Bowl of Corn Flakes
Credit: Hanasaki/ iStock
Author Timothy Ott
October 3, 2024

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Well before the name Kellogg became synonymous with milk-infused breakfast fare and animated tigers, it was associated with health. While serving as director of the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, physician John Harvey Kellogg earned widespread fame in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for his efforts to cure a range of illnesses. To treat digestive problems, Kellogg developed a concoction called Granula in the 1870s that was made from wheat flour, oatmeal, and cornmeal, baked at high temperatures, and crumbled into tiny pieces. Though it was a hit with patients, the food was a little too similar to what is now considered the first breakfast cereal, the identically named Granula created by nutritionist James Caleb Jackson in 1863, fueling a lawsuit that forced Kellogg to change his product’s name to Granola.

Around 1894, Kellogg and his associates, which included his wife, dietitian Ella Eaton Kellogg, and younger brother Will Kellogg, tried developing a new flaked cereal made from wheat dough. While the exact origin is unclear, several sources point to one batch of dough being left out longer than planned. This slightly moldy but fermented batch produced large, delightfully crispy flakes when baked, and the team debuted their creation, dubbed Granose, to a strong reception in the summer of 1895. Of course, the health-minded Dr. Kellogg refused to allow any sugar in this cereal; it was only after former patient C.W. Post hit it big with the 1897 launch of Grape-Nuts, a flavored spinoff of the Granola he saw produced in the sanitarium’s kitchen, that Will devised the sweeter, corn-based version of Granose that became ubiquitous on American kitchen tables as Corn Flakes.

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The Kellogg brothers sued each other over the brand name.

From the 1880s until 1906, Will Kellogg quietly managed the Battle Creek Sanitarium’s operations under the critical eye of his domineering older brother. After the younger sibling finally achieved success with his Kellogg’s Toasted Corn Flake Company, he was none too thrilled when his elder relation began selling his own cereals under the label Kellogg’s Food Company of Battle Creek. Will subsequently filed a lawsuit for copyright infringement in August 1910, prompting a countersuit from his brother. Although they initially settled out of court in 1911, Will reignited the legal furor a few years later when he began marketing bran cereals in direct competition with those created by his brother. However, a Michigan judge determined the Kellogg trademark belonged to Will’s company, a decision upheld by the Michigan Supreme Court in 1920, ensuring the family’s cereal glory would thenceforth be the sole domain of the younger brother. 

The tradition of using three names dates back to ancient Rome.

  • Pantheon of ancient Rome
Pantheon of ancient Rome
Credit: Robert Ray/ iStock
Author Sarah Anne Lloyd
August 15, 2024

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Just like most Americans have a first, middle, and last name, many ancient Romans also used three names, especially upper-class men. (Women typically had two names, and enslaved people were called by just one.) But these ancient monikers weren’t a direct parallel to how we use middle names today. Roman full names started with a praenomen, or personal name, which often came from numbers or months, possibly noting the time or order of birth (such as “Quintus” or “Sextus”). The middle name, nomen gentilicium, came from a person’s gens, a broad family clan based on a patriarchal line. Names then ended with a cognomen, which could reflect a smaller family group or reference a specific attribute, such as a big head, pug nose, or left-handedness. These nicknames were passed down to children, and throughout a person’s life, they could have more than one cognomen.

Some Roman men, particularly aristocrats, had more than three names — often because they were adopted or accepted an inheritance, linking them to additional family members. One senator in the second century CE had a whopping 38 names, six of which came from his father. By the fifth century CE, multiple names had mostly fallen out of use, and after that Roman citizens typically went by just one name. Middle names came back into vogue in Renaissance Italy, when families would give their children Catholic saint names in hopes the saints would protect them. This paved the way for middle names as we know them today, although the practice didn’t catch on in Britain or the United States until the 19th century.

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Pablo Picasso had around 15 names.

The common moniker “Pablo Picasso” is actually only a small fraction of the famous painter’s full name. When he was born in 1881 in Andalusia, Spain, his family gave him around 15 names (sources vary), taken both from saints and members of his own family. The exact order is unclear, but his full name was along the lines of Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Crispín Crispiniano María de los Remedios de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz Picasso. His first name, Pablo, came from an uncle who had died a few years before he was born. It actually took a while for Picasso to settle on which names to use in his signature. He signed his earliest paintings P. Ruiz, then P. Ruiz Picasso, then P.R. Picasso, before settling on Picasso. 

It took the Oxford English Dictionary editors five years just to reach the word ‘ant.’ 

  • Well-worn Oxford Dictionary
Well-worn Oxford Dictionary
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Author Sarah Anne Lloyd
October 31, 2024

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The Oxford English Dictionary, also known as simply the OED, is a massive reference book containing not just words — including obsolete ones — and their definitions, but also detailed information on the words’ history and usage. The project was born in 1857, when the Philological Society of London, a group dedicated to the history of literature and words, established a committee to collect words that didn’t appear in existing dictionaries at the time. Their goal was to document the English language going back to Anglo-Saxon times, which ended around 1000 CE — so quite a lot of territory to cover.

Work started in earnest in 1879, after Oxford University Press signed on to finance and publish the dictionary, at the time called the New English Dictionary (NED). The staff buckled down and got to work reading and researching; editor James Murray estimated the dictionary would take about 10 years to compile. In 1884, after working on the dictionary for five years, the first fascicle (meaning a part of a book) came out. It only covered the words “a” through “ant.”

The project was clearly more ambitious than the Philological Society had originally imagined. Murray started working on the dictionary full time, and over the next several years he was joined by another editor and two co-editors. The last fascicle was published on April 19, 1928, nearly 50 years after work began. The original plan was for the dictionary to contain 6,400 pages over four volumes; ultimately, the first edition of the NED contained 12 volumes with 15,487 pages, covering a whopping 414,825 words. Today, the OED continues to document the growing English language, and includes more than 600,000 entries, with new words and meanings added regularly.

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J.R.R. Tolkien worked on the Oxford English Dictionary.

You can, in some small part, thank Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien for the Oxford English Dictionary — or maybe you can thank the OED for The Lord of the Rings, since etymology features so heavily in Tolkien’s epic trilogy. A 27-year-old Tolkien joined the OED project in 1919 and spent around 18 months on staff, focusing on words beginning with the letter “W” (including “wasp” and “walnut”). The author went on to coin words that appeared in later editions of the dictionary, including “hobbit,” “eucatastrophe,” and “dwarves” as a plural form of “dwarf.”

Men have been shaving since the Stone Age.

  • Razor-tweezer, circa 1550–1295 BCE
Razor-tweezer, circa 1550–1295 BCE
Credit: Penta Springs Limited/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Michael Nordine
September 25, 2024

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Long before the age of electric and five-blade razors, men still felt compelled to shave. The practice is so old, in fact, that it dates back to the Stone Age, roughly 100,000 years ago. The planet was quite cold at the time; somewhat counterintuitively, this made facial hair a liability rather than a way of keeping warm. A long, damp beard doesn’t exactly feel good in the rain or snow, and in extreme enough conditions it could trap enough moisture to freeze against the skin and cause frostbite.

This necessitated the first instances of shaving, though our ancestors’ methods were unsurprisingly primitive. Lacking more advanced tools, the first people brave enough to maintain their facial hair did so with seashells that essentially functioned as tweezers — they simply pulled their hair out. They later moved on to using obsidian shards, which sounds less painful and more effective. Copper razors appeared in ancient Egypt between 2686 BCE and 2181 BCE, with some featuring decorative flourishes such as goose heads and hippo-shaped handles, suggesting this more primitive method of shaving lasted longer than most of us would like to imagine.

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The Stone Age was the longest period in human history.

It isn’t even close, either, as the Stone Age began an estimated 2.6 million years ago and ended about 5,000 years ago. The period has been described as the first 99% of human history. Homo sapiens weren’t the only hominids around during this era, as the now-extinct Neanderthals and Denisovans were still alive at the time as well. Divided into three periods — Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic — the Stone Age came to an end when humans first started working with metal and began making tools and weapons out of bronze. It was followed by the Bronze Age and then the Iron Age.

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