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Easter was banned in early America.

Public worship at Plymouth by the Pilgrims
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Author Michael Nordine
March 26, 2026

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“They for whom all days are holy can have no holiday,” the Puritans liked to say, which helps explain why Easter was banned in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. (It also wasn’t widely celebrated in other parts of colonial America, including Jamestown, where it was observed with little fanfare.) The Bible didn’t mention holidays, the Puritans reasoned, so even one like Easter — which commemorates the resurrection of Jesus Christ and is perhaps the holiest day in all Christianity — was verboten. 

The Puritans likened such celebrations to paganism, to which they wanted to remove all references. Christmas was banned alongside Easter in 1659 in Massachusetts, with the law stating that people caught observing the holidays “either by forbearing of labour, feasting, or any other way … shall pay for every such offence five shillings, as a fine to the county.”

The Puritans first arrived in New England in the early 17th century, settling around what’s now Boston. They believed that only “the elect” would be chosen for salvation and that most people would be damned, leading them to be as stringent as possible in their religious practices. Because Easter is always observed on a Sunday, banning it caused a problem for preachers delivering sermons on what would have been Easter Sunday — a pickle often solved by simply talking about something else.

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No one knows where the word “Easter” comes from.

There's a common theory that Easter is named after the Anglo-Saxon goddess Ēostre, a pagan deity associated with dawn, spring, and fertility. But that association is likely a myth. In fact, the roots of the English name for this Christian holiday remain unknown. It's possible the word comes from the Latin phrase in albis, which was used to describe the start of spring and evolved into eostarum in Old High German.

The O.K. Corral gunfight didn’t take place at the O.K. Corral.

O.K. Corral site in Arizona
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Author Michael Nordine
November 20, 2025

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A catchy name has a way of sticking — even when it’s not entirely accurate. Presumably because “Gunfight in an Alley Behind C.S. Fly’s Photography Studio” was too ungainly a moniker, one of the most iconic events of the Old West is known by another name: Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. 

Lasting just 30 seconds on October 26, 1881, in Tombstone, Arizona Territory, the brief shootout between lawmen and outlaws has been enshrined as a vital part of Americana: Good guys on one side, bad guys on the other, and justice prevailing in the end. Yet as is the case with a lot of folklore, many details have been flubbed over time — including, notably, the fact that the shootout didn’t actually take place at the O.K. Corral, but rather down the block behind a photography studio on Fremont Street near Third Street.

Pitting lawmen brothers Wyatt, Virgil, and Morgan Earp and their friend Doc Holliday against outlaws Ike and Billy Clanton, Tom and Frank McLaury (also brothers), and Billy Claiborne, the brief fracas ended in the deaths of Billy Clanton and both McLaurys. The gunfight was preceded by a number of violent run-ins between the two groups, who were battling for control of Tombstone. The Earp brothers and Holliday, all of whom survived (though only Wyatt Earp was uninjured), were later charged with murder but found not guilty, with a Tombstone judge ruling they had been “fully justified in committing these homicides.” They don’t call it the Wild West for nothing.

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The California gold rush wasn’t America’s first gold rush.

Nor was it the second: Half a century before 300,000 prospectors descended upon California in search of riches, a boy named Conrad Reed discovered gold in his father’s field in Cabarrus County, North Carolina, in 1799, without realizing what it was. The family used what turned out to be a 17-pound gold nugget as a doorstop for three years until a jeweler identified its true nature and set off America’s first gold rush. The second rush was in Georgia in 1828. Because it took place on Cherokee land and led to the forced relocation of thousands of Cherokee people, it became known as the Great Intrusion. 

Ancient Greeks had no single word for the color blue.

Athens, ancient Greece
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Author Bess Lovejoy
March 26, 2026

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Back in ancient Greece, there was no single word that neatly captured the hue of the sky, the sea, sapphire, and blueberries all at once. But that’s less strange than it might sound. If you think about it, the English word “blue” covers a wide range of shades, from the palest robin’s egg to the deepest navy. 

While it’s sometimes reported that ancient Greeks had no word at all for this part of the color spectrum, they actually used several terms that correspond to what we call blue, including kyaneos for darker blue shades and glaukos for pale and mid-toned grayish blues and greens. However, these words could also refer to other hues and were more dependent on context than our modern color categories.

Plenty of languages divide colors differently than English. Russian distinguishes between lighter blues (goluboy) and darker blues (siniy), and modern Japanese has a specific term for light blue (mizu). And while it’s sometimes said that people in ancient Greece couldn’t see the color blue, they definitely could — assuming normal vision, of course. The eyes of ancient Greek people worked as well as ours, and they knew how to dye and paint with blue pigments. 

However, it’s true that blue was far less important symbolically in the ancient Greek world than red, black, yellow, and white. Blue tones generally only appear as background colors in Greek art, when they appear at all. But the Greeks did hold blue in higher regard than the Romans did; the latter considered it a color of barbarians and mourning. (Having blue eyes was considered practically a character defect.) Imagine how surprised they’d be to discover that today, blue is one of the most popular colors in the world.

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English had no word for the color orange until the 16th century.

For most of history, the color orange didn’t have its own name in English. Before the 16th century, English speakers typically described the hue as “yellow-red” or simply “red.” The word “orange” originally referred only to the fruit, and its linguistic journey began with the Sanskrit nāraṅga, the name for the orange tree.

As the fruit spread west through trade, the word became the Arabic nāranj and eventually entered European languages. English lost the initial “n” through a linguistic shift called metanalysis, in which sounds migrate between words — the same process that turned “a napron” into “an apron” and “a nuncle” into “an uncle.”

By the 1300s, “orange” was widely used across Europe to name the fruit. But according to the Oxford English Dictionary, English speakers didn’t begin using it to describe the color until the 1500s, often in reference to fabrics and clothing. Before that, the color existed as a unique hue — but it didn’t have a name of its own.

A Civil War battle was briefly paused so that soldiers could watch a fistfight.

Civil War cavalry duel
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Author Sarah Anne Lloyd
June 17, 2024

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In one of the more peculiar moments of the Civil War, an entire battle came to a screeching halt so that everybody — Union and Confederate soldiers alike — could watch a fistfight. A Confederate soldier named John H. Worsham recounted the incident, which took place on May 5, 1864, on Saunders Field in Virginia during the Battle of the Wilderness, in his 1912 memoir One of Jackson’s Foot Cavalry. Worsham wrote that a small ditch ran down the center of the battlefield that was first used by Union soldiers to shelter them from enemy fire. When the soldiers vacated the ditch, one of them stayed behind. Soon after, a single Confederate soldier jumped into the ditch to find shelter — and it wasn’t long before the two soldiers noticed each other. 

After the men exchanged some words, they decided to have what Worshom called a “regular fist and skull fight,” in which the winner would take the loser prisoner. The soldiers took their duel to a road midway through the battle lines, and both sides stopped fighting and rushed closer to get a better view. Ultimately, at least according to Worsham, the Union soldier lost and let himself be taken prisoner — but bear in mind that the tale comes from a book of Confederate, not Union, war stories.

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Harriet Tubman led a Union raid that freed 750 enslaved people.

Harriet Tubman is perhaps the most famous “conductor” of the Underground Railroad, a network of people who helped enslaved people escape to freedom in the 1850s. But during the Civil War, she worked as a nurse and a spy. On June 1, 1863, after gathering intelligence from enslaved people about Confederate torpedoes along the Combahee River, she led 150 Black soldiers in a military operation against the plantations of wealthy secessionists. Tubman guided three gunboats down the river and destroyed several prominent plantations. Along the way, her boats picked up around 750 enslaved people and brought them to freedom. She was the first woman to lead a major military operation in the United States.

Early shoes made no distinction between left and right feet.

Shoes, circa 1650
Credit: © Penta Springs Limited/Alamy
Author Michael Nordine
March 26, 2026

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Like a lot of life-changing products, shoes are much more precise now than when they were first brought to market. In fact, it wasn’t until 1860 that left and right shoes were made en masse after centuries of a different approach. From the 16th century until the Industrial Revolution, nearly all shoes were “straights” made to be worn on either foot. 

Of course, this wasn’t because cobblers and consumers were under the false impression that their feet were identical. It’s just that straights were more economical and easier to produce than mirrored shoes — something of a one-size-fits-all philosophy. Right and left shoes date back to the ancient world, including the Romans, but “straights” were preferred in the leadup to the Industrial Revolution, whose many factories then made it easier to mass produce lefts and rights.

Footwear has existed in one form or another for at least 50,000 years, since people first began protecting their feet from frigid conditions; footwear with actual soles is believed to date back around 40,000 years. The Fort Rock sandals, which were discovered in a cave in Oregon in 1938, are the oldest known shoes in the world at more than 9,000 years old. 

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The world’s oldest leather shoe was discovered in a cave.

Like the oldest known footwear, the world’s oldest leather shoe was found in a cave — this one in Armenia. (Older shoes, including the Fort Rock sandals, were made of cheaper material such as shredded sagebrush bark.) The aptly named Areni-1 shoe is approximately 5,500 years old and was found in the Areni-1 cave, which is located in the Vayots Dzor province in southeastern Armenia. Thanks to the cave’s cool, dry conditions and several layers of sheep dung keeping it in pristine condition for several millennia, the one-piece shoe was nearly perfectly preserved (including intact laces) when researchers discovered it in 2008. 

During World War II, people ate mock bananas made from parsnips.

Little girl eating a banana, 1945
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Author Bess Lovejoy
March 26, 2026

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In 1940, as Britain endured the Blitz and struggled under strict food rationing, one unexpected loss loomed large in the national imagination: the banana. Before the war, the island imported roughly 20 million tons of food a year, including most of its fruit. But when German naval attacks threatened supply routes — and refrigerated ships were diverted to military use — the Minister of Food ordered a complete halt to banana imports. For many children, who had grown up with the fruit as a sweet staple, the ban felt especially cruel.

Enter Marguerite Patten, a home economist hired by the Ministry of Food to teach Brits how to cook under wartime constraints. Patten became famous for her “mock” recipes — mock sausages made with lentils, mock oyster soup built on artichokes, and, notably, mock bananas.

Her substitute relied on a humble root vegetable: the parsnip. Boiled or roasted until soft, then mashed with sugar and a splash of artificial banana essence, the mixture took on a surprisingly banana-like texture and taste (though it was still far from the real thing). Some thrifty cooks even tinted the result yellow. Children who had never tasted a real banana often believed the ruse; adults tended to be less convinced. One wartime diarist recalled her husband eagerly devouring the treat — until he learned the truth and refused to eat it again.

When the first postwar shipment of bananas — 5 million of them — arrived in 1945, the country staged a celebratory parade. Children were the first allowed a taste. After years of ersatz fruit fashioned from parsnips, the real thing was nothing short of magical.

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The hit song “Yes! We Have No Bananas” grew out of a real banana-killing fungus.

During World War II, when Britain banned banana imports and rationing took hold, the jaunty novelty tune “Yes! We Have No Bananas” enjoyed a surge of popularity. Its cheerful absurdity suited a moment when real bananas were nowhere in sight. But the tune actually dates to 1922 — and may itself have sprung from an earlier banana shortage. According to popular lore, New York songwriters Frank Silver and Irving Cohn wrote the song after stopping at a greengrocery run by a Greek immigrant. When they asked for bananas, the proprietor apologized by saying: “Yes! We have no bananas today.” (Reportedly, the greengrocer answered the beginning of all questions with “Yes!”) Introduced by Eddie Cantor in the Broadway revue Make It Snappy, the song became a runaway hit, topping the charts for five weeks and later recorded by artists such as the Muppets. The shortage itself was much less fun. The world’s preferred banana at the time, the Gros Michel (aka the “Big Mike”), was being ravaged by Panama disease, a soilborne fungus that attacked the plant’s roots and quickly spread through genetically identical plantations. From the 1910s through the mid-20th century, the disease devastated Big Mike crops and ultimately ended its use as an export crop. The Cavendish banana eventually replaced the Gros Michel, but it, too, now faces its own fungal threat, Tropical Race 4, a successor strain to the original species behind Panama disease. So while “Yes! We Have No Bananas” began as a joke about a local shortage, its punchline was rooted in a very real agricultural menace — one that continues to haunt banana growers today.

The U.S. government paid farmers not to grow crops.

Farmers wait in line to receive AAA checks
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Author Bess Lovejoy
March 24, 2026

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In the early 1930s, American farmers faced a crisis — not of scarcity, but of surplus. Years of increased production (encouraged by high demand and new technology), combined with the economic collapse of the Great Depression, caused U.S. crop prices to plunge. Farmers were growing more and more food but earning less and less for it.

The federal government’s solution was counterintuitive. Under the 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) — part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal — the government paid farmers to produce less. The idea was simple: Reduce supply, and prices would rise. 

Farmers were offered subsidies to leave portions of their land unplanted. In some cases, the government went further, overseeing the destruction of existing crops and livestock. Millions of acres of cotton were plowed under and millions of animals slaughtered, all in an effort to shrink the glut of agricultural goods flooding the market.

The policy did help push prices upward, but it also sparked outrage. At a time when many Americans were unemployed and hungry, the spectacle of food being destroyed — and the fact that farmers were being paid not to grow it — struck many as deeply unjust. 

Parts of the original law were ruled unconstitutional in 1936, but a revised version that passed in 1938 kept many of its core ideas. Farmers continued to receive payments for limiting production, sometimes by leaving land fallow or following crop quotas, although efforts were framed more around soil conservation in the wake of the Dust Bowl. (Years of intensive plowing, combined with drought, had stripped the Great Plains of its topsoil, demonstrating the need for more careful soil management.)

Variations on the idea behind the AAA persist today, including programs that pay farmers to take environmentally sensitive land out of cultivation. What started as a widely criticized policy has, over time, come to include ideas that align with sound ecological practices and help ensure there are good crops for generations to come. 

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During the Great Depression, farmers dumped milk in protest.

In the early 1930s, American dairy farmers faced a grim reality — milk was abundant, but prices had collapsed. As the Great Depression deepened, demand fell and supply remained high, pushing prices to unsustainable lows. In Iowa and Wisconsin, farmers were paid as little as 2 cents per quart, far below the cost of production.

Frustrated and desperate, many farmers turned to protest. Beginning in 1931, groups such as the Farmers’ Holiday Association organized strikes across the Midwest, urging farmers to withhold their products from the market. When that failed to raise prices, a few took more dramatic action: dumping milk onto roads, ditches, or fields rather than selling it at a loss.

The protests were meant to reduce supply and force higher prices, but they also drew public attention to the crisis facing rural America. In some cases, striking farmers stopped delivery trucks or blocked roads, escalating tensions between producers and authorities. The spectacle of milk being discarded while many Americans struggled to afford food highlighted a central paradox of the Depression — not a lack of resources, but a breakdown in the system that distributed them. The crisis helped spur federal intervention, including New Deal programs such as the AAA.

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

Statue of Genghis Khan
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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
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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
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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.

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