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In the Victorian era, bridesmaids often wore white.

  • Victorian-era wedding party
Victorian-era wedding party
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Author Sarah Anne Lloyd

June 26, 2025

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There are few wedding guest gaffes more serious than wearing white. In Western culture, that color is traditionally reserved for the bride, so even the plainest white dress can be considered upstaging. And yet, in England’s Victorian era, when etiquette was of the utmost importance, bridesmaids often wore white, thanks to the influence of the queen herself.

Queen Victoria is often credited with popularizing the white wedding dress in the Western world, after wearing one for her 1840 nuptials when she married Prince Albert. But it wasn’t just Victoria who wore white — her bridesmaids did too, in dresses the monarch helped design.

That said, the queen didn’t invent the idea of the white gown for brides: White, especially with silver, was a popular color choice among those wealthy enough to buy an impractical dress for the occasion. But Victoria’s wedding fashion, combined with the burgeoning Industrial Revolution lowering the price of many garments, the advent of photography, and the emergence of women’s magazines, made both white gowns and white bridesmaids dresses popular across class lines. In the following decades, bridesmaids often dressed in a less-extravagant version of the bride’s outfit, complete with a (shorter) veil. 

Over time, new, vibrant dyes came on the market at prices that non-wealthy people could afford, and brides were eager to add these new hues to their wedding party. By the 1940s, white was traditionally reserved for the bride, and most bridesmaids were wearing other colors.

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White wedding dresses used to represent wealth, not purity.

Even before the trend went mainstream, white and silver dresses were a common choice among wealthy brides in the 18th century, but the colors had nothing to do with purity and everything to do with extravagance. Light-colored dresses were costly and impossible to keep clean, so wearing one signaled money and status. As white dresses became affordable to more brides, the association with purity was retroactively applied by women’s magazines. In 1849, an article in Godey’s Lady’s Book claimed that white dresses were “an emblem of the purity and innocence of girlhood, and the unsullied heart she now yields to the chosen one.”

There was an onion craze on the stock market in the 1950s.

  • Floor traders at the Chicago Board of Trade
Floor traders at the Chicago Board of Trade
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Author Michael Nordine

June 30, 2025

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You can buy and sell all sorts of commodities on the stock market, from gold and oil to soybeans and cattle. One thing you can’t trade, however, is the humble onion, and there’s a good reason for it: The vegetable was once the subject of a stock market scam. It took place in 1955, when onion futures became the Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s most traded commodity and two investors saw a get-rich-quick scheme in the making. Sam Siegel and Vincent Kosuga bought 30 million pounds of onions, a full 98% of Chicago’s stock, as well as onion futures. They then set a plan in motion to short sell the vegetables, which is when investors buy a stock they think (and hope) will decrease in value, sell it on the open market, and then buy it again for the lower price. They then profit from the difference between the sale price and purchase price.

Siegel and Kosuga didn’t just think that onion prices would drop — they knew it. They flooded the market with their massive inventory, dropping the price from $2.75 a bag to just 10 cents a bag. They made millions but bankrupted countless farmers in the process, leading to congressional hearings and the 1958 passage of the Onion Futures Act, which made it illegal to trade the pungent allium on the stock market. To this day, onions are the only banned agricultural trading commodity in the United States — not that anyone’s tearing up over it.

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The London Stock Exchange was the largest stock exchange until World War I.

Founded in 1801, the London Stock Exchange is among the oldest in the world. It also used to be the largest in terms of market capitalization, a position it held until World War I. As it became clear that war was going to break out in Europe, a financial crisis forced the LSE to stay shut for five months beginning in July 1914. That crisis extended far beyond England, of course — around 50 countries experienced bank runs and stock market slumps. The New York Stock Exchange also closed for about four months, finally reopening on November 28, and eclipsed the LSE by the end of the war to become the world’s largest stock exchange. It still holds that title today, though London remains the biggest in Europe. 

Joan of Arc inspired the bob haircut.

  • Joan of Arc, 1429
Joan of Arc, 1429
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Author Rachel Gresh

June 30, 2025

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A 15th-century teenage war heroine may be an unlikely fashion muse, yet the French martyr Joan of Arc inspired the bob haircut that was trendy throughout the 20th century. Joan first decided to crop her hair and don men’s clothing to hide from danger during a journey to see Charles VII, the dauphin of France, believing she had received divine guidance that would help save France during the Hundred Years’ War against England. At just age 17, she helped lead her country to victory at the Siege of Orléans in 1429, for which she became famous. She is often depicted in knight’s armor with a cropped, pageboy-style hairdo in scenes from the battle. 

The French heroine returned to the spotlight when the Catholic Church canonized her as St. Joan of Arc in the early 20th century. Influenced by Joan’s popularity, renowned Paris hairdresser Antoni Cierplikowski cut the first “bob” hairdo in 1909, citing Joan as his inspiration. The cut transformed the idea of cropped hair for women, making it a fashionable look for glamorous Hollywood stars — albeit controversial, especially at first. Long hair had long been seen as a symbol of femininity, and it was considered rebellious and even scandalous to expose the nape of the neck. Famous ballroom dancer Irene Castle was among the first to adopt the look, cropping her tresses in 1915. Actress Louise “Lulu” Brooks further popularized the style in the 1929 silent film Pandora’s Box, which made the “Lulu bob” world famous. Jazz Age “flappers” also adopted the new ’do, emphasizing their break from societal norms. Bobs continued their reign throughout the 20th century, as seen on some of the most influential women of the era, from actresses Elizabeth Taylor and Audrey Hepburn to First Lady Jackie Kennedy.

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Barbers doubled as surgeons in medieval Europe.

Cutting hair and performing surgery were considered similar crafts during the Middle Ages, both requiring a steady hand with a blade. In 1540, King Henry VIII of England even issued a decree ordering the Company of the Barbers and the Fellowship of Surgeons to form one unified trade guild, the Company of Barber-Surgeons, considered masters in medicine and grooming. Barbers began assisting with medical procedures that required blades, especially bloodletting, after the 14th-century bubonic plague dramatically decreased the number of qualified surgeons throughout Europe. Eventually, barber-surgeons performed dental extractions, minor surgeries, and even amputations. The profession was especially common in France, where Ambroise Paré — often regarded as the father of modern surgery — began his career as a barber-surgeon.

Johnny Appleseed was a real person.

  • Drawing of Johnny Appleseed, 1862
Drawing of Johnny Appleseed, 1862
Credit: Library of Congress/ Corbis Historical via Getty Images
Author Timothy Ott

June 30, 2025

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According to legend, Johnny Appleseed wandered the Midwestern frontier in the 1800s with a tin pot on his head and nothing on his feet, scattering apple seeds from a sack and winning over settlers and Indigenous peoples alike with his joie de vivre. It all sounds too far-fetched to be real, but unlike Paul Bunyan — another celebrated frontiersman said to have wielded his axe in a similar time and place — Johnny Appleseed’s legend is rooted in truth.

Though there are few established facts from his lifetime, historians believe Johnny Appleseed was born John Chapman in Massachusetts a few months before the opening shots of the American Revolution, and he relocated to Western Pennsylvania in the 1790s. By the early 1800s, he was living a nomadic life throughout Ohio that consisted of planting nurseries, trading seeds and saplings with settlers, and preaching the word of the New Church, a Christian denomination inspired by the writings of Swedish scientist Emanuel Swedenborg. 

Along the way, he picked up his famous nickname, while making an impression on communities with his alleged refusal to harm other living creatures and his strange garb; witnesses claimed he wore a cloth sack with holes cut out for his arms and head. After moving into Indiana in the 1830s, Chapman died from what was most likely pneumonia around Fort Wayne in 1845.

The combination of the unusual lifestyle and clear eccentricities made Chapman’s story ripe for exaggeration. W.D. Haley’s article “Johnny Appleseed: A Pioneer Hero” in the November 1871 edition of Harper’s Monthly Magazine championed him as a kinder and gentler frontiersman who easily bridged the worlds of the Natives and settlers, while poems such as Lydia Maria Child’s “Apple-Seed John” from 1881 painted its subject as a saintly figure who walked the earth solely to grow food for the good of humankind. By the time Disney included a segment on Johnny Appleseed in 1948’s Melody Time, the image of the barefoot, tin pot-hatted do-gooder was here to stay.

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Johnny Appleseed's apples were mostly grown for hard cider.

Among the seedier elements of Johnny Appleseed's story that were whitewashed for general audiences is the fact that his crops were primarily grown for alcoholic cider instead of eating. This was partly due to the biological nature of apple seeds: Many trees grown from seedlings will produce inedible apples, as opposed to the juicy varieties we enjoy today that spring from the horticultural process of grafting. There were also nutritional benefits to drinking cider, as sanitary drinking water was often absent from frontier life. However, even in Appleseed's heyday there was a temperance movement afoot that sought to dissuade farmers from turning their wares into alcoholic cider. Not surprisingly, this pressure worked to only limited effect, and yet the widespread hard cider craze perpetuated by Appleseed's dealings fizzled out in the years after his death, as the combination of a vanishing frontier and the influx of German immigrants helped point drinking-inclined Americans toward beer instead.

Richard Nixon helped fund his first political campaign by playing poker.

  • Nixon standing behind mic
Nixon standing behind mic
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Author Bennett Kleinman

June 30, 2025

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Before he was president, Richard Nixon was such a prolific poker player that he amassed enough winnings to help fund his very first political campaign. In January 1944, Nixon was stationed in the South Pacific while serving in the U.S. Navy, and it was during this time that he became something of a card shark, though it’s rumored he had no idea how to even play poker upon his arrival at the base. Nixon quickly took an interest in learning the game and spent hours studying strategy before putting his money at risk. His hard work proved fruitful, and the future president raked in around $40 to $50 each night (roughly $700 to $876 today). One fellow serviceman noted that he once saw Nixon “bluff a lieutenant commander out of $1,500 with a pair of deuces.” 

Nixon continued to win big before returning stateside in July. Upon arriving home, he claimed to have won $8,000 (around $140,000 today) from his various poker exploits, though some estimates put the winnings closer to $6,800. Either way, the number was quite substantial. In 1946, Nixon decided to enter the world of politics and run for Congress in California’s 12th District. A political newcomer, he turned to his poker savings as a way to jump-start his campaign, using the winnings to fund approximately 20% of its total costs. This choice paid off, as Nixon easily coasted to victory over incumbent Jerry Voorhis, marking the beginning of his political climb.

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FDR and Nixon are the only people to appear on a major presidential ticket five times.

In the history of U.S. presidential elections, two candidates have appeared on a national major party ticket on five separate occasions: Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard Nixon. FDR first ran on the Democratic ticket in 1920 as the vice presidential candidate, though he and presidential nominee James M. Cox ultimately came up short. Twelve years later, Roosevelt was nominated as the Democratic presidential candidate, and went on to win his first of four consecutive elections — the most of any U.S. president. Nixon, for his part, appeared on his first national ticket as a Republican in 1952, serving as the vice presidential nominee alongside Dwight D. Eisenhower. He successfully won two terms as vice president before unsuccessfully running for president against John F. Kennedy in 1960. He was nominated for president again in 1968, winning that election as well as his reelection campaign in 1972.

John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Monroe all died on July 4.

  • Adams, Jefferson & Monroe
Adams, Jefferson & Monroe
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Author Adam Levine

June 30, 2025

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Since 1777, the Fourth of July has been celebrated as the day the United States of America formally broke from Great Britain and became an independent nation. It’s a pretty stunning coincidence, then, that the day of the nation’s birth is also marked by the deaths of three separate founding fathers and early U.S. presidents: Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Monroe. More unlikely still, Adams and Jefferson died just hours apart on the exact same day: July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of American independence. 

The fact that America’s second, third, and fifth presidents all died on the same day has sparked a certain degree of speculation. In eulogies for Jefferson, mourners suggested he had willed himself to survive through illness until reaching the significant 50th-anniversary milestone of the nation’s independence. (According to various people who were with him when he died, on the night of July 3 Jefferson said, “Is it the Fourth?” or a similar phrase.) Statesman Daniel Webster suggested divine intervention had played a role in the timing, to signal to the world that the United States was favored by heavenly providence. Others have offered a more sinister theory: that doctors deliberately prolonged Jefferson’s life until July Fourth and even had a hand in determining Adams’ final day, making sure that it fell on the historically significant date. Whatever the explanation, the coincidence has become woven into the history and mythology of the birth of the United States.

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John Adams’ last words were “Thomas Jefferson survives.”

Throughout their political careers, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were close political colleagues, and sometimes fierce rivals. The two men met at the Continental Congress in 1775 and worked together on the committee to draft the Declaration of Independence. Their shared commitment to American independence sparked a close friendship, but that friendship was tested by the different visions the two men had for the future of the United States. Jefferson was an ardent defender of states’ rights, while Adams believed that the nation should be led by a strong central government. This fundamental disagreement in their politics led to a falling out, and after Jefferson defeated Adams in the presidential election of 1800, the two founding fathers didn’t speak to each other for 11 years. The tension lasted for the rest of their lives, though they were able to rekindle their friendship and begin speaking again. When Adams died on July 4, 1826, his last words were reported to be, “Thomas Jefferson survives.” Ironically, though Adams didn’t know it, Jefferson had died just hours earlier that same day.

A volcanic eruption in 1815 caused the “year without a summer.”

  • Eruption of Tambora
Eruption of Tambora
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Author Michael Nordine

June 30, 2025

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The recent volcanic eruption in Iceland was certainly disruptive, but it pales in comparison to the blast that caused the “year without a summer.” That eruption took place on Indonesia’s Mount Tambora in April 1815. The explosion ejected mass amounts of sulfur dioxide, ash, and dust into the atmosphere, blocking sunlight and plunging the global temperature several degrees lower, resulting in 1816 being the coldest year in some 250 years. In part because of the volcano, Europe and North America were subjected to unusually cold, wet conditions that summer, including a “killing frost” that destroyed crops in New England. The year was sometimes referred to as “Eighteen Hundred and Nearly Frozen to Death.” 

Initially, the chilly summer was misunderstood. Some speculated that the position of the planets caused the horrible weather, and legend has it that The Old Farmer’s Almanac predicted snow that summer. That the volcanic eruption had occurred more than a year before explains why the link wasn’t readily apparent. The volcanic ash was ejected into the upper atmosphere and carried around the planet by the jet stream. That dust blanketed the Earth, resulting in the strange weather that followed.

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The eruption helped inspire "Frankenstein."

Difficult times can lead to great art. Then 18 years old and still going by her maiden name of Godwin, Mary Shelley and her lover and future husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, visited Lake Geneva in the spring and summer of 1816, a time of extremely gloomy weather. One fateful night that July, the two were with their friend Lord Byron, the famous poet, when he suggested, “We will each write a ghost story.” Shelley completed hers in just a few days, writing in the introduction to Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus that “a wet, ungenial summer, and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house.” Who knows: If it had been bright and sunny that week, we might never have gotten the endlessly influential 1818 book, which later spawned an assortment of movies, TV shows, plays, and Halloween costumes.

Einstein’s brain was preserved for scientific study.

  • Section of Einstein brain
Section of Einstein brain
Credit: Friedrich Stark/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Nicole Villeneuve

June 30, 2025

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Albert Einstein was one of the most famous and influential physicists of the 20th century, and although he was widely revered in his life, he had complicated feelings about being the subject of such adulation. When Einstein died from a ruptured abdominal aneurysm at age 76 in 1955, he had already made it clear that he wished to be cremated so “people don’t come to worship at my bones.” Per his wishes, Einstein’s ashes were scattered by his family at a private spot along the Delaware River. But it wasn’t the entirety of the physicist’s body: Before cremation, his brain was removed and taken to be studied.

On the same day Einstein died, Thomas Harvey, a pathologist at New Jersey’s Princeton Hospital, conducted an autopsy, during which Harvey removed the scientist’s brain. Removing organs was common autopsy practice, as they were often kept by medical institutions for research. But Harvey decided to keep this one for himself. He claimed he wished only to conduct medical research on the genius’s brain, and promised Einstein’s family he would not use the organ for his own cultural cache. Over the next four decades, Harvey occasionally sent sections of the brain to other scientists to study, but most of it was stored in pieces in jars of formaldehyde at his home. While studies done on Einstein’s brain over the years did reveal differences from the average person’s, it ultimately remains unclear where his extraordinary intellect really came from. Today, samples of Einstein’s brain are kept at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C., and the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia.

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Humans use much more than just 10% of their brains.

The human brain is the most complex organ in the human body. Given how little we know about the spongy mass, the claim that humans use only 10% of their brains seems not only possible, but likely. But the long-repeated assertion is just a myth — humans actually use all of their brains. It isn’t known for sure where the 10% idea started; it has been misattributed to Albert Einstein, but it most likely germinated with American psychologist and author William James, who theorized that people use only a fraction of their mental capabilities. The myth got a big boost in Dale Carnegie's bestselling 1936 self-help book How to Win Friends and Influence People. In the preface, journalist Lowell Thomas misquoted James, claiming the psychologist said that “the average person develops only 10% of his latent mental ability.” But according to modern brain imaging technologies, areas of the entire brain are, in fact, active most of the time, even if they're not active all at the same time.

The U.S. military tried to make a flying saucer.

  • U.S. Air Force photo of the Avrocar
U.S. Air Force photo of the Avrocar
Credit: PJF Military Collection/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Sarah Anne Lloyd

June 30, 2025

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UFO, short for unidentified flying object, is a pretty vague term. But it tends to call to mind a specific image in the popular consciousness: a flying saucer. The disc-shaped craft entered the public imagination in 1947 after aviator Kenneth Arnold described a strange sighting of several objects while flying over Washington state, spawning hundreds of other dubious UFO sightings and many a spooky movie. But for a brief time, flying saucers were more than science fiction, thanks to a failed military prototype.

In 1947, the Canadian aircraft manufacturer Avro hired a British engineer named John Carver Meadows Frost, who saw great potential in flying saucers — and worried, in the early years of the Cold War, that the Soviet Union was harboring secret German saucer tech. In 1952, he began developingthe Avrocar, a disc-shaped fighter craft with turbojet engines around the perimeter and a large, central turbine that sucked in air. Theoretically, by directing the exhaust downward or laterally, the craft could take off powerfully, hover smoothly, and zoom around at Mach 4 speeds.

The project became too expensive for Canadian government funding, but the United States Army and Air Force were extremely interested. The Army wanted an all-terrain hovercraft for transport and reconnaissance, while the Air Force wanted a stealthy supersonic craft that could hover below enemy radar and zoom up vertically. Frost figured his saucer could serve both purposes.

The Avrocar, however, didn’t even come close to expectations. After the U.S. took over the project in 1958, Avro produced two prototypes. One went off to NASA, where it proved too aerodynamically unstable to pass a wind tunnel test. The other underwent flight tests, which were just about as disastrous: The saucer would pitch and roll if it got any more than 3 feet off the ground, and had a top speed of only 35 miles per hour. The project ended in 1961.

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The term “flying saucer” may come from a misquote.

Kenneth Arnold is widely credited with sparking the public’s fascination with flying saucers thanks to a series of media reports about his famous UFO sighting — the first of which described a “saucer-like aircraft.” But Arnold maintained that the objects he saw were more crescent-shaped, and claimed he told journalists that they flew like saucers skipping on the water. However, some early articles quote him using words such as “disk” and “pie-pan” to describe the craft, so it’s unclear whether he was misquoted at the time or revised his story later.

Only two Americans have been generals in three different wars.

  • Winfield Scott (left) and Douglas MacArthur (right)
Winfield Scott (left) and Douglas MacArthur (right)
Credit: (left) GL Archive/ Alamy Stock Photo; (right) Bettmann via Getty Images
Author Michael Nordine

June 18, 2025

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Not for nothing was Winfield Scott known as the Grand Old Man of the Army. He spent more than half a century in the U.S. military, and was so committed to proper decorum that he also earned the nickname “Old Fuss and Feathers.” Along with Douglas MacArthur after him, he holds the distinction of being a U.S. general in three different wars. Scott’s tenure included the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, and the Civil War, while MacArthur served in World War I, World War II, and the Korean War.

Scott was in his 70s by the time the Civil War broke out, but still served as the commanding general for the Union Army during the first seven months of the conflict; he also clashed with Abraham Lincoln on several issues, including the overall strategy for the war. Old Fuss and Feathers later sent a copy of his memoirs to Ulysses S. Grant with the inscription, “From the oldest to the greatest general.” Eighty years later, on December 18, 1944, MacArthur achieved the five-star rank of General of the Army — a title only four others, including Dwight D. Eisenhower, have held.

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Douglas MacArthur received 18 different medals.

As one of the most distinguished generals in United States history, MacArthur had quite the list of medals. He received 18 honors, including the highest of them all: the Medal of Honor, for which he was nominated three times and finally received for his World War II service in the Philippines. That distinction ran in the family, as his father, Arthur MacArthur Jr., received it during the Civil War. (The only other father and son to be similarly honored were Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Roosevelt Jr.) MacArthur’s ribbon rack also included three Distinguished Service Crosses (the Army’s second-highest honor), five Army Distinguished Service Medals, the Navy Distinguished Service Medal, seven Silver Stars, the Distinguished Flying Cross, a Bronze Star, an Air Medal, and two Purple Hearts.

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