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The Oregon Trail wagons weren’t for passengers.

Oxen pulling wagon
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Author Michael Nordine
April 30, 2024

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It’s often thought that the Oregon Trail was made easier by the covered wagons that have become synonymous with the grueling journey, but that’s only partially true. Those wagons weren’t actually for people, who walked most or all of the trail’s 2,000 miles from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon City, Oregon. Instead, they were for the supplies that hopeful settlers deemed necessary for the trek, pulled by mules and oxen. Indeed, people who were ferried by wagons had a habit of falling out, as the vehicles didn’t have springs and thus bounced around a lot; some folks were even run over by other wagons or trampled by beasts of burden after falling. As for those walking, many of the children didn’t have shoes.

So while we often romanticize that months-long journey as being emblematic of the “American Dream” and westward expansion, it was above all else a brutal quest that many did not survive. Contrary to popular belief, however, that has little to do with Indigenous peoples. Tribes such as the Pawnee and Shoshone were more likely to be trail guides or trading partners than hostile combatants, and fatigue and disease caused the vast majority of settlers’ deaths. When they circled the wagons at night, it wasn’t to keep Indigenous peoples out — it was to keep animals in.

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Only one-fifth of Oregon Trail travelers went to Oregon.

Given its name, you might reasonably assume that most travelers who braved the Oregon Trail settled in Oregon. Not so, as only one-fifth of the pioneers who risked life, limb, and dysentery in search of the 19th-century “American Dream” ended up in the Beaver State. The rest changed course in either Idaho or Wyoming en route to Utah and California. Approximately 70,000 Mormons made their pilgrimage to the former, and some 250,000 settlers headed to California — many of them in search of gold.

Synchronized swimming dates back to ancient Rome.

Synchronized swimming circa 1953
Credit: Michael Ochs Archives via Getty Images
Author Bess Lovejoy
September 4, 2025

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When most people think of synchronized swimming, they picture Esther Williams’ glittering “aquamusicals” in the 1940s and ’50s, or the sport’s 1984 Olympic debut. But the idea of choreographed aquatic performance actually dates back nearly two millennia — to the flooded amphitheaters of ancient Rome.

Roman rulers were obsessed with turning water into spectacle. Julius Caesar and his successors staged naumachiae — mock naval battles fought by prisoners in specially dug lakes or even within the Colosseum in Rome, which could be flooded for the occasion. These violent dramas overshadowed a quieter but no less dazzling aquatic art: an early forerunner of synchronized swimming.

The Roman poet Martial, writing in the first century CE, described a performance in which women portraying Nereids, or sea nymphs, dove and swam in formation across the Colosseum’s waters. Their bodies, likely nude to match the mythological roles, gleamed in torchlight as they created patterns on the waves — shapes of anchors, tridents, even ships with billowing sails. Martial was so enchanted that he suggested Thetis herself, queen of the sea nymphs, must have taught them their art.

These displays were more than entertainment; they showed off Rome’s engineering might through its ability to summon rivers into stone theaters, transforming the spaces into watery stages. Across the Roman Empire, smaller “Thetis-mimes” featured swimmers pantomiming mythic tales in waterproofed orchestra pits, a kind of water ballet that echoed through Europe centuries later in 19th-century “aqua dramas.”

Though early Christian leaders denounced these spectacles as indecent, their watery choreography survives in today’s sport. Modern synchronized swimming — now called artistic swimming — owes its roots not just to Hollywood glamour but also to ancient Rome, where the first water ballets shimmered beneath the torchlight of the Colosseum.

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The term “synchronized swimming” was coined at the 1934 Chicago World’s Fair.

While the origins of the sport go back to the ancient world, its name can be traced to a summer spectacle at the 1934 Chicago World’s Fair. In the 1920s and ’30s, U.S. swim clubs were experimenting with “stunt swimming,” a style that emphasized floating patterns and group formations rather than speed. Katharine Curtis, a physical education instructor at the University of Chicago, added a key element: music. Using a gramophone by the poolside, she timed swimmers’ movements to a beat, calling the approach “rhythmic swimming.” 

When the 1934 world’s fair asked Curtis to stage a performance, she recruited 60 women to perform three times daily as the “Modern Mermaids,” accompanied by a 12-piece band. During one broadcast, radio announcer Norman Ross called the show “synchronized swimming” — a name that immediately caught on. 

Congress created a lottery to help fund the American Revolution.

United States lottery ticket, 1776
Credit: PHAS/ Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Author Bennett Kleinman
October 1, 2025

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While America declaring independence was a gamble that paid off in spades, luck wasn’t always on the government’s side. Look no further than the time the First Continental Congress authorized a national lottery to fund the Revolutionary War effort — which didn’t exactly go as planned. 

The inspiration came, in part, from colonial lotteries that helped fund early settlements such as Jamestown and public works projects including streets and churches. This time, Congress hoped the proceeds from selling lottery tickets could be used to pay soldiers and manufacture munitions. 

On November 18, 1776, it enacted a national lottery with the goal of raising $1.5 million (roughly $105.5 million today) in Continental currency, a form of paper money that was issued the year before to help finance the war. However, this speculative currency lacked solid backing and quickly depreciated, losing a chunk of its value by the time the lottery began; it was rendered virtually worthless by the time it ceased circulation in 1781. Because of this, as well as some marketing and distribution issues, the lottery failed to attract much public interest.

The lottery was set to be held in four phases, with the first drawing planned for March 1, 1777. But mismanagement and poor ticket sales caused it to be delayed until May 27, 1778. By that time, only 36,000 of the 100,000 tickets — which cost $10 each — had been sold. This saddled the fledgling government with a net loss in excess of $72,000 as it still had to fund organizational costs and pay out the winner. 

The next drawing took place the following year, but the lottery quickly fizzled out after that. In the end, it generated less than $100,000 in funds for Congress to use as it saw fit — just 6.5% of the initial estimate. Having fallen short of its goal, the government instead relied on loans from France, donations from wealthy financiers, and other revenue sources to fund the war effort.

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Several Ivy League colleges were partially funded through lotteries.

Long before they came to rely on endowments, tuitions, and donations, most of the Ivy League colleges were funded through public lotteries. Harvard, for example, was founded in 1636 but struggled to find solid financial footing for more than a century, so in 1745, the Massachusetts General Assembly authorized a lottery to help fund the school. Additional lotteries were held in the 18th and 19th centuries to support dormitory construction. In 1746, the New York Provincial Assembly authorized a lottery “to advance learning,” leading to the formation of what is now Columbia University. Another 1755 lottery helped raise funds for the Academy of Philadelphia, which became the University of Pennsylvania. Other lotteries funded construction of several campus buildings at Brown, Dartmouth, Princeton, and Yale. Of the eight Ivy League schools, only Cornell — founded in 1865 by philanthropist Ezra Cornell — didn’t rely on lottery funds for early financial support.

Before the invention of price tags, shoppers weren’t used to fixed prices.

John Wanamaker Building, Philadelphia
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Author Sarah Anne Lloyd
October 1, 2025

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If you’re shopping for goods in the Western world, you expect to see a price tag on most things, whether it’s a secondhand toaster at a garage sale or a can of beans at the supermarket. But clearly advertised prices are a relatively recent phenomenon, originating in the 1870s. Before then, haggling was the norm, with the major exception being stores run by Quakers, who believed charging different prices for different customers was morally wrong.

Philadelphia businessman John Wanamaker is widely credited with pioneering the price tag. He was a deeply religious man and, while he himself was Presbyterian, he agreed with the Quakers that transparent, clear, consistent pricing was a moral imperative. So when he created a clothing store called the Grand Depot in a converted railroad station, he clearly labeled the cost of each item on tags and in product guides. The business later became Wanamaker’s department store.

The grand opening of his store was just before the 1876 world’s fair in Philadelphia. Millions of people came to the city, and many of them visited Wanamaker’s, where they experienced not only price tags but also fixed prices for the first time. Those visitors, who saved a lot of time by avoiding haggling, went home and brought the groundbreaking idea of price tags with them.

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Airfare used to be set by the U.S. government.

Airlines were pioneers in dynamic pricing — it’s why a seat on an airplane has a wildly different fare from one day to the next. But before 1980, you didn’t need any kind of timing strategy to buy a plane ticket. That’s because rates, along with routes and safety standards, were set by the Civil Aeronautics Board, a federal agency. At first, the government oversight stabilized the industry and ensured that flights were available to less-popular destinations. But by the 1960s, ticket prices were high and airlines were having trouble establishing new routes. In 1978, Congress passed the Airline Deregulation Act, which, among other things, forced airlines to be more competitive with their pricing. By 1986, Americans were paying around 25% less for airfare, but were already wrestling with pricing algorithms running on mainframe computers.

Galileo wrote horoscopes.

Astronomer Galileo Galilei
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Author Sarah Anne Lloyd
April 30, 2024

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Galileo Galilei made some major scientific strides in his time, particularly in the field of astronomy. He discovered four of Jupiter’s moons and the stars of the Milky Way, and determined that the surface of Earth’s moon isn’t smooth. Most famously, he vehemently believed, as Nicolaus Copernicus proposed before him, that the Earth revolved around the sun, not the other way around — even as the Catholic Church labeled him a heretic for it. But despite his reputation as a skeptic, his cosmic beliefs included a little of what is now considered pseudoscience, too. To wit, he was one of Europe’s most sought-after astrologers in his time, and wrote horoscopes for Italy’s elite. Some of his astrological tools are even on display at the Galileo Museum in Florence, Italy.

Galileo, a Pisces, practiced judicial astrology, which concerns human circumstances rather than just natural phenomena; clients consulted him for guidance on illness, travel, love, and other major events. He also wrote birth charts, including for himself and his children. Before he was tried by the church for his belief in heliocentrism, he was investigated for telling his clients that the stars governed their fates — although the church didn’t pursue the matter very far. Galileo’s faith in the zodiac may sound surprising, but at the time, it wasn’t unusual for astronomers to practice this kind of cosmic divination. Some patrons would even judge whether a scientist was worthy of their support by their astrology skills. Indeed, other astronomers we hold in high esteem today, including Johannes Kepler, Tycho Brahe, and Copernicus, also studied astrology.

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Galileo tried to calculate the dimensions of hell.

In Renaissance Italy, there was significant academic interest in the literal dimensions of hell as it was described in Dante Alighieri’s Inferno. When Galileo was 24 years old, Dante scholars were fiercely divided between two calculations made by two different Renaissance thinkers. Galileo, already a prominent mathematician by then, was invited by the Accademia Fiorentina (Florence Academy) to make his own estimation. He ultimately affirmed one of the previous results, but made a major error when calculating the thickness of hell’s domed roof. He multiplied the width and thickness by the same amount before realizing that buildings don’t scale that way. Later, Galileo published the square-cube law, which states that as an object increases in size, its volume gets larger than its surface area, meaning that supports need to grow disproportionately thicker than the rest of a structure. According to the law, there wouldn’t be a lot of Dante’s hell left if the roof were as thick as it needed to be.

People used to be buried with bells attached to their coffins in case they woke up.

Premature burial prevention, 1905
Credit: Science History Images/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Bess Lovejoy
September 24, 2025

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In the 18th and 19th centuries, fear of being buried alive was widespread. Newspapers and pamphlets — not to mention gothic novels and “penny dreadfuls” — reported cases of mistaken death, and even famous figures took precautions to avoid being buried prematurely. Composer Frédéric Chopin reportedly asked that his body be cut open to ensure he was truly dead, while George Washington had his body watched for two full days before burial.

The concern was not entirely unfounded. Death is a gradual process, and faint pulse, shallow breathing, or illnesses that mimic death could easily fool the untrained observer. Early methods to confirm life included placing a feather by the mouth or using a mirror to detect breath. Later, more inventive techniques emerged, such as brushing invisible silver nitrate messages onto glass above coffins; decomposition gases would reveal the words “I am dead.”

Fear of premature burial also inspired a wave of “safety” innovations. The most famous was Russian Count Michel de Karnice-Karnicki’s 1897 safety coffin, known as Le Karnice. A spring-loaded ball rested over the chest, and any movement released air and light into the coffin, which rang a bell and raised a flag aboveground. A tube allowed a conscious occupant to call for help. 

Thousands of French citizens requested Le Karnice in their wills, and it was demonstrated in New York, though false alarms caused by natural postmortem body movements kept it from widespread use. Other safety coffins were also patented and demonstrated, including one in New Jersey that included a receptacle for refreshments.

While there’s no evidence that safety coffins actually ever saved anyone, they reveal a fascinating mix of ingenuity and anxiety. They are a reminder that for centuries, people sought practical ways to assert control over one of life’s most unsettling uncertainties: the line between life and death.

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Germans once created “waiting houses” for the dead.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, Germans developed a unique solution to widespread fears of premature burial: Leichenhaüsers, or waiting mortuaries. These corpse chambers were designed to hold the recently deceased until decomposition — considered the most definitive proof of death — confirmed that burial was safe. The first Leichenhaüser was established in 1791 in Weimar by Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland, a physician-turned-philanthropist. It could accommodate eight bodies at a time and was kept warm with steam pipes to hasten decomposition. Over the following decades, Leichenhaüsers spread across Germany and beyond, sometimes including additional features to assuage public fears. Bodies were occasionally adorned with scented flowers, and bells or wires were attached in case a corpse showed signs of life. A vigilant porter would remain on duty to monitor the occupants. Some waiting houses even allowed visitors to wander among the corpses, paying admission to observe the “safety” of the practice. Despite the expense and elaborate precautions, there is no record of a single corpse reviving while in a Leichenhaüser.

The ‘phantom time hypothesis’ claims 297 years of history never happened.

Wooden analog clock
Credit: Denny Müller/ Unsplash
Author Kerry Hinton
April 19, 2024

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What would happen if two emperors and a pope decided to fast-forward the calendar 300 years into the future? According to the “phantom time” conspiracy theory, that’s exactly what happened around a thousand years ago in Europe. This startling hypothesis was put forth by German amateur historian Heribert Illig in his 1996 book The Invented Middle Ages: The Greatest Time-Falsification in History, which suggests the years 614 to 911 CE — a sizable chunk of the Middle Ages — never happened. Illig argues that Holy Roman Emperor Otto III, Pope Sylvester II, and possibly Roman Emperor Constantine VII conspired to make up 297 years of history — including the reign of Charlemagne, the Viking raids on Europe, and countless other historical events — in order to place Otto’s rule in the year 1000 CE. The main reason? That date was exactly a thousand years after the birth of Christ (although some scholars now believe Jesus was born closer to 4 BCE).

Illig supports his claim by pointing out discrepancies between the Julian and Gregorian calendars that could be explained by the fabricated dates. He also suggests that Otto III and Sylvester II ordered scribes to create manuscripts from the missing centuries. Historians, however, have offered considerable evidence that debunks the theory, not least of which is that Illig’s hypothesis ignores the development of other cultures around the world during those 300 years. Astronomical science offers additional proof that a royal and holy alliance didn’t invent centuries of history. As astrophysicist Brian Koberlein wrote in Forbes, “If 300 years of history were simply added to the record, the forgery would be written in the stars, and this simply isn’t the case.”

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Experts have proposed a simpler version of our modern calendar.

The Gregorian calendar, which has been in use for more than 400 years, improved upon the mistakes of the Julian calendar that preceded it, but it's still a complicated way to keep time. At Johns Hopkins University, professors Steve H. Hanke and Richard Conn Henry have come up with a revised, simpler version: the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar (HHPC). Unlike our current calendar, the HHPC uses fixed dates — each date is identical every year. For example, someone born on Monday, February 3, would always celebrate their birthday on a Monday. Instead of using leap years, the HHPC includes 364 days in a year, plus a weeklong "Mini-Month" that occurs once every five to six years.

The Pilgrims settled at Plymouth partly because they were running low on beer.

Pilgrims land at Plymouth, 1620
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Author Timothy Ott
September 24, 2025

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The old proverb holds that for want of a nail, the kingdom was lost. And yet, it seems that for want of beer, a colony was founded. The religious separatists known today as Pilgrims, who left England aboard the Mayflower in September 1620, endured cramped conditions and frightening storms as they waited out their journey across the Atlantic Ocean. As described in Susan Cheever’s Drinking in America: Our Secret History, one of the few sources of relief for this troubled lot was the daily ration of up to a gallon of beer. Besides helping to calm harrowed nerves, the fermented beverage provided health benefits to imbibers, as it was safer to drink than the algae-laced water supplies.

The Mayflower passengers were ecstatic to finally reach the shores of America when they landed in Massachusetts in November, but they were bound by contract with the Virginia Company of London to settle farther south. However, the ship was blown off course, and dangerous rocks and shifting shoals prevented it from progressing to Virginia, prompting captain Christopher Jones to turn his storm-battered ship back toward Cape Cod. According to William Bradford, an early governor of Plymouth Colony, the Mayflower crew still had some beer left when they landed in Massachusetts, but they were saving it for the return trip and thus pushed the Pilgrims to go to shore and drink water. 

After a few weeks of scouring the region, the Pilgrims realized the importance of finding a spot to bunker down for the winter and beyond; as one passenger wrote in a surviving journal from the period, “[W]e could not now take time for further search or consideration, our victuals being much spent, especially our beer.” The newcomers promptly began building what became Plymouth Colony in the area of an abandoned Wampanoag settlement, with a brew house unsurprisingly among the first structures to be raised.

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Before carrying the Pilgrims, the Mayflower primarily transported wine.

While the transatlantic voyage that brought the Pilgrims to America was an outlier in the life of the Mayflower, the transportation of large stores of alcohol was par for the course. The merchant ship was purchased by Captain Christopher Jones and a few co-investors around 1608 and used for trading goods across Europe over the next dozen years. A typical round-trip passage carried cloth and wine between England and the French ports of Bordeaux and La Rochelle. Immediately prior to taking on the Pilgrims, the Mayflower docked at London with 50 tons of French wine for a Mr. William Speight, while a Mr. John Crabbe claimed 19 tons along with another hogshead of wine. It's unclear what prompted Captain Jones to accept the assignment of ferrying passengers across the Atlantic, but he resumed his usual trading routine after returning to England in May 1621.

King Richard III’s grave was discovered underneath a parking lot.

Richard III, 1480s
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Author Bennett Kleinman
April 19, 2024

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Many English monarchs are buried inside ornate tombs located at sites of great reverence. The same can’t be said for Richard III, whose long-lost remains were found and excavated underneath a parking lot in Leicester, England. Richard III served as king of England from 1483 until he was slain at the Battle of Bosworth Field on August 22, 1485. After the battle, his remains were brought to a nearby friary in Leicester that was operated by the Franciscans. He was buried inside, but the building was torn down in 1538. Centuries of new construction thereafter transformed the city’s layout, and the exact location of Richard III’s grave was lost in the annals of time.

In 1975, a researcher named Audrey Strange published an article theorizing that Richard III could be buried under a parking lot used by the Leicester City Council. In 2012, a team of researchers at the University of Leicester took it upon themselves to find the monarch’s body once and for all, honing in on that very car park. After just six hours of digging, the king’s remains were uncovered, though it took five months of further analysis to confirm the bones belonged to Richard III. The grave they discovered was oddly short in length, with Richard’s head and torso crammed in tightly at one end. There was also no evidence of a shroud or any personal ornaments, suggesting the king had been hastily buried without fanfare. In 2015, Richard III’s remains were finally reinterred at Leicester Cathedral.

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George Washington approved a plan to kidnap the future king of England.

William IV served as king of Great Britain from 1830 until 1837, succeeding his brother George IV. But decades earlier, in 1779, the 13-year-old future monarch, then known as Prince William Henry, enlisted in the British navy as a midshipman. Two years later, William’s ship arrived in New York Harbor, coincidentally making him the only member of the royal family to visit the continent during the American Revolutionary War. Word of William’s arrival spread among members of the Continental Army, who devised a scheme to kidnap the young prince so he could be used as leverage in future treaty discussions. Colonel Samuel Ogden presented the idea to General George Washington, who approved the plan, saying, “You have my authority to make the attempt in any manner and at such a time as your judgment shall direct.” Ultimately, the plot never came to fruition; William safely returned home and eventually ascended to the English throne.

The world’s oldest bread loaf is more than 8,000 years old.

Loaf of bread
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Author Sarah Anne Lloyd
April 19, 2024

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Bread is such a staple food that it’s often synonymous with sustenance itself, as in “putting bread on the table,” “breadwinner,” or “daily bread.” Indeed, humans have been eating bread for a long, long time. The earliest loaf of bread ever discovered is a whopping 8,600 years old, unearthed at Çatalhöyük, a Neolithic settlement in what is now southern Turkey, comprised of mud-brick dwellings built on top of one another. 

While excavating the site, archaeologists found the remains of a large oven, and nearby, a round, organic, spongy residue among some barley, wheat, and pea seeds. After biologists scanned the substance with an electron microscope, they revealed that it was a very small loaf of uncooked bread. It had been fermented, like a sourdough loaf, and someone had pressed their finger in the center of it. The dough had been encased in clay, which allowed it to survive for thousands of years.

The preserved loaf dates back to around 6600 BCE, but by that point, humans had already been baking bread for thousands of years. Some baking even predates agriculture, meaning our prehistoric ancestors were making the food with foraged grains. The oldest known evidence of bread, found in the Black Desert in modern-day Jordan, dates back around 14,000 years. Researchers recovered crumbs from large, circular stone fireplaces — one archaeobotanist compared it to the charred crumbs at the bottom of a toaster. This ancient bread was made of wild wheat and root vegetables, kneaded, then baked on hot stones. The process would have been labor intensive, so archaeologists theorize that bread was a treat reserved for special occasions.

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Figs are the earliest known cultivated plant.

For the most part, humans started growing their own food rather than hunting or gathering it between 10,000 and 11,000 years ago, when Neolithic peoples began planting wheat, barley, lentils, peas, chickpeas, and flax. But there’s evidence that cultivated fig trees predate what’s known as the “founder crops” by as many as 1,000 years. In 2006, archaeobotanists discovered several figs in a building that had burned down near ancient Jericho, leaving a slight char that preserved the fruit well enough to analyze it. They found that the figs had a genetic mutation that produced sweet fruit but no fertile seeds, so new plants had to be propagated by humans.

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