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During Prohibition, grape juice had “warnings” describing how to ferment it into wine.

Grape juice brick from Prohibition
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Author Michael Nordine
July 23, 2025

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To say that Prohibition didn’t put an end to the “manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors” would be putting it lightly. Before the 18th Amendment was finally repealed by the 21st Amendment, the Volstead Act was the law of the land and bootlegging could land you in serious trouble. Yet many people took creative approaches to skirting that law, including vintners. Some winemakers used concentrated grape juice to make “wine bricks” that they were quick to clarify should definitely not be used for alcoholic consumption. To drive this point home, some such juices even came with “warnings.”

“Do not place the liquid in this jug and put it away in the cupboard for twenty-one days,” read one particularly unsubtle store sign, “because then it would turn into wine.” The packaging of a brand called Vino Sano advised consumers to “avoid the use of any kind of yeast, raisins, etc., otherwise fermentation sets in.” The many upstanding citizens who purchased wine bricks surely heeded that warning and enjoyed their alcohol-free grape beverage. On the other hand, because it wasn’t technically illegal to drink during Prohibition — only to manufacture, sell, or transport liquor — anyone who purchased grape juice and accidentally left it in a jug for three weeks could imbibe the resulting concoction without fear.

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Maryland never enforced Prohibition.

The idea of Prohibition didn’t go down easy in the Free State. After earning that nickname in 1864, Maryland doubled down on it when the 18th Amendment passed. Though it was the sixth state to ratify the amendment, Maryland never passed legislation that actually enforced it. No less a moral authority than Cardinal James Gibbons, the archbishop of Baltimore, referred to Prohibition as “a national catastrophe, little short of a crime against the spiritual and physical well-being of the American people,” and it seemed many of his fellow Marylanders agreed. “National Prohibition went into legal effect upward of six years ago,” Maryland Senator William Cabell Bruce said to Congress in the mid-1920s, “but it can be truly said that, except to a highly qualified extent, it has never gone into practical effect at all.”

The ancient Tangut script had more than 6,000 symbols.

Tangut script
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Author Rachel Gresh
February 27, 2024

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While traveling in Asia during the early 20th century, Russian linguist Nikolai Aleksandrovich Nevsky became fascinated by an extinct Sino-Tibetan language called “Tangut.” It was the language of the Tangut Empire, or Xi Xia (meaning “Western Xia”), a kingdom in modern-day northwestern China that declared its independence from China in 1038 and developed its own language. This short-lived dynasty was wiped out by the expanding Mongol Empire in 1227, less than two centuries after its establishment, and its language was nearly lost to history. 

Nevsky is credited with renewing interest in the Tangut script 700 years after the fall of the empire. In the late 1920s, he completed his first two manuals, which deciphered around 500 Tangut characters into Tibetan phonetic glosses (or notations). Thanks to Nevsky and other contributors in the field, some ancient Tangut scripts have been translated over the last 100 years, yet the Tangut language is still considered one of the most difficult in the world to decipher. 

Although it was modeled after the Chinese writing system, there are few similarities in their actual characters, and native Chinese readers cannot decipher Tangut. There are also no known native speakers, and because the Tangut script is a logographic writing system, each of its 6,000 complex characters represents an individual word without relating to pronunciation. By comparison, other scripts with logographic elements have far fewer characters, such as the 700 Egyptian hieroglyphs and 800 characters in the Maya writing system. Both of these scripts also contain some phonetic signs that represent syllables, allowing them to use fewer characters, and making them easier to decipher than the Tangut language. 

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The first Chinese script was written on “oracle bones” made from turtle shells.

More than 3,000 years ago, Chinese fortunetellers carved and painted an ancient script on “oracle bones,” the oldest surviving evidence of systematic Chinese writing. During the Shang dynasty (1600 to 1046 BCE), oracle bones were made from the plastrons of turtles (the flat underside of shells) or ox shoulder blades. As the name suggests, they were used for divination or fortunetelling. Questions were inscribed onto the bones, which were lit on fire until they cracked in the extreme heat. The directions of the cracks were interpreted as guidance from the supernatural realm to predict anything from the price of an ox at market to the start of another war. These inscriptions became some of the earliest historical accounts of Chinese civilization and its languages. 

Ben Franklin thought the bald eagle had “bad moral character.”

Bald eagle with American flag
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Author Darren Orf
February 22, 2024

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The majestic bald eagle has been a symbol of the U.S. for as long as the country has existed; the imposing raptor first appeared on Massachusetts currency back in 1776. Yet not all Americans were fans of the bird of prey. In fact, arguably the most famous celebrity of the colonial era, Benjamin Franklin, was quite the opposite. In a letter addressed to his daughter and dated January 26, 1784, Franklin referred to the bald eagle as a “Bird of bad moral Character,” who “does not get his living honestly.” Philadelphia’s favorite son much preferred North America’s other avian native — the wild turkey — whom he called a “Bird of Courage.”

So why the anti-eagle sentiment? While it’s true that eagles do steal food from other birds, it’s likely a myth that Franklin wanted the turkey to be the national bird. Rather, the founding father’s words were actually maligning a particular institution that used the eagle on its seal. The Society of the Cincinnati, which formed in 1783 (and eventually supplied the name for the U.S. city), was a hereditary patriotic organization, meaning only sons of officers in the American Revolution could enter its ranks. According to Franklin, an organization based on family or heritage was uncomfortably similar to Britain’s status-driven culture, to which he believed American ideals were diametrically opposed. 

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Turkey (the bird and the country) is named for the Turkish people.

The wild turkey comes from North America, but the bird is actually named after the Turkish people of Eurasia. In the 15th century, Turkish merchants from Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul) imported an East African bird called the Guinea fowl — which resembles North America’s wild turkey — into England, where it was dubbed a “turkey-coq” or “turkey” after the Ottoman Turks. When English settlers arrived in the New World in the 17th century and crossed paths with the similar-looking North American fowl, they simply gave the bird the same name. In 1922, when the Ottoman Empire dissolved, the new nation of Turkey was established, and found itself sharing a name with a bird that is not even native to Turkey.

Comic books were once considered a national threat.

Official with approved comic books
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Author Nicole Villeneuve
July 15, 2025

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In the mid-20th century, comic books came under fire in the United States. Though the medium started out as reprinted collections of popular newspaper strips in the 1930s, it quickly grew into a diverse and wildly popular original art form. By the 1940s, original comics filled newsstands across the country; in 1948, 80 million to 100 million comic books were being sold in the U.S. each month. This was far from a niche hobby; comic books were mass entertainment for a range of ages (though primarily children), covering everything from superhero adventures and Westerns to genres such as horror, romance, sci-fi, and war stories.

Across the country, some church groups and parent organizations began expressing concerns that comics glorified violence and led to delinquency. Public comic book burnings began in the late 1940s as a protest. The concern reached fever pitch in 1954 with the publication of psychiatrist Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent, which argued that comic books were a major cause of juvenile crime. Though widely publicized at the time, Wertham’s reporting was later found to be deeply flawed, often misrepresenting research to support his claims.

The outcry that followed led to Senate hearings and, eventually, the creation of the Comics Code Authority (CCA), a self-governed body that publishers used as a censorship guide to stay in the good books of distributors and newsstands. Under the code, scenes of violence, horror, and anything deemed morally questionable were heavily edited or banned altogether. The backlash reshaped the comic book industry for decades: Superheroes such as Batman, originally dark and gritty, were toned down to seem more wholesome, and entire publishers went out of business. The CCA had a decent hold on the industry until the 1970s, when specialty comic book stores started popping up. Direct relationships were established with publishers, bypassing most distributors, and eventually, the code was dropped, allowing the comic book industry to resume its expansive storytelling.

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Before "Garfield," Jim Davis made a comic strip about bugs.

Before he created the world’s most famous cartoon cat, Jim Davis made a go of it with insects. In the early 1970s, Davis worked on a comic strip called Gnorm Gnat, starring a deadpan, wisecracking gnat. The comic ran in a small Indiana newspaper for two years, but never got syndicated; one editor told the creator, “Your art is good, your gags are great, but bugs — nobody can relate to bugs.” Taking the advice to heart, Davis set out to create a more relatable character, one inspired by the many cats he grew up with on his family’s farm. The result, of course, was Garfield, which debuted in 1978 and quickly became a sensation. 

John Hancock’s house just went up for sale.

Ebenezer Hancock House in Boston
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Author Bennett Kleinman
July 25, 2025

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Though 10 Marshall Street may not be as famous an address as 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, this three-story Boston home still holds an important place in American history. The residence was built and owned by founding father John Hancock, and it recently went up for sale for the first time in decades. The real estate listing describes the home as the “last extant property associated with [Hancock] in Boston” and the “only vernacular structure dating to the mid-1700s to survive in central Boston.” According to Boston city archaeologist Joseph Bagley, it’s also the 27th oldest house in the city. And it’s one of a few surviving homes in Massachusetts associated with a U.S. founding father, along with John Adams’ birthplace (built in 1681) and residence (built in 1731), which are part of a national historical park in Quincy, Massachusetts.

John Hancock — famous for being the first person to sign the Declaration of Independence — inherited the lot at 10 Marshall Street in the 1760s, and built the house in 1767. However, the 5,748-square-foot home is referred to as the Ebenezer Hancock House, named after John Hancock’s brother who lived there. Ebenezer later assumed the role of deputy paymaster general for the Continental Army and set up an office in the home where regimental commanders came to pick up soldiers’ wages during the American Revolutionary War. In 1778, France’s Louis XVI gifted 2 million silver crowns to the United States in support of the war effort, which were stored in this very building.

In 1785, John Hancock sold the property to a glass merchant, who later sold it to a shoe dealer in 1798. For the next 165 years, the building operated as a shoe store before it was left vacant and then acquired by the law firm Swartz & Swartz in 1976. While the current asking price isn’t publicly known, the property was assessed at $1.65 million in June 2025.

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Benjamin Franklin’s only surviving home is located in London.

While Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston in 1706 and spent most of his life in Philadelphia, he also lived and worked in London for several years. In August 1757, Franklin moved into an apartment located at 36 Craven Street, which is now the founding father’s last-surviving residence. In a 1758 letter to his wife, who was living back in the U.S., Franklin wrote, “I lodge in Craven Street near Charing Cross, Westminster; We have four Rooms furnished, and every thing about it is pretty genteel.” During his time in the apartment, Franklin invented a glass instrument called the “armonica,” and was said to take nude “air baths” sitting in front of the open windows. He departed London in 1775 to return stateside and serve in the Second Continental Congress. While the property fell into disuse, it was restored and reopened as a museum in 2006 honoring Franklin’s legacy.

A 15-year-old invented Braille.

Portrait of Louis Braille
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Author Sarah Anne Lloyd
July 15, 2025

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Braille is a set of tactile symbols designed for reading that’s used all over the world by blind and visually impaired people; letters and symbols are represented by different configurations of a grid of six raised dots. One could easily assume that such a widely accepted system was drafted by someone with a wealth of experience, but inventor and namesake Louis Braille was just 15 years old at the time, a student at the Institution Royale des Jeunes Aveugles (Roayl Institute for Blind Youth) in Paris.

Young Braille, who lost his sight in an early childhood accident, didn’t build the system from scratch. French inventor Charles Barbier had a keen interest in shorthand, and spent a lot of time developing alternate notation methods that didn’t require traditional writing. In 1815, he published a collection of methods for tactile reading, including a series of raised bumps in a 12-dot grid. Barbier had visually impaired people in mind when he designed this method, but as a sighted person, he couldn’t fully test it on his own.

When Braille first enrolled at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in 1819, students learned to read raised cursive letters, which were not only difficult to read but very rarely taught kids to write. But in 1821, the school started using Barbier’s system, which was much easier to both read and write. Braille, who had firsthand experience with the system and knew how to improve it for visually impaired people, started developing his own version. His six-dot system, invented in 1824, was easier to read under a single fingertip, and could be adapted for math and music. He published his method in 1829, when he was 20 years old.

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The first audiobooks were recorded in 1932.

In the early 1930s, after the American Foundation for the Blind couldn’t convince commercial record producers to release books on records, the organization decided to launch its own recording studio. Newly invented LP records had room for 15 minutes of audio per side — a whopping amount of time compared to previous technologies — and the foundation’s first test pressing, an excerpt from Helen Keller’s book Midstream, came out in 1932. Production began in earnest a few years later, with options including Shakespeare plays, historic documents such as the Declaration of Independence, and then-new works including Eleanor Roosevelt’s memoir This Is My Story, read by the first lady herself.

Walt Disney didn’t draw Mickey Mouse.

"Steamboat Willie," 1928
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Author Michael Nordine
February 22, 2024

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Despite essentially being synonymous with his most famous character, Walt Disney didn’t draw Mickey Mouse. The iconic cartoon rodent was actually designed by Disney’s best friend, animator Ub Iwerks, in 1928. Indeed, A Mouse Divided: How Ub Iwerks Became Forgotten, and Walt Disney Became Uncle Walt author Jeff Ryan described Mickey as “basically the child of two dads.” The pair worked together for decades, and Iwerks created effects for such Disney classics as Mary Poppins and Sleeping Beauty, in addition to helping develop theme park attractions such as “It’s a Small World.” But he rarely received much credit for his contributions to the company, especially in comparison to its namesake. That began to change when his granddaughter Leslie Iwerks directed the 2000 documentary The Hand Behind the Mouse: The Ub Iwerks Story, but even today, Iwerks remains relatively unknown.

For the first 20 years of Mickey Mouse’s existence, Disney voiced the character himself. The world was introduced to Mickey in the 1928 animated short Steamboat Willie, though Disney produced two previous shorts featuring Mickey that same year, Plane Crazy and The Gallopin’ Gaucho, which weren’t picked up by distributors. Steamboat Willie was the first of these to feature sound, though Mickey didn’t utter his first actual words (“Hot dog!”) until the following year’s The Karnival Kid. Disney last lent his vocal talents to The Mickey Mouse Club between 1955 and 1958, though 2013’s Get a Horse! patched together previous recordings to once again feature him as the voice of the famous cartoon mouse.

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Walt Disney received a custom-made Oscar statuette for "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs."

Walt Disney is an Oscar legend, but he never won the Academy Award most often associated with animation over the last 20 years. Since there was no award for Best Animated Feature until 2001 (when Shrek won the inaugural prize), Disney received an Honorary Oscar for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1939, for “significant screen innovation which has charmed millions and pioneered a great new entertainment field for the motion picture cartoon.” The award included a unique custom design that paid homage to the movie’s beloved characters: one regular Oscar statuette and seven miniature ones placed along a stepped base. It was presented to Disney by Shirley Temple, who was 11 years old at the time and didn’t totally understand the significance of the design. She later said, “I thought that the big statue was for Walt and that the Seven Dwarfs were the little ones going down the side and that Snow White herself hadn’t gotten anything.” 

In 1835, “The New York Sun” claimed life had been discovered on the moon.

Great Moon Hoax of 1835
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Author Sarah Anne Lloyd
February 22, 2024

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When The New York Sun started publishing in 1833, the paper was just a penny per edition, making it popular with New York’s less affluent residents. Just a year later, it had the highest circulation of any newspaper in the United States. Unfortunately for its many readers, it had a tumultuous relationship with the truth. The most notorious incident was 1835’s “Great Moon Hoax,” a six-part series, supposedly written by someone named Andrew Grant with the Edinburgh Journal of Science, that claimed that life had been found on the moon.

The first article, published on August 25 that year, reported that the famous astronomer John Herschel had made a number of startling discoveries about the moon and distant planets after hauling a 7-ton telescope from England to the Cape of Good Hope, the southern tip of Africa. Herschel had actually set up a telescope in South Africa (though it was not quite that large), which both gave the story a sheen of truth and left the astronomer conveniently unavailable to deny the report. The next day, the Sun reported that Herschel had discovered stunning Earth-like landscapes; brown quadrupeds resembling small bison; a playful, single-horned, goatlike species; birds similar to cranes and pelicans; and some sort of spherical amphibian. The day after that, it was larger bison, more birds, and miniature zebras.

The descriptions only got more extravagant as the series stretched on, and the story started to lose credibility, although at one point a team of Yale scientists came to New York in search of the original Edinburgh Journal articles. On day four, when the Sun described short, hairy humanoid bipeds with batlike wings engaged in animated conversations, more readers and newspapers started to cry hoax. The paper acknowledged the fabrication in mid-September, admitting that the Edinburgh Journal had ceased publication already and Grant was a fictional character. Perhaps surprisingly, the incident didn’t hurt the paper — readership skyrocketed during the moon hoax week and the Sun continued publishing until 1950.

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A fake proto-human skull fooled scientists for decades.

In 1912, an amateur archaeologist claimed to have found a 500,000-year-old link between apes and human beings: a humanlike skull in Sussex, England. When more advanced dating technology emerged in 1949, a geologist at London’s Natural History Museum tested the skull and found that it was from only 50,000 years ago — and it wasn’t one animal’s skull, but a mixture of human and likely orangutan remains. This wasn’t just a case of mistaken identity: Closer inspection under a microscope revealed that the skull had been stained to match the gravel where it was supposedly found, and the teeth had been filed down to make the ape jawbone more human-looking. 

Caesar salad isn’t named after Julius Caesar.

Chicken Caesar Salad
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Author Bennett Kleinman
February 22, 2024

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It would be easy to assume that the Caesar salad got its moniker from the famous Roman statesman of the same name, but the classic appetizer actually has no connection to Julius Caesar. Instead, it was named after an Italian American restaurateur and chef named Caesar Cardini. Cardini opened his first restaurant in California in 1919, one year before the onset of Prohibition. In the 1920s, he expanded across the border so that he could legally serve alcohol, opening a new eatery called Caesar’s in Tijuana, Mexico. It was at this restaurant that the recipe for Caesar salad was invented, and while the exact origin of the dish is debated, what’s certain is that Cardini claimed responsibility and marketed the salad under his name. 

According to Cardini’s daughter, Rosa, the original Caesar salad was improvised on a busy Fourth of July weekend in 1924. After running out of other ingredients, the story goes, Cardini gathered anything available — romaine lettuce, olive oil, egg, croutons, Worcestershire sauce, and Parmesan — and instructed his chefs to mix it together tableside for added showmanship. Others say the salad was created by Cardini’s brother, Alessandro, in an effort to impress a group of airmen dining at Caesar’s. And some argue that it was actually a restaurant employee named Livio Santini who came up with the salad, basing it on his mother’s recipe. Whatever the truth may be, Cardini moved back to Los Angeles and opened a shop in 1938 to sell bottles of his popular namesake salad dressing. 

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Popsicles were invented by accident.

In 1905, an 11-year-old boy named Frank Epperson absentmindedly left his cup of soda with a stirring stick in it on the porch overnight. Temperatures dipped below freezing that evening, which was a rarity where Epperson lived in Oakland, California. This unusual frigidity proved to be a blessing in disguise. The next morning, Epperson discovered his drink had frozen over and transformed into a delicious icy concoction, which he dubbed the “Epsicle.” Epperson showed the creation to his classmates, who loved it as well, and after becoming a parent, he introduced it to his own children. His kids referred to the refreshing treat as “Pop’s ’sicle,” and the name stuck. In 1923, he began selling the dessert at Neptune Beach near San Francisco, and the Popsicle went on to achieve popularity worldwide.

The U.S. once had a political party called the “Know-Nothings.”

Sheet music for a Know-Nothings song
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Author Timothy Ott
July 9, 2025

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Of all the political parties that have surfaced over the years, the Know-Nothings would seemingly rank somewhere between the Polish Beer-Lovers’ Party and the Canadian Extreme Wrestling Party as a tongue-in-cheek entity with a silly name. But there was nothing funny about this organization, which tapped into xenophobic fears en route to emerging as a major American political force in the 1850s. 

The Know-Nothings sprung from the nativist groups that organized in the United States in response to a rising tide of Catholic immigrants in the early 19th century. Officially working under the banner of the American Party, the Know-Nothings got their nickname from a membership-wide refusal to answer questions about the organization’s secret meetings. 

Publicly, the American Party espoused a platform that included a 21-year naturalization period for immigrants, the deportation of foreign-born criminals, the purging of Catholics from public office, and mandatory reading of Protestant versions of the Bible in schools. Coming of age at a time when the Whig Party was splintering over the combustible issue of slavery, the Know-Nothings rapidly gained adherents among those drawn to their populist messaging. The party swelled to an estimated 1 million members by the mid-1850s, with eight governors and as many as 53 members of Congress among its ranks. In 1856, the party even had its own presidential candidate in the form of ex-Oval Office resident Millard Fillmore. 

But that (losing) presidential campaign turned out to be the swan song for the Know-Nothings, as the relentless focus on immigration took a back seat among a populace that literally was coming to blows over the issue of slavery. Those in favor of maintaining the practice began drifting toward the Democrats, while many of those opposed found their way to another newly formed party, the Republicans. By 1860, the remaining Know-Nothings had coalesced with former Whigs under the Constitutional Union Party, another political faction doomed to a short life with the Civil War looming.

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Comedian Gracie Allen ran for president as the "Surprise Party" candidate.

As one-half of a popular comedy team with husband George Burns, Gracie Allen used their radio show on February 7, 1940, to announce her intentions to run for president of the United States. The candidacy was meant as a joke from the very beginning: Allen said she was a member of the “Surprise Party,” as she was a surprise baby born to her Republican father and Democrat mother, while her mascot was a kangaroo in honor of the leap year.  Yet the favorable response from fans prompted the duo to keep running with the gag, leading to a whistle-stop train tour across nearly three dozen cities and the publication of Allen's How To Become President. Although she suspended her campaign shortly after holding a Surprise Party convention in May, Allen still wound up stealing a few thousand write-in votes from candidates Franklin D. Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie that November, perhaps a signal that Americans were ready to embrace something other than politics as usual following the years of the Great Depression.

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