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In 1960, more than a third of the U.S. population was under 18.

  • Children get on a school bus, 1960s
Children get on a school bus, 1960s
Credit: World of Triss/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Sarah Anne Lloyd

January 7, 2025

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During the 1930s and early 1940s, many Americans held off on starting families because of the economic insecurity of the Great Depression and uncertainty of World War II. But the prosperous postwar era led to an increase of births between 1946 and 1964 that gave the baby boomer generation its nickname. Over this 19-year period, the booming birth rate helped the U.S. population grow by more than 50%. The country’s demographic makeup shifted so rapidly that by 1960, there were 64.2 million Americans under age 18, out of 180 million overall — a whopping 36% of the population. For context, in 2022, an estimated 22.4% of the U.S. population was under 18. 

General fertility rates in the baby boom era peaked in 1957 at 122.9 live births for every 1,000 women aged 15 to 44 — that’s 4.3 million babies that year alone. The general fertility rate took a nosedive throughout the 1960s as the birth control pill became more widely available and women entered the workforce at much higher rates. By 1970, the general fertility rate was 87.9, and the much smaller Generation X was well underway.

The baby boomer generation didn’t reproduce at the same rapid clip as their parents, but because there were so many of them, they still produced a lot of offspring. Indeed, 1990 — the year all those 1957 babies turned 33 — was another banner year for births, with 4.2 million millennials entering the world, despite a general fertility rate of just 70.9.

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The year 1960 had a senior citizen boom, too.

The 1960 census didn’t just count a whole lot of kids — it also saw nearly as large an increase in older Americans. Between 1950 and 1960, the over-65 population grew 35%. These elders had also been born during a time of high fertility rates, but they were living much longer than the generations before them. While birth rates eventually dropped, the United States’ share of senior citizens only continued to grow. In 1960, despite the increase, just 9% of the U.S. population was over 65; in 2020, it was 16.5%.

The first Broadway musical was performed in 1866.

  • “The Black Crook” musical, 1866
"The Black Crook" musical, 1866
Credit: Everett Collection Historical/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Timothy Ott

January 7, 2025

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On September 12, 1866, a packed house at Niblo’s Garden theater at the junction of Broadway and Prince Street in New York City witnessed a unique spectacle with the six-plus-hour debut of The Black Crook. Dozens of dancers in flesh-colored tights twirled around the stage as glittering fairies; ominous lighting and noises announced the onset of a hurricane; and the banter between the main characters was interrupted by such plucky songs as “You Naughty, Naughty Men.” Although this was hardly the first stage performance to incorporate singing into the drama, the explosive combination of music, dancing, and elaborate set theatrics led The Black Crook to be widely recognized as the starting point for the Broadway musical.

The creation of the play was something of an accident. A Parisian ballet troupe had been booked for performances at Manhattan’s Academy of Music, but was left without a venue when the opera house was destroyed in a May 1866 fire. Its producers subsequently struck a deal with Niblo’s Garden manager William Wheatley, who determined that the troupe’s attractive performers and expensive set machinery would liven up Charles M. Barras’ original script for The Black Crook, a Faustian drama about a poor artist’s entanglements with an evil count and an agent of the devil.

While the visual effects helped divert attention from the shaky plot, it was the scantily clad dancers who took up most of the ink in reviews and ignited the largest furor among moralists who condemned the indecent display of flesh. But the indignation only served to heighten interest: The Black Crook continued for nearly 500 performances in its first run, grossed more than $1 million, and spawned a sequel called The White Fawn, all of which demonstrated to the industry that this musical extravaganza was very much a model worth imitating.

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"Moose Murders" is considered the nadir of Broadway flops.

If The Black Crook was the happy result of an accident, then the notorious Moose Murders represents the train wreck that can ensue when a production fails to gel into something resembling coherency. Penned by young playwright Arthur Bicknell, the 1983 play was intended to be a farcical murder mystery about a vacationing family and the strange inhabitants they encounter at an Adirondack lodge. However, things headed south when the script wound up in the possession of a first-time director, whose wife was both bankrolling and appearing in the show. 

The aging big-name star, Eve Arden, left after one preview due to an inability to remember her lines. While her replacement, Holland Taylor, quickly got up to speed, her professionalism couldn't offset the confusion created by such characters as a Native American caretaker with an Irish accent and a man-eating moose. At the conclusion of what turned out to be the only official performance on February 22, 1983, critic Brendan Gill summed up the disaster by noting it "would insult the intelligence of an audience consisting entirely of amoebas." 

Still, there was something to be salvaged from a production that became shorthand for a spectacular failure: Moose Murders occasionally enjoys a revival from a director and cast that leans into the weirdness, while Bicknell turned his painful experience into a memoir titled Moose Murdered, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love My Broadway Bomb.

Apple pie isn’t from America.

  • Homemade apple pie
Homemade apple pie
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Author Nicole Villeneuve

November 8, 2023

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Apple pie has long been emblematic of wholesome Americana. There’s even a saying tying the dessert to U.S. culture: “as American as apple pie.” But the classic treat actually originated across the ocean, in 14th-century England. The first known record of an apple pie recipe was in The Forme of Cury, an English cookbook compiled around 1390 by King Richard II’s cooks. The recipe calls for apples, figs, raisins, pears, and spices, but unlike the dessert we know today, it didn’t call for any additional sugar. All of the ingredients were to be baked inside a hard, lard-based shell called a “coffin,” meant to be a container, not a golden, flaky crust. 

Eventually, apple pie made its way to America with European settlers; the first recorded mention of the dessert in the U.S. was in a 1697 diary. By the late 1700s, multiple updated recipes were included in America’s first known cookbook, American Cookery. By the early 1800s, American farmers were growing thousands of apple varieties. Apple pie continued to gain popularity through the 19th century, but it didn’t become a cultural icon until the 20th century. As early as 1902, a New York Times editorial called it a symbol of American prosperity, and by the 1920s, “as American as apple pie” started to appear in print. The dessert’s position as a meaningful part of American culture was all but cemented during World War II, when soldiers proudly declared that they enlisted for “mom and apple pie.” 

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Johnny Appleseed was a successful entrepreneur.

John Chapman, the real-life figure behind the legend of Johnny Appleseed, was not just a wandering folk hero, but by all accounts an astute businessman and successful entrepreneur. As a young man in the late 1700s and early 1800s, he ventured west to strategically plant apple trees across America’s frontier, from western Pennsylvania through central Ohio and into Indiana. Chapman often stayed just ahead of settlers, cultivating nurseries and orchards, then selling them off when settlers arrived. It’s believed he resourcefully acquired his seeds from cider presses — at the time, apples were primarily grown for producing alcoholic cider, a major part of frontier life. Most accounts of Chapman describe him as traveling barefoot, in a burlap sack, and with a tin pot for a hat. Despite his modest life, it’s believed that when he died in 1845, Chapman still owned many properties himself, and was a wealthy man.

People once used animal fat to do laundry. 

  • Woman with tub of laundry
Woman with tub of laundry
Credit: Penta Springs Limited/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Michael Nordine

December 20, 2024

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Most laundry detergent has ingredients you probably haven’t heard of — carboxymethyl cellulose is a common one, ditto linear alkylbenzene sulfonate — but one thing it doesn’t contain is animal fat. That hasn’t always been the case, however, as people have used fat to do laundry since ancient times. Rendered animal fat has long been present in cleaning products, a practice we only moved past fairly recently. The Mesopotamians were the first known group to produce soap, and did so with plant ashes and animal fat. 

Other ingredients in proto-detergent solutions included lye and even urine. A set of 14th-century instructions in A Medieval Home Companion explains, “If there is any spot of oil or other grease, this is the remedy: Take urine and heat it until it is warm, and soak the spot in it for two days. Then, without twisting it, squeeze out the part of the dress with the spot. If the spot is not gone … put it in other urine, beat in ox gall, and do as before.” Indeed, laundry was an intensely arduous process in medieval Europe, one that involved literally beating the dirt out of one’s clothes, and it was carried out almost exclusively by women. So next time you find yourself dreading laundry day, take solace in the fact that it’s infinitely easier than it used to be.

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The first commercial electric washing machine was called Thor.

The Norse god of thunder isn’t the only notable Thor. That was also the name of the first commercially produced electric washing machine, which the Hurley Machine Company of Chicago introduced in 1908. The brainchild of inventor Alva J. Fisher, the drum-type washer had a galvanized tub and, per the patent, the “perforated cylinder is rotatably mounted within a tub containing the wash water.” The Thor proved successful enough for the company to continue innovating for the next several decades; it even made a hybrid dishwasher-washing machine called the Automagic in the 1940s.

Divers recently found a long-lost shipwreck that sank in a hit-and-run.

  • A fishing vessel run aground
A fishing vessel run aground
Credit: Gannet77/ iStock
Author Nicole Villeneuve

December 20, 2024

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More than 160 years after vanishing beneath the waves of the Atlantic, the wreck of French steamship Le Lyonnais was discovered off the coast of Massachusetts. The ship’s demise in November 1856 was a bit out of the ordinary. Le Lyonnais didn’t topple in a storm or suffer an epic wreck — it sank as a result of a hit-and-run.

Le Lyonnais was sailing from the U.S. to France when it collided with the U.S. sailing ship Adriatic. The Adriatic suffered only minor damage and sailed on, heading for port in Gloucester, Massachusetts, for repairs. The crew of the Adriatic reportedly thought Le Lyonnais was fine to carry on as well, but the French ship was not so fortunate: The hull was punctured, and despite the crew’s efforts to patch the breach, the situation grew worse. Three days later, Le Lyonnais succumbed to the damage and sank. Of the steamship’s 132 passengers, only 18 survived.

Though the fate of Le Lyonnais was known, the exact location of its wreckage remained a mystery until recently. In August 2024, a shipwreck hunting and salvaging team discovered the vessel about 200 miles from New Bedford, Massachusetts. They knew they’d found the right ship thanks to a few key details including the horizontal steam engine and iron hull plates. Most crucially, the engine’s cylinder measured 57 inches — a perfect match with the ship’s records. According to Jennifer Sellitti, a member of the crew that found the ship and the author of The Adriatic Affair: A Maritime Hit-and-Run off the Coast of Nantucket, Adriatic Captain John Durham later had his ship apprehended by French authorities and was put on trial. But even with the international attention, the sinking of Le Lyonnais was all but forgotten after the onset of the American Civil War.

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A California chicken farmer once discovered a $400 million shipwreck.

Mel Fisher followed a winding path to becoming one of history’s most profitable treasure hunters. After spending his childhood and university years in Indiana, followed by a stint with the U.S. Army, Fisher ended up in California, where he worked on his parents’ chicken ranch. It was there that he indulged in a longtime passion, opening his first dive shop in a feed shed on the ranch. 

By the 1960s, Fisher was immersed in the world of shipwreck hunting and had become fixated on finding the Nuestra Señora de Atocha, a Spanish treasure galleon that sank off the Florida Keys in 1622. In 1985, it paid off: Fisher’s team found the long-lost ship, and its gold, silver, jewels, and other artifacts, worth about $400 million, were intact. The Atocha treasure made Fisher a millionaire — and led to law reform. In 1987, Congress passed the Abandoned Shipwreck Act, giving states ownership of shipwrecks found within 3 miles of their coastlines.

Yo-Yo Ma played for JFK at just 7 years old.

  • Yo-Yo Ma with cello
Yo-Yo Ma with cello
Credit: Lebrecht Music & Arts/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Bennett Kleinman

December 20, 2024

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On November 29, 1962, 7-year-old cello prodigy Yo-Yo Ma performed at the D.C. National Guard Armory in front of President John F. Kennedy and other esteemed dignitaries. His appearance was part of a televised event called “An American Pageant of the Arts,” which was held to raise money for the National Cultural Center — later renamed the Kennedy Center. This arts organization was founded under Kennedy’s predecessor Dwight D. Eisenhower, who also attended the event by remote satellite from Augusta, Georgia.

The event featured acts including singer Harry Belafonte, ballerina Maria Tallchief, and Yo-Yo Ma and his 11-year-old sister, Yeou-Cheng Ma, who accompanied her brother on piano. It marked the U.S. and television debut for the cellist, who had been playing for audiences in his home nation of France since age 5. On this night, the duo was introduced by emcee Leonard Bernstein before playing a rendition of Jean-Baptiste Bréval’s “Concertino No. 3 in A Major.” The talented musical siblings were received quite favorably; both Kennedy and Eisenhower were shown on TV applauding with delight.

While this marked the first time Yo-Yo Ma performed for an American president, it wasn’t the last. The musician has played cello in front of several U.S. presidents, including at the White House for Ronald Reagan in 1987 and at a 2018 Armistice ceremony for Donald Trump. He also performed at Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration — which was attended by Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Joe Biden — and he delivered a virtual cello performance at President Biden’s 2021 inauguration.

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Abraham Lincoln frequently attended the opera.

Despite his own lack of musical skills, Abraham Lincoln was a self-professed lover of music, and attended the opera upwards of 30 times during his presidency. Lincoln attended his first opera on February 20, 1861, two weeks before his first inauguration. That night he enjoyed a performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s A Masked Ball, an ominously portentous story about the assassination of a Swedish king. Though he was sometimes accompanied by his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, or friends, Lincoln enjoyed attending operas alone, and was especially fond of Faust by Charles Gounod, which he saw at least four times. Lincoln found these performances therapeutic amid the tribulations of his presidency, though according to the White House Historical Association, he was often criticized for spending so much time at the opera instead of focusing his attention on the ongoing Civil War. The 16th president defended his leisurely activities, saying, “I must have a change or I will die.”

A new ancient city was recently discovered.

  • Ancient Maya city of Calakmul
Ancient Maya city of Calakmul
Credit: Anne Lewis/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Nicole Villeneuve

December 18, 2024

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In the world of archaeology, advancements in technology have enabled discoveries that may never have happened otherwise, including that of an ancient Maya city. Located under dense jungle canopy in the southeastern Mexican state of Campeche, the lost city was rediscovered in October 2024 using lidar, a laser radar technology.

Lidar works by sending out laser light pulses from an aircraft and measuring how long they take to bounce back — not unlike how some animals use echolocation. The information helps create detailed maps of the Earth’s surface, showing things such as land shapes and structures. The site was discovered by researchers at Tulane University, but they didn’t deploy the radar themselves; they found a 2013 lidar survey of the area several pages deep into a Google search. The survey was initially done to measure carbon in Mexico’s forests, and the results had never been studied by archaeologists before. Once the research team processed the data, it was clear to them what they were looking at. 

The city, which the researchers named Valeriana after a nearby lagoon, had all the markings of a capital city. It’s thought that upwards of 50,000 people may have called Valeriana home at its peak between 750 and 850 CE — a population second only to that of Calakmul, one of the largest ancient Maya sites. The researchers determined that Valeriana was once home to pyramids, ball fields, dense housing, causeways connecting distinct districts, and amphitheaters. The exact reason for its eventual abandonment isn’t clear, but archaeologists suggest that, not unlike other Maya cities, its dense population could not be sustained when faced with challenging conditions such as drought. 

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The Maya ball game wasn’t just a sport — it was also political and spiritual.

The Maya are known for their ball game “pitz,” which was so central to their culture that some settlements, such as Chichén Itzá, had multiple courts dedicated to it. While the sport was indeed played for entertainment, it was also much more than that — it held a great deal of political and spiritual significance. Archaeologists believe the players used the trunks of their bodies to propel a heavy rubber ball to the other side of the court. The game was often played to settle conflicts and territory disputes, and captives of war could be forced to play, with the leader of the losing team sometimes being sacrificed. Pitz was also thought to symbolize the eternal struggle between life and death, light and darkness, and even the movement of celestial bodies, with the court itself serving as a connection to the underworld.

Some ancient languages have never been deciphered.

  • Examining Rosetta Stone
Examining Rosetta Stone
North Wind Picture Archives/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Darren Orf

October 26, 2023

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The discovery of the Rosetta Stone — an artifact featuring an inscription written in three ancient scripts — allowed Egyptologists to translate previously unintelligible hieroglyphics into fascinating facts of history. But when it comes to understanding ancient cultures through language, Egypt is a somewhat rare case. Experts still can’t decipher dozens of ancient languages, including the script of the Rapa Nui on Easter Island, texts belonging to the Olmec and Zapotec cultures in Mesoamerica, and the tongues of some of the oldest civilizations in history. 

One such civilization is the Kingdom of Kush, which flourished in Nubia (modern-day Sudan and southern Egypt) from around 1070 BCE to 350 CE. The kingdom rivaled ancient Egypt in splendor, but scholars can’t crack its language, named Meroitic for the capital city of Meroë. Another incredible example takes us eastward to the Minoan civilization that lived on the island of Crete, a culture that predated and inspired the ancient Greeks. Linguists have yet to fully decipher the texts, written in Linear A, that survive from this once-great Mediterranean power. But perhaps the greatest missing linguistic link is the Indus Valley language, spoken by the people who lived along the Indus River in modern-day Pakistan as far back as 7000 BCE. Although it rivaled other great civilizations such as ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, little is known about this early society, as its language has yet to be deciphered. Linguists hope that one day some ancient tablet, likely buried beneath the sands of Iraq or along the coast of Arabia, will contain a Rosetta Stone-like translation that finally brings to light this influential civilization whose voice has been lost to time.

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Europe’s oldest spoken language remains a linguistic mystery.

Euskara is the oldest language still spoken in Europe, and it’s also the continent’s most mysterious. Spoken by the people in Basque Country — an autonomous region in northern Spain and southwestern France — Euskara appears to have no relation to Romance and Germanic languages, which are both branches of the Indo-European language family.  This means the Basque tongue is very different from the languages spoken in the surrounding areas, such as French and Spanish. (The word for “thank you,” for example, is “gracias” in Spanish and “eskerrik asko” in Euskara.) Linguists aren’t sure where this strange tongue originated, but they do have a few guesses. One theory links Euskara with the Kartvelian languages spoken in the Caucasus region, particularly in modern-day Georgia. Other researchers suggest Euskara is a remnant of Iberian, a language spoken on the Iberian Peninsula before the arrival of the Romans in the second century BCE. Today, the Etxepare Euskal Institutua is working to promote and preserve Euskara. According to the group, the language is “vulnerable” within parts of Basque Country, but its survival is guaranteed.  

After World War I, people used X-rays to try on shoes.

  • Shoe-fitting fluoroscope
Shoe-fitting fluoroscope
Credit: Yakoniva/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Sarah Anne Lloyd

December 17, 2024

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There’s a reason we typically receive X-rays only in a medical setting: Without the proper precautions, radiation is extremely dangerous. But for several decades following the discovery of X-rays in 1895, most people didn’t think twice about sticking their feet inside unregulated X-ray machines at the shoe store. Shoe-fitting fluoroscopes, which show moving images in real time, were developed during World War I to examine injured soldiers’ feet without removing their boots. After the war, they were adapted for commercial use to help fit people for shoes, and they became staples at shoe stores in many countries, including the United States.

The machines were tall wooden or metal cabinets with an X-ray tube encased in lead at the base, and an alcove for the customer’s feet just above. When the fluoroscope was turned on, X-ray beams created an image on a fluorescent screen above the feet, which could be viewed through eyepieces on top of the cabinet. The devices were heavily marketed to mothers and children, and some machines had three eyepieces: one for the seller, one for the customer, and one for the parent.

While some experts raised alarms about the potential dangers of the machines in the 1920s and ’30s, the public became more acutely aware of the effects of radiation after World War II. States started regulating and testing shoe-fitting fluoroscopes in the late 1940s. At least one shoe store employee suffered radiation burns on her foot from a leaky machine, and medical experts warned that radiation exposure could damage kids’ growing bones. However, it’s impossible to determine how many people were hurt, since radiation injuries come on slowly and nobody at the time was keeping track of who was using the machines or for how long.

In 1957, Pennsylvania became the first state to ban the shoe-fitting X-rays altogether, and most other states followed suit over the next few years, effectively wiping out their use in the United States. 

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Radium water was initially considered a cure-all.

Nobel Prize-winning scientists Marie Curie and Pierre Curie discovered radium in 1898, and it was immediately heralded as a miracle substance; people used it to make toys, makeup, toothpaste, and even condoms. Some doctors claimed that a little radium in the water could cure just about anything, from anemia to impotence to arthritis.

Customers had a few options for getting radium (or radon) into their water: They could fill a radioactive jar or water crock, place a radioactive bar or stone into a nonradioactive water bottle, or take a shot of Radithor, an ounce of triple-distilled water with at least 1 microcurie each of radium and mesothorium. One can safely say that it was actually the opposite of a cure-all. Radithor in particular caused one of the first high-profile deaths by radium poisoning. Athlete and businessman Eben Byers championed the drink and consumed around three bottles a day, which ultimately led to his death just a few years later in 1932. Around the same time, the case of the Radium Girls, factory workers who were killed by exposure to radioactive paint, was making headlines, and the world’s love affair with all things radium started to fizzle out.

Alexander Graham Bell proposed using “ahoy” to answer the phone.

  • Old dial up telephone
Old dial up telephone
Janne Hamalainen/ Shutterstock
Author Bennett Kleinman

October 25, 2023

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“Ahoy” is an 18th-century term most commonly used as a nautical greeting, though it was nearly reappropriated as the standard greeting for answering the phone. This suggestion came from Alexander Graham Bell — the inventor of the telephone — who received a patent for the device on March 7, 1876. Bell made the first phone call to his assistant Thomas Watson three days later, speaking the historic words: “Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.” While that inaugural call lacked any special greeting, Bell proposed using “ahoy” as a suitable introduction for phone calls going forward. 

Bell’s contemporary Thomas Edison proposed an entirely different word for answering phone calls: “hello.” This relatively new term was first published in 1827, and despite its recency, Edison believed that “hello” was the perfect way to begin a phone call because it was easily distinguishable from other words. He first recommended using “hello” in an 1877 letter to the president of the Central District and Printing Telegraph Company of Pittsburgh, and the connection between “hello” and telephones only grew from there.

With both “ahoy” and “hello” as potential candidates, many early phone books accepted Edison’s suggestion, or derivations thereof. The very first phone book published — released by the Connecticut District Telephone Company in New Haven — recommended that readers begin phone calls with “a firm and cheery ‘hulloa.’” Other phone books of the time printed the term “hello” in their “how to” sections. By 1880, Bell’s “ahoy” suggestion fell by the wayside, while Edison’s “hello” was adopted as the standard.

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Alexander Graham Bell's middle name was a birthday present.

The inventor we know today as Alexander Graham Bell lacked a middle name when he was born on March 3, 1847. Christened Alexander Bell and known to his family simply as “Aleck,” the young boy spent the first 10 years of his life without a middle name, unlike his brothers Melville James Bell and Edward Charles Bell. After expressing his desire for a middle name — possibly to help differentiate himself from his father and grandfather, both of whom were named Alexander — the future inventor got his wish. On Bell’s 11th birthday, he was given permission to assume a middle name. He adopted the moniker “Graham,” taking inspiration from a temporary houseguest and former student of Bell’s father named Alexander Graham. The family admired the guest dearly, and rechristened their own son as Alexander Graham Bell in his honor.

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