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There’s an ancient pyramid in Rome.

  • Pyramid of Caius Cestius
Pyramid of Caius Cestius
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Author Darren Orf

September 12, 2023

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The word “pyramid” generally conjures up visions of the awe-inspiring stone tombs that dot Cairo’s skyline, but the ancient Egyptians didn’t have a monopoly on these triangular monuments. Pyramids can be found throughout Africa, India, and the Americas — and one can even be found in Rome, the ancient capital of the Roman Empire. Originally built around 12 BCE, and located only a mile south of the Roman Forum (at what is now a busy intersection), the Pyramid of Cestius is named after Caius Cestius, a little-known Roman magistrate who had an affinity for all things Egyptian. The structure stands less than 120 feet tall, which is almost four times smaller than the world-famous Great Pyramid of Giza, but it features far steeper slopes than Cairo’s collection of pyramids. Archaeologists believe this could be because Cestius simply had the wrong dimensions, or that he was inspired by tombs located farther south of modern-day Egypt in what is now Sudan, which feature similarly steep slopes. 

While the Pyramid of Cestius is the only surviving pyramid among Rome’s sprawling collection of ancient monuments, that wasn’t always the case. For centuries, the Meta Romuli, or Pyramid of Romulus, stood west of the Roman Forum and served as a kind of monumental twin to Cestius’ pyramid. In fact, during the Middle Ages, the Pyramid of Cestius was called the Meta Remi, and a legend grew that the two tombs housed the mythological founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus. Unlike the Pyramid of Cestius, the Meta Romuli did not survive Rome’s Renaissance-era building craze, and it was demolished for its materials. Today, the lone “twin” is the only ancient pyramid still standing on the European continent. 

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Sudan has more ancient pyramids than any other country.

Egypt is home to nearly 140 ancient pyramids, and Mexico boasts around the same number, thanks to Mesoamerican empires such as the Olmecs, Maya, and Aztecs. However, both countries pale in comparison to Sudan, which is home to upwards of 255 ancient pyramids by some counts. These funerary structures were built by an ancient civilization known as the Kingdom of Kush, which thrived (in various forms) from around 1070 BCE to 350 CE. The Kushites ruled a land known as Nubia stretching from Aswan, Egypt, to Khartoum, Sudan. Nubian kings built these smaller pyramids (typically less than 100 feet high) 500 years after their Egyptian neighbors had stopped building pyramids. Today, the best-preserved and highest concentration of pyramids are in the Meroë, the former capital of the Kushite kingdom, which is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Women wrote nearly all early Japanese literature.

  • The Tale of Genji book
The Tale of Genji book
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Author Michael Nordine

September 12, 2023

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There’s a good chance you already knew that The Tale of Genji was the world’s first novel, but it’s less likely that you knew it was written by a woman. Murasaki Shikibu, a lady-in-waiting at the imperial Japanese court, was the author in question, and she began a trend that lasted for centuries: women penning nearly all early literature that was written in the Japanese language. Aristocratic men eschewed their native tongue in favor of Chinese during the Heian period (794–1185), leaving women who were denied a formal education to rely on Japanese for personal and creative expression. The hiragana script, one of the language’s three syllabaries, was even referred to as onna-de, or “women’s hand.”

Shikibu wasn’t the only woman of her era to have a massive influence on Japanese literature. Of nearly equal importance were Sei Shōnagon, who wrote a book of observations on imperial court life called The Pillow Book, and the poet Izumi Shikibu. Considered by many to have been the foremost poet of her era, she’s especially well remembered for love poems such as “If the One I’ve Waited For”: “If the one I’ve waited for / came now, what should I do? / This morning’s garden filled with snow / is far too lovely / for footsteps to mar.” As the Heian period ended and the Kamakura period began, women found themselves in a lower position under the feudalistic government and had fewer opportunities to write. The literature of this era, which was written almost entirely by men, reflects the many wars that Japan experienced. 

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Haiku were originally part of longer poems.

The brief, evocative haiku has long been famous for its three-line structure and strict syllable count (five in the first line, seven in the second, five in the third). Though one of the world’s oldest poetic forms, it wasn’t originally intended as a stand-alone work. Haiku actually began as the opening of a renga, a “linked poem” written by several authors working together, which first appeared some 700 years ago. The first stanza was the hokku (“starting verse”), which consisted of three lines and 17 syllables and was written by one poet; the second stanza, composed by a different poet, was a couplet with seven syllables in each line. The third stanza mirrored the structure of the first, the fourth mirrored the second, and so on and so forth for as many as 100 stanzas. The haiku proved popular enough to eventually become its own form of poetry in the 16th century.

Shakespeare’s wife was named Anne Hathaway.

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Shakespeare's farewell
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Author Adam Levine

September 12, 2023

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The actress Anne Hathaway is well known for starring in hit films such as Les Misérables, The Princess Diaries, and The Devil Wears Prada, but what’s less well known is that she was named after the wife of famed playwright William Shakespeare. That Anne Hathaway was born in 1556, and grew up on a large farm in the village of Shottery, England, about a mile and a half away from Shakespeare’s hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon. William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway were married in 1582, after which Anne moved with William into the Shakespeare family home in Stratford.

Anne and William had three children: Susanna, born in 1583, and twins Judith and Hamnet, born in 1585. William spent much of his time away from his family working as a playwright in London, and it’s unknown whether he was at Anne’s side after the couple suffered a tragic loss when their son Hamnet died at the age of 11. In fact, little is known about the nature of Anne and William’s marriage. One of the few details historians have is that upon the Bard’s death, he left his wife his “second-best bed” in his will.  In England at that time, the best bed was typically reserved for guests, while the second-best bed was a couple’s marital bed, meaning William might have been giving Anne a sentimental gift to acknowledge the life they shared together. When Anne Shakespeare died in 1623, she was buried next to her husband in Stratford.

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Most of Uranus’ moons are named after Shakespeare characters.

In our solar system, most planets and the moons that orbit them are named after figures from Greek and Roman mythology. But the moons of Uranus are a notable exception: They take their names from characters in English literature, the vast majority of which are from Shakespeare plays. The planet’s two largest moons, Titania and Oberon, are named after the king and queen of the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Others include Ophelia (Hamlet’s doomed lover in Hamlet), Cordelia (the king’s youngest daughter in King Lear), and Miranda (one of the principal characters in The Tempest, the daughter of the sorcerer Prospero). Three of the names — Umbriel, Ariel, and Belinda — are characters from the poetry of Alexander Pope. But since Ariel is also a character in The Tempest, either 24 or 25 of the 27 moons of Uranus are named for Shakespeare characters, depending on how you count it.

Tomatoes were called “love apples” because they were believed to be aphrodisiacs.

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Bucket of tomatoes
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Author Adam Levine

September 6, 2023

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Today, tomatoes are so common and ubiquitous that some of us have no qualms sacrificing the juicy produce by chucking them at subpar performers. Yet prior to the early 16th century, tomatoes existed exclusively in their native South America. This all changed when Spanish colonizers began taking tomatoes home to Europe; the seeds of the tomato plant grew quite well there, and it was soon being cultivated throughout the continent. This unfamiliar, exotic fruit from the New World fascinated Europeans, not least of all in France, where tomatoes were referred to as “pomme d’amour,” or “love apples,” because they were believed to be an aphrodisiac.

The exact reason the French developed this belief in the tomato’s libidinous power is not known, but there’s at least one explanation often offered by historians. One of the earliest Europeans to write about tomatoes, Italian naturalist Pietro Andrea Mattioli, classified the tomato as a member of the nightshade family, and referred to it as a “mandrake” (another nightshade plant). Mandrakes were widely considered an aphrodisiac in 16th-century Europe — in fact, they appear in the Bible as the key ingredient in a love potion, and their name in Hebrew translates to “love apples.” It’s possible the French assumed that the novel “mandrake” the Spanish brought from the New World shared the same erotic potency as its biblical counterpart.

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Europeans once thought tomatoes were poisonous.

The belief that tomatoes were aphrodisiacs wasn’t the only misconception that 16th-century Europeans had about the strange new fruit. For more than two centuries after tomatoes were introduced from South America, many Europeans believed they were poisonous, and they acquired the sinister nickname “poison apples.” This false belief in the tomato’s toxicity might have had something to do with one of its infamous relatives, the highly toxic belladonna plant. Another possibility is that Europeans thought tomatoes were poisonous because some aristocrats actually did occasionally fall ill or even die after eating them. This sickness wasn’t caused by the tomatoes, though — at least, not directly. Rather, many wealthy people would eat off of pewter plates, which contained high quantities of lead. The acid in the tomatoes would cause the lead to leach out of the pewter and into people’s food, causing lead poisoning. Until the real reason for these mysterious illnesses was discovered, many people believed — quite unfairly — that a toxin contained in the tomato itself was to blame.

Blue jelly beans were created for Ronald Reagan.

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Jar of jelly beans
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Author Bennett Kleinman

September 6, 2023

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All presidents have their culinary pleasures, from James Madison’s passion for ice cream to George H.W. Bush’s fondness for pork rinds. But few presidents loved snacks to the degree that Ronald Reagan loved jelly beans, a food that he initially relied on to help kick his pipe smoking habit in 1966. At the time, Reagan’s preferred brand was Goelitz Mini Jelly Beans, which were produced by an Oakland-based company that sent Reagan monthly shipments while he served as governor of California. In 1976, one year after Reagan left that office, the company introduced the Jelly Belly brand, which became the politician’s favorite (particularly the licorice flavor). When Reagan was elected president, the company even developed new blue beans in honor of his presidential inauguration in 1981.

Reagan requested red, white, and blue jelly beans for the event, figuring it would be a fittingly patriotic spread. Jelly Belly already had red- and white-colored beans (Very Cherry and coconut, respectively), but there was no blue jelly bean at the time. To remedy this, Jelly Belly made a new blueberry-flavored bean to complete the trifecta of American colors. When the day of Reagan’s inauguration arrived in January 1981, Jelly Belly sent a 3.5-ton shipment of jelly beans to the White House to commemorate the occasion. After Reagan took office, his administration gave Jelly Belly the OK to produce jars decorated with the presidential seal, which the president handed out as gifts to foreign dignitaries and other notable figures.

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Thomas Jefferson recorded one of America’s first ice cream recipes.

Before becoming the third U.S. president, Thomas Jefferson served as a global ambassador in Europe. Upon returning to the U.S., he helped popularize a number of foreign foods, including tomatoes, macaroni and cheese, and french fries. Though he didn’t invent it, Jefferson was also among the first Americans to record a recipe for ice cream. One of 10 surviving recipes penned in Jefferson’s hand, the ice cream recipe likely dates to the founder’s time in France (1784 to 1789), where Jefferson was most likely introduced to the food by his French butler, Adrien Petit. When Jefferson returned to America, his inventory included “quatre moules à glace” (four ice molds), allowing him to prepare the treat stateside. The recipe was a simple one, including two bottles of “good cream,” six egg yolks, and a half pound of sugar, which were then mixed, boiled, stirred, and set in ice. There are no fewer than six recorded instances of White House guests being served the dessert during Jefferson’s presidency (1801 to 1809), often inside a pastry.

Oregon was the first state to make Labor Day a holiday.

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Oregon state flag
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Author Sarah Anne Lloyd

August 24, 2023

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Labor Day, celebrated on the first Monday in September in the United States, honors workers and their contributions to the nation. Congress passed a bill signed by President Grover Cleveland making it an official federal holiday in 1894, but state observations date back to 1887. Five different states observed Labor Day that year, but Oregon came first; the state’s bill to recognize the holiday became law on February 21, 1887. 

Strangely — and of little use to people with weekday work schedules — Oregon’s first Labor Day was celebrated not in September, but the first Saturday in June. After Colorado, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York each passed laws recognizing Labor Day on the now-traditional September date, Oregon moved its own observance to match. The September date comes from the first-ever Labor Day demonstration, which was organized by the Central Labor Union (a coalition of local labor unions) and held in New York City on September 5, 1882. It included a one-day strike, a parade, and, fitting with more modern Labor Day celebrations, a giant picnic. Unlike May Day, an international observance on May 1 that commemorates the 1886 Haymarket Riot in Chicago, there was no particular significance to the timing of the demonstration — it likely just fell roughly between the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving on the calendar. In the ensuing years, pro-worker demonstrations on the first Monday in September started cropping up throughout the country, eventually gaining enough steam to become a national holiday.

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The U.S. federal minimum wage didn’t exist until 1938.

Though the United States government recognized a holiday for workers as early as 1894, it took more than 40 more years for the country to enshrine certain workplace protections we take for granted today, such as the 40-hour workweek, the minimum wage, and even the end of child labor. The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), signed in June 1938, implemented protections for minors, limited the hours employees were obligated to work per week (44), and set a minimum compensation (25 cents an hour). The law had originally called for a 40-cent minimum wage and 40-hour workweek, but the bill met significant opposition at the time. Ultimately, it took more than a year and multiple revisions to finally push the legislation through. 

Forks were considered sinful in the Middle Ages.

  • Fork and knife table setting
Fork and knife table setting
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Author Adam Levine

September 6, 2023

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While forks are now a mundane and commonplace item at most dining room tables, they were once quite controversial. In the Middle Ages, many Christian Europeans considered the act of eating with a fork to be a sinful affront to God. According to some clergymen of the time, God had already given human beings 10 natural forks, in the form of the fingers on their own hands, so daring to use an artificial accessory to spear food was an offense to the Lord and his divine gifts. Not only did using a fork insult the fingers that God gifted to humanity, the thinking went, but it also insulted the food God had provided: To use a fork meant you thought the Lord’s bounty was unworthy of being touched by your hands. Forks were so frowned upon in medieval European society that when a Byzantine princess living in Venice died of the plague, her death was said to be God’s punishment for her ostentatious and hubristic custom of eating her food with a fork.

The supposedly sinful nature of forks is likely one reason it took so long for the utensils to become widely accepted by European society. While forks had existed since the days of ancient Egypt and ancient Greece, they were predominantly used for cooking, and rarely, if ever, appeared for personal use at the dinner table. Using forks for eating wasn’t a regular practice in Europe until the 17th century, and even then their popularity was limited largely to the aristocracy. It wasn’t until the late 19th century that forks became widely accepted at all levels of European society as the everyday eating utensils we know today.

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Chopsticks became popular in part because Confucius was opposed to knives.

The evolution of eating utensils took a different path in Asia than it did in Europe, and one of the most notable distinctions between the two culinary cultures is the widespread use of chopsticks in Asian cooking and dining. Archaeological evidence suggests that chopsticks were used in ancient Chinese societies dating back to at least 1200 BCE, when they were used to pull food from boiling pots. Much like the fork, chopsticks made a gradual migration from the kitchen to the dining table. By 400 CE, a shortage of cooking fuel across Asia forced chefs to chop food into smaller pieces that would cook faster, and as a result, diners began using chopsticks to eat, as there was no need for knives. This practice was also expedited due to the teachings of the influential philosopher Confucius (551 to 479 BCE), who wrote that “the honorable and upright man… allows no knives on his table.” Confucius preached a philosophy of nonviolence, and viewed both forks and knives as violent weapons that were more suitable for killing than for eating. The use of chopsticks became deeply ingrained in Chinese culture, and soon became ubiquitous in countries across Asia.

The New York Philharmonic had to ask the audience not to knit during concerts.

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NY Philharmonic musicians
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Author Bennett Kleinman

September 6, 2023

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There are few hobbies more perfectly aligned than knitting and listening to classical music. But in 1915, Americans took their zeal for needlework a bit too far, forcing the New York Philharmonic to request that its audience refrain from knitting during live musical performances. 

At the time, knitting was promoted as a patriotic act to support soldiers fighting in World War I. Even though the United States didn’t officially join the war until 1917, organizations such as the American Red Cross encouraged U.S. citizens to knit warm clothing to aid in the Allied war effort. People knitted everywhere, from buses to courtrooms and even while attending shows at Carnegie Hall. However, the clacking of needles proved distracting to performers and audience members alike, prompting the New York Philharmonic to take action. A program dated February 7, 1915, stated, “the Directors respectfully request that [knitting], which interferes with the artistic enjoyment of the music, be omitted.” 

Knitting was one of many ways that Americans back home supported the war effort. In 1917, future President Herbert Hoover, who was then head of the U.S. Food Administration, pondered ways to supply soldiers with heartier meals. Hoover asked Americans to participate in “Meatless Tuesdays” and “Wheatless Wednesdays,” leading to more than 10 million households pledging to use potato flour and chicken instead of wheat flour and beef. The Hoover administration later published a cookbook titled Victory Recipes of the Great War, featuring dishes such as a “camouflage roast” made of peanuts, and a lima bean “mock sausage” for “Porkless Saturday.”

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The New York Philharmonic is America’s oldest symphonic orchestra.

The New York Philharmonic is a legendary institution founded in 1842, making it the oldest symphony orchestra in the United States. It’s also among the historic “Big Five” orchestras around the country, along with the Boston Symphony Orchestra (founded in 1881), Chicago Symphony Orchestra (1891), Philadelphia Orchestra (1900), and Cleveland Orchestra (1918). The New York Philharmonic has premiered some of classical music’s most indelible works, including composer Antonín Dvořák’s  From the New World symphony in 1893. Despite this prestigious history, it can’t claim the title of the oldest orchestra in the world: That record belongs to the Royal Danish Orchestra, a European musical giant that first recruited musicians in 1448 and continues to perform today.

Parts from the original Wright Flyer have been to space.

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Wright Flyer, 1903
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Author Adam Levine

September 6, 2023

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On December 17, 1903, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, aviators Orville and Wilbur Wright achieved the world’s first motor-powered airplane flight. On that historic flight, the Wright brothers’ aircraft, the Wright Flyer, reached an altitude of just 8 feet and traveled a distance of 120 feet. Little did anyone know that just 66 years later, parts of that very same plane would travel much higher and much farther — all the way to the moon.

When astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the moon on July 20, 1969, he brought with him two fragments from the original Wright Flyer: a 1.25-square-inch piece of muslin fabric cut from the aircraft’s left wing, and a piece of spruce wood taken from the left propeller. Armstrong carried the pieces inside his “personal preference kit,” a small bag of personal items that each of the Apollo 11 astronauts was allowed to bring with them into the lunar module for their journey. But Armstrong wasn’t content to simply treat the Wright Flyer artifacts as carry-on luggage — he placed the fabric and wood inside a pocket of his space suit and walked with them on the lunar surface. In this way, Armstrong was able to pay tribute to the Wright brothers, whose pioneering work ushered in the age of aviation that made the Apollo 11 mission possible.

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There is currently a falcon feather lying next to a hammer on the surface of the moon.

The Wright brothers aren’t the only historical figures whose work received a tribute on the surface of the moon. Pioneering astronomer Galileo Galilei also received a memorable homage on a moonwalk by astronaut David Scott during the Apollo 15 mission in 1971. In order to demonstrate Galileo’s physical principle that all objects fall at the same rate under the influence of gravity regardless of their mass, Scott performed a modified version of the legendary experiment in which the Italian scientist dropped two balls of different masses off the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Instead of two balls, Scott chose to drop two items with an even more dramatic disparity in their masses: a hammer and feather. On Earth, it would take the feather much longer to hit the ground because the planet’s dense atmosphere would create air resistance that would slow the feather’s fall. But on the moon, where there is almost no atmosphere and air resistance is negligible, Scott’s experiment was a resounding success: The hammer and feather fell to the lunar surface at exactly the same rate. Before performing the experiment, Scott acknowledged Galileo’s contributions to physics, calling him “one of the reasons we got here today.” The two items are still lying side by side on the surface of the moon — a lasting tribute to Galileo’s scientific achievements.

Victorian England had special teacups for men with mustaches.

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Mustache cup
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Author Bennett Kleinman

September 6, 2023

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Mustaches were a fashionable choice during Britain’s Victorian era, but life with a bushy upper lip wasn’t without its challenges, especially when it came to enjoying a hot cup of tea. Englishmen often used mustache wax to style their facial hair, which melted straight off their upper lip into the warm drink. In response to this predicament, an inventor named Harvey Adams developed an ingenious workaround in the 1870s: the “mustache cup.” The cup featured a traditional shape, with an added built-in ceramic ledge for men to rest their mustaches against, as well as a tiny hole for liquid to pass through. Effectively, it was an adult sippy cup. The mustache cups came in a wide variety of sizes, including larger “farmers’ cups” for pints of tea and tiny porcelain cups embossed with the owner’s name. These teacups were popular not just in the U.K., but also in the U.S., where they were sold at stores such as Sears and Marshall Field’s.

Believe it or not, the mustache cup wasn’t the only 19th-century kitchen invention inspired by facial hair. In 1868, a New York engineer named Solon Farrer created the mustache spoon, which was essentially a spoon with a lid that lifted up. In 1873, inventor Ellen B. A. Mitcheson tweaked Farrer’s idea and submitted a patent of her own. Mitcheson’s version added a piece of holed-out metal to the side of the spoon that rested against the lip, thus keeping the mustache from coming into direct contact while slurping down soup. The concept was largely similar in design to the mustache cup, allowing hot liquids to travel through a tiny hole in the spoon while maintaining those perfectly waxed whiskers.

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French waiters went on strike in 1907 for the right to grow mustaches.

Facial hair was strictly regulated in France around the turn of the 20th century, as French elites attempted to co-opt the mustache as a class symbol. This meant that people who weren’t members of the upper class, including waiters, domestic workers, and even priests, were forbidden from growing mustaches, which led to widespread pushback. Tensions came to a head in April 1907, when a group of French waiters participated in a strike to demand the freedom to grow facial hair, as well as benefits such as higher pay. The waiters were fed up with forced shaving, and the decision to strike left high-end Parisian restaurants losing roughly 25,000 francs per day in revenue. A bill was introduced to outlaw mustache bans across France, though it initially failed. Despite this bureaucratic shortcoming, many waiters at individual restaurants across the country successfully earned the right to wear mustaches, though their wages remained stagnant.

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