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Rowdy sports fans nearly overthrew a Roman emperor.

  • Ancient chariot race
Ancient chariot race
Credit: Keith Lance/ iStock
Author Sarah Anne Lloyd
June 17, 2024

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Ancient Romans were fanatical about chariot races, and were devoted to one of four teams: the Reds, Whites, Greens, or Blues. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE, the four teams consolidated into two, the Greens and Blues. The rivalry was more potent than ever, and often led to violence. In Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul), the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, competitions took place at the local hippodrome, an arena with a capacity of more than 60,000. In 532 CE, the bitter sports rivals, enraged by some recent tax increases, found a common enemy in Emperor Justinian I. After some particularly nasty fighting broke out at the hippodrome, Justinian, a longtime Blues fan, put his foot down, relinquished his fandom, and sent for the military. He sentenced seven leaders in the fighting to death, but two of them, one fan from each team, survived when the hanging scaffolding broke.

At the next big chariot race, the Greens were resentful of Justinian’s longtime preference for the Blues, the Blues were angry that Justinian was no longer a fan, and both demanded that the two riot leaders be spared. Both teams started chanting “nika,” meaning “win,” but they were cheering less for the charioteers and more for a violent revolt against the emperor. The crowd poured out into the streets, and the ensuing riot went on for five days. On the last day, the rioters returned to the hippodrome and attempted to install a new leader. Justinian was ready to retreat, but his wife, Theodora, convinced him to hold his ground. Troops stormed the hippodrome and massacred the crowd, while some soldiers guarded the exits to make sure nobody could escape. The death toll was around 30,000, or around 10% of the city’s population. Justinian reigned for another 33 years, until 565 CE.

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Ancient Roman sports fans would try to curse the other team.

When ancient Romans wanted to invoke the supernatural to manipulate others, they’d create a “curse tablet,” a thin sheet of lead carved with an inscription directing a deity of their choice to step in. (They weren’t limited to one religious tradition, and the specific deity was sometimes unspecified or represented in an image rather than text.) Charioteers were common targets: Dedicated fans and gamblers with money on the line would try to curse the athletes to fix the race’s outcome, burying the tablets in the hippodrome or hiding them behind turning posts along the track or at the starting gates. One tablet found in 1984 curses the Blue and Red factions, naming individual horses and riders; one found under a race venue in Antioch in 1934 curses each individual Blue horse, invoking various Greek gods and demigods; and another dating back to the fifth century CE calls upon god and angels to drown the opposition.

Pretzels were invented by Catholic monks.

  • Snack board with pretzels
Snack board with pretzels
Paul Biñas/ Unsplash
Author Adam Levine
August 3, 2023

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Though it is a ubiquitous, even mundane snack today, the humble pretzel actually has a spiritual origin: It was invented by Catholic monks at the beginning of the Middle Ages and, according to legend, was imbued with religious symbolism. Most historians trace the origin of the pretzel to around 610 CE in a monastery in either Italy or France, and some scholars believe that the iconic twisted shape was meant to resemble children with their arms crossed in prayer. In fact, according to some sources, the modern name “pretzel” is derived from the old German word “brezel,” which comes from the Latin “bracchiātus,” which roughly translates to “little folded arms.”

The pretzel’s connections to the Catholic Church persisted throughout the Middle Ages. Images of pretzels began appearing in religious manuscripts of the time, and the food was frequently used in Easter games and hung on Christmas trees in the 16th century. While most people no longer associate pretzels with the divine (unless they’re really, really good), these salty snacks have never fully left their religious origins behind: They’re still commonly eaten by Catholics during Lent. Since they were baked without milk, pretzels were also a perfect food for the fasting tradition, when most Christians abstain from consuming dairy products.

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Monks founded the world’s oldest operating brewery.

Pretzels aren’t the only Super Bowl party mainstay that can be traced back to European monks. There’s also a long monastic tradition of brewing beer — in fact, the world’s oldest continuously operating brewery was founded by monks nearly 1,000 years ago. The Weihenstephan Abbey in Bavaria, Germany, began brewing beer as early as 1040 CE (though some sources cite 1146 as the founding date), and still sells its beers internationally today. The abbey’s monastic brotherhood was dissolved in 1803 when ownership passed to the government and the Benedictine monastery officially became the Bavarian State Brewery. Despite this change in management, the long tradition of brewing beer at Weihenstephan is still going strong today.

Agriculture is why so many people need braces.

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Orthodontic teeth model
sujit kantakat/ Shutterstock
Author Darren Orf
August 2, 2023

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Braces have become so commonplace in the U.S. that wearing them is almost a rite of passage; data suggests that about 50% of children in the U.S. will need orthodontic treatment at some point, mostly due to misaligned teeth. But that wasn’t always the case. The advent of agriculture changed the human diet, which led to a smaller jaw that no longer has enough space to provide a comfy home for all 32 teeth. Before humans took to the plow around 10,000 BCE, our hunter-gatherer predecessors chowed down on tougher foods, such as uncooked vegetables and hard-shelled nuts, and needed bigger, stronger jaws to munch through them. When farming introduced softer foods into our diet, such as beans and cereals, the need for those beefy jaws declined. Our jaws got smaller over the generations, but human teeth shrank at a much slower rate, resulting in the dental traffic jam experienced by millions of Americans every year. 

In 2015, to test whether the rise of agriculture led to our species’ crooked teeth, scientists from University College Dublin analyzed the lower jaws of 292 skeletons ranging from 28,000 to 6,000 years old. The results were clear: Hunter-gatherers sported larger jaws, especially lower jaws, than their farming descendants only a few thousand years in the future. And our mouths weren’t the only body part impacted by Homo sapiens’ more sedentary existence. Additional studies show that humans developed lighter and less dense bones around joints due to a changed diet that reduced calcium intake and a less-active lifestyle brought on by the switch from foraging to farming.

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Our forager ancestors may have had more leisure time than we do.

When it comes to downtime, it’s likely that our hunter-gatherer ancestors had more than we do. In 2019, anthropologists from the University of Cambridge studied Indigenous Agta tribes in the northern Philippines, where some groups were beginning to adopt agriculture while others remained foragers. The scientists discovered that as the Agta introduced farming, they slowly lost leisure time. While Agta foragers worked roughly 20 hours per week on finding food and other domestic chores, farmers worked 30 or more. (Industrialization only increased this, especially before 19th-century labor laws standardized the 40-hour workweek.) This evidence supports a theory first proposed in the 1960s that hunter-gatherers were actually the “original affluent society” — they worked less than we do today, enjoyed abundant leisure time, and had fewer material desires, making them more easily satisfied.

The Egyptian pyramids were originally polished white.

  • Ancient Pyramids of Giza
Ancient Pyramids of Giza
Les Anderson/ Unsplash
Author Adam Levine
August 3, 2023

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Today, the famous pyramids of Giza are known as sand-colored monuments that seem to blend into the surrounding desert, but they were originally built to stand out in spectacular fashion. When the pyramids were first erected about 4,500 years ago to mark the tombs of Egyptian pharaohs, they were covered with a polished white limestone that would have sparkled in the sun and made the already-imposing structures even more dazzling. 

According to ancient papyrus scrolls written by people who actually participated in the construction of the pyramids, workers transported boats filled with limestone up the Nile River to the building site in Giza. The limestone casing stones were thoroughly polished in order to increase their luster, and each one weighed upwards of 15 tons. The fact that these massive polished stones were used to encase the entirety of each pyramid, fitted together perfectly to create a nearly seamless white exterior, is a testament to the engineering genius of the ancient Egyptians. Over the centuries, most of the limestone exterior of the pyramids has been destroyed, worn away, or stripped for use in other construction projects, but faint remnants of weathered white limestone can be seen toward the top of Giza’s Pyramid of Khafre — the last remaining architectural evidence of what pyramids looked like in the days of the pharaohs.

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The world’s largest pyramid is actually located in Mexico.

Although pyramids are most commonly associated with Egypt, the world’s largest pyramid is located not in Egypt, but in Mexico. The Great Pyramid of Cholula, found in the city of Cholula in central Mexico, is more than 1,400 feet wide and has a volume of 157 million cubic feet — nearly double the volume of the Great Pyramid of Giza (although it is shorter). The Great Pyramid of Cholula was constructed gradually over several centuries by multiple Mesoamerican civilizations, including the Olmecs and the Toltecs, and was built to honor the god Quetzalcóatl. Despite its record-holding status, the Great Pyramid of Cholula isn’t world famous, which might be due in part to the fact that it’s hidden under a hill and topped by a 16th-century Spanish church. Nevertheless, the structure remains an impressive reminder that the ancient Egyptians were far from the only civilization capable of building these staggering feats of engineering.

Daniel Boone didn’t actually wear a raccoon-skin cap.

  • Pioneer Daniel Boone
Pioneer Daniel Boone
Credit: Christine_Kohler/ iStock
Author Michael Nordine
June 11, 2024

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If you know one thing about Daniel Boone, it’s probably that he wore a raccoon-skin fur cap. But alas, it turns out you might know zero things about the legendary frontiersman, as Boone never wore such a head covering at all. “My father, Daniel Boone, always despised the raccoon fur caps and did not wear one himself,”  his son Nathan Boone said in an 1851 interview with historian Lyman Draper. The elder Boone instead preferred a wide-brimmed, Quaker-style hat made of felt or beaver fur, which would have offered better protection from the elements and shielded his eyes from the sun during his many long hunting trips.

We may have an actor named Noah Ludlow (1795–1886) to thank for the myth of Boone’s raccoon-skin cap. He was hired to make frames for prints of a portrait of Boone first painted by artist Chester Harding in 1820. Later, he played a character in a performance called “The Hunters of Kentucky” and drew inspiration from Boone to create his look, which included the cap we now associate with the storied frontiersman. The performances were a hit, which was good for Ludlow, but not so much for historical accuracy.

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Daniel Boone may not be buried in his own grave.

Perhaps fittingly for a folk hero, another key aspect of Boone’s life (and, in this case, death) might not be accurate: his final resting place. After passing away in Defiance, Missouri, Boone was interred next to his wife Rebecca Boone in a cemetery in Marthasville, Missouri. Then, 25 years later, the couple’s descendants were persuaded to have the remains exhumed and reinterred in a cemetery in Frankfort, Kentucky. The descendants were promised that the site’s owners would erect a monument to Boone, who was especially beloved in the Bluegrass State. The reinterment has been described as “perhaps the largest celebration event in Kentucky history,” with just one problem: It’s possible that the wrong graves were dug up and thus someone else’s remains were transferred to the new cemetery. Two forensics experts have examined Boone’s supposed skull, but neither offered conclusive evidence either way.

The first candid photograph of a person was taken in 1838.

  • Boulevard du Temple, 1838
Boulevard du Temple, 1838
Credit: Science History Images/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Kerry Hinton
June 11, 2024

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Before the 19th century, photography did not exist, so people who wanted a lasting image of their home, their family, or themselves had to have one painted, sculpted, or drawn. In the early 1800s, inventors in France and England were at the center of the effort to create photographic representations of objects and people. In France, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce stunned the world in 1827 when he released what is believed to be the first photograph ever taken, titled “View from the Window at Le Gras.” Niépce rendered the image using a camera obscura combined with a light-sensitive metal plate, a process he called heliography. Despite its success, the heliograph required several days of exposure to capture the scene, eliminating the opportunity to photograph any people who may have been on the street.

In 1829, Niépce met artist and printmaker Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre. Each man was familiar with the other’s work. Niépce admired Daguerre’s rotating diorama that had captivated Parisian audiences in 1822. Daguerre, like Niépce, saw the potential of improving upon the camera obscura to create clear and permanent images. They entered into a business partnership that resulted in the creation of the daguerreotype, an innovative photographic process that required only four to five minutes of exposure. 

The quicker shutter speed allowed Daguerre’s camera to capture an image never seen before: a photo of a human being. In 1838, he debuted a daguerreotype of a street scene on the Boulevard du Temple in Paris. In the lower left corner of the photo we can see a man having his shoes shined; remaining stationary allowed him to be included in the photo, something that would have been impossible using the multiple-day exposure that heliographs required. This anonymous stranger on Boulevard du Temple was not simply the subject of the world’s first candid photograph — he’s also believed to be the first human being ever photographed.

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An American photographer took the first selfie in 1839.

In the fall of 1839, a Philadelphia silversmith named Robert Cornelius decided to take a self-portrait. In itself, this was nothing new; painters had been making self-portraits for more than 200 years. What set this work apart from that of the old masters was that Cornelius used a camera obscura to photograph himself. The resulting image is considered the first selfie, as well as the first portrait photo. Cornelius was an unlikely photography pioneer. He began working as a silversmith for his father in 1831 and had no connection to the burgeoning field of photography. Fate intervened when a local photographer named Joseph Saxton contacted Cornelius to work on the silver plate for a daguerreotype. This spurred Cornelius’ interest in photography, and in the early fall of 1839, he made his own camera and photographed himself in front of the family’s business. According to Library of Congress conservationist Rachel Wetzel, “Taking a portrait is astounding in 1839. Taking a self-portrait is a whole next level up from that.”

Martin Van Buren was the first President born in the United States.

  • Martin Van Buren portrait
Martin Van Buren portrait
mashuk/ DigitalVision Vectors via Getty Images
Author Adam Levine
August 2, 2023

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None of the United States Presidents in the first 61 years of the nation’s existence were actually born in the country they led. The reason for this is simple enough: The first seven U.S. Presidents — George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, and Andrew Jackson — were all born before 1776, and therefore before the United States was an independent nation. The first President who could actually claim to have been born a U.S. citizen was the country’s eighth President, Martin Van Buren. Van Buren was born in 1782 in Kinderhook, New York, which also makes him the first native of the Empire State to be elected to the presidency. 

Before becoming President in 1837, Van Buren served as Vice President under Andrew Jackson (who himself was born in 1767 in a territory disputed between the British colonies of North and South Carolina). Jackson’s endorsement helped elevate Van Buren to the nation’s highest office. However, his presidency was marked by a severe economic downturn, which sunk his bid for a second term. He was defeated in his campaign for reelection by William Henry Harrison, who was born in Virginia in 1773, making him the last U.S. President to come into the world a subject of the British Empire. 

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English was Martin Van Buren’s second language.

Martin Van Buren may have been the first President born in the United States, but his first language wasn’t English — it was Dutch. His family’s roots in Kinderhook, New York, extended back before the nation’s founding, and even before New York was a British colony. Van Buren could trace his heritage to Dutch immigrants who settled in the Kinderhook area in 1631, when New York was known as New Netherland. Even after control of the colony passed from the Dutch to the English, Kinderhook remained an overwhelmingly Dutch community, and the young Van Buren grew up speaking the Dutch language until he learned English in school, and became fluent in his teens.

Mark Twain was known to rent cats when he traveled.

  • Mark Twain holding a cat
Mark Twain holding a cat
Chronicle/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Darren Orf
August 2, 2023

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Samuel Clemens, known to literary history as Mark Twain, once wrote that “when a man loves cats, I am his friend and comrade, without further introduction.” Those are not the words of someone for whom cats are a passing fascination. In fact, the writer likely enjoyed the company of felines over people. At one time, Twain owned 19 cats, many with inventive monikers such as Soapy Sal and Sour Mash. So deep was his ailurophilia (love of cats), Twain even rented furry felines for company when he traveled. As he wrote in his autobiography, “Many persons would like to have the society of cats during the summer vacation in the country, but they deny themselves this pleasure… These people have no ingenuity, no invention, no wisdom; or it would occur to them to do as I do: rent cats by the month for the summer, and return them to their good homes at the end of it.”

In 1906, while staying for the summer in Dublin, New Hampshire, Twain procured the companionship of three kittens from a local farmer’s wife (he got a discount if he took three) — one named Sackcloth and the other two, identical twins, both called Ashes. One of Twain’s biographers, who visited the author during his stay, recalled Twain holding open a screen door for two waiting kittens, saying, “Walk in, gentlemen. I always give precedence to royalty.” Twain’s rental payment covered expenses for the cats’ care for the rest of their lives.

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Cats are not nearly as domesticated as dogs.

Although cats and dogs are the most popular pets of choice in the U.S., cats are far less domesticated than their canine counterparts. Dogs began their journey to becoming man’s best friend in the Paleolithic era some 30,000 years ago, and today they exhibit many of the telltale signs of domestication, including decreased tooth size and docility. Cats, on the other hand? Not so much. Studies have shown that the Felis catus (the scientific name for your kitty) isn’t genetically far removed from Felis silvestris, its wild cousin. Cats likely first started fraternizing with humans when the rise of agriculture increased rat populations, creating a symbiotic relationship. But because wild cats aren’t social or hierarchical animals, they weren’t as easily integrated into human societies as wolves were, which is why house cats retain their hunting instincts while many dog breeds rely on humans to survive. Some scientists argue that cats are actually in a “semi-domesticated” state and that we are only at the beginning of the domestication process. It would certainly explain why they remain frustratingly (if adorably) aloof — always making us question whether they serve us, or we serve them.

Winston Churchill had a doctor’s note to let him drink alcohol during Prohibition.

  • Churchill in 1935
Churchill in 1935
Fremantle / Alamy Stock Photo
Author Bennett Kleinman
August 2, 2023

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From the 18th Amendment’s ratification on January 16, 1919, until its repeal in 1933, Prohibition dominated American society. Most libation lovers were forced to either give up alcohol or acquire it by illicit means, while other cunning boozehounds conceived of clever workarounds. One such individual was British statesman Winston Churchill, who capitalized on an otherwise unfortunate accident he suffered on December 13, 1931. After being struck by a vehicle while crossing Fifth Avenue in New York City, Churchill experienced great pain, for which his doctor conveniently prescribed alcohol as a treatment — though it was likely Churchill himself who requested this specific “medicine.” Otto C. Pickhardt, M.D., wrote, “Churchill necessitates the use of alcoholic spirits especially at meal times,” thus permitting the future prime minister to skirt the law during his stateside visits. Pickhardt described the dosage as “naturally indefinite,” but no less than “250 cubic centimeters” of hooch. 

Churchill’s case was far from unusual, as pharmacies often prescribed alcohol as “medicine” during Prohibition due to the lucrative payoffs. It was one of several methods Churchill used to finagle his way around Prohibition; he once visited an American speakeasy, wryly quipping that he only did so as a “Social Investigator.” Churchill’s drinking wasn’t to be impeded upon by laws or religion, as he once imbibed in the presence of Saudi King Ibn Saud. Churchill used an interpreter to explain, “[M]y religion prescribed as an absolute sacred ritual smoking cigars and drinking alcohol before, after, and if need be during, all meals and the intervals between them.”

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Maine was the first U.S. state to ban alcohol in 1851.

Long before Prohibition, local temperance movements around the U.S. sought to limit the consumption of liquor. Though several localities succeeded in doing so, Maine became the first to ban alcohol on a statewide level, thanks to the Maine Law of 1851. The law was the brainchild of Neal Dow, who served as the mayor of Portland starting in 1851, but was involved in anti-alcohol movements for many years prior. On June 2, 1851, the Maine Law passed successfully, though the backlash was significant enough that it was ultimately repealed just five years later. Maine’s temperance movement remained strong, however, and the prohibition of alcohol was later written into the state constitution in 1885. After Prohibition ended nationwide in 1933, Maine allowed its residents to imbibe again, though several other states embraced the anti-alcohol lifestyle for decades to come. Mississippi was the final holdout among them, keeping Prohibition-era laws on the books until 1966.

Sideburns are named after a Union general in the Civil War.

  • Ambrose Everett Burnside
Ambrose Everett Burnside
John Parrot/Stocktrek Images via Getty Images
Author Adam Levine
August 2, 2023

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While we may never know the first person to wear sideburns, we do know the origin of the word. The popular facial hair style gets its name from a single individual: Major General Ambrose Burnside (1824-1881), a Union general in the Civil War who later became governor of Rhode Island. 

By all accounts, including his own, Burnside was a terrible general. He was appointed to a post as Commander of the Army of the Potomac in spite of his own protests, and his time in the role proved disastrous. He led the Union Army to a devastating defeat in the Battle of Fredericksburg in 1862, as well as a second failed Fredericksburg offensive campaign known unflatteringly as the “Mud March.” Shortly thereafter, he was relieved of command. But while his military career didn’t exactly make history, Burnside managed to earn lasting fame for his facial hair — a distinct variation on muttonchop whiskers. As early as 1866, newspapers began referring to the general’s signature facial hair as “Burnside whiskers,” and the term evolved over time into just “sideburns.” 

While the name now refers to any simple strip of hair grown down the side of the face, the original sideburns sported by General Burnside were a bit more elaborate: The look consisted of thick, bushy whiskers that joined in a luxurious mustache above a clean-shaven chin. That style eventually fell out of fashion (though perhaps some brave tastemaker will bring it back), but Burnside’s legacy lives on in the form of the more modest, trimmed sideburns that are still seen today.

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Ambrose Burnside was left at the altar by a future Confederate spy.

In 1849, when Ambrose Burnside was still a young officer recently graduated from West Point, the future general was engaged to a Virginia socialite named Charlotte “Lottie” Moon. Unfortunately for young Burnside, the couple’s romance came to an abrupt end on their wedding day. When Lottie was asked if she took Ambrose to be her husband, she reportedly shouted, “No siree, Bob!” and sprinted out of the chapel. Burnside and Moon met again years later, once more under dramatic circumstances. Since the outbreak of the Civil War, Moon had become a spy for the Confederacy. She served as a courier for the South and even spied on President Abraham Lincoln by disguising herself as a British noblewoman and feigning sleep during a carriage ride while the President discussed war strategy. She was eventually caught and placed under house arrest by none other than her jilted fiance. However, Burnside declined to charge his former betrothed with espionage (a crime which carried the death penalty), and instead agreed to let her go free as long as she never returned to Union territory.

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