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High heels used to be for men.

Baroque high heel
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Author Fran Hoepfner
August 18, 2023

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Long before the days of stilettos and pumps, kitten heels and wedges, high-heeled shoes were worn by men. As far back as the 10th century, Persian soldiers and emissaries wore heels when riding, battling, or traveling to faraway lands. These heels weren’t for show, however; they were for function. When a soldier wore heeled boots on a horse, he was able to better steady himself and generate more balance both for riding and fighting. Persian soldiers were also able to stand upright in their stirrups, positioning their feet so the space between the heel and the sole was snug in the stirrup, which gave them an advantage in battle.

Once heels made their way to Europe in the 16th century, their purpose was much more akin to how we think of these shoes today. Men in the French, Spanish, German, and Russian courts wore heels to project height and physical stature in order to intimidate rivals and foreign diplomats in court. Over the course of the next 200 years, men’s heels got shorter and stockier — making the shoes better for balance and walking, and less of an ornate fashion statement. By the 18th century, high heels faded out of fashion for men, who started to favor less flamboyant clothing and accessories. When women started to wear high heels, the goal was to hide as much of the foot as possible beneath a long skirt. The peeking toe suggested a small foot, showing daintiness. Though sneakers are far more popular than heels today, the concept of the “platform sneaker” suggests that the ethos of the high heel is not yet a thing of the past. 

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Red soles and heels date back to the 17th century.

Red-bottomed shoes are most often attributed to the contemporary fashion designer Christian Louboutin, yet footwear with red soles and heels dates all the way back to 17th-century France and England. King Charles II’s coronation portrait from 1661 displays him wearing red-soled heels, known as the “French style,” which were popular in England during that time. Red was a popular color for royalty due to the pricey nature of the dye, and the color came to symbolize power and masculinity.

Harry S. Truman’s middle initial doesn’t stand for anything.

Vintage Truman stamp
Credit: manley099/ E+ via Getty Images
Author Darren Orf
August 15, 2023

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Serving as the 33rd President of the United States, Harry S. Truman guided the country out of World War II after the death of his predecessor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and prepared America for the geopolitical battle ahead: the Cold War. Today, Truman is regarded as one of the nation’s best Presidents, and yet most people probably can’t tell you what his middle initial stands for — because it doesn’t stand for anything. When the future President was born on May 8, 1884, in Lamar, Missouri, his parents couldn’t decide which of Truman’s grandfathers, Anderson Shipp Truman and Solomon Young, to honor with their son’s middle name. Instead, they chose a simple “S” — without a period — for Truman’s middle initial. This atypical name caused some confusion during Truman’s presidential inauguration in 1945, when Chief Justice Harlan F. Stone assigned a middle name to Truman while swearing him into office. He asked the future President to say, “I, Harry Shipp Truman,” but Truman repeated the words with one alteration: “I, Harry S Truman.” Despite the President’s insistence, the name is now officially styled with a period following the middle initial. 

Strangely, Truman isn’t the only U.S. President with an unconventional “S” middle initial. Ulysses S. Grant — whose birth name was Hiram, though he went by his middle name, Ulysses — also has an “S” middle initial that stands for nothing. Unlike Truman’s ambiguous tribute to his ancestors, Grant’s “S” was a simple clerical error. In 1839, Congressman Thomas Hamer nominated Grant to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Believing Ulysses to be Grant’s first name and at a loss for his middle initial, Hamer wrote in “S” as a stand-in for the cadet’s mother’s maiden name, Simpson. When Grant arrived at West Point, he tried to get the error fixed, but to no avail, and the “S” eventually even appeared on his diploma. The error proved prophetic — after all, U.S. Grant is a pretty good name for any future President.

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Mark Twain helped Ulysses S. Grant publish his memoir.

In 1884, while nearing the end of his life, former President U.S. Grant was hard at work on his memoirs in the hope of leaving something behind for his family, as a failed business venture had left them in financial ruin. A publishing house offered 10% royalties on the book, but famed writer Samuel Clemens — known by his pen name, Mark Twain — arrived at Grant’s home on 66th Street in New York City to make a better offer. Instead of 10% of the sales, Twain promised 70% of the total profit to Grant and his family if he used a publisher owned by the nephew of Twain’s wife. Grant died only a few days after he finished writing in the summer of 1885, and his memoir became an instant bestseller. In early 1886, former First Lady Julia Dent Grant received a check for $200,000 based on the book’s success — at the time, it was the largest royalty check ever written. 

Women couldn’t wear pants on the Senate floor until 1993.

Carol Moseley Braun
Gary Ell / Alamy Stock Photo
Author Nicole Villeneuve
August 15, 2023

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Carol Moseley Braun holds the distinction of being the first African American woman elected to the U.S. Senate, and in 1993, she also helped bring about another victory for equality: a rare rule change in the Senate that updated the dress code from its outdated, gendered restrictions to better align with the times.

Before becoming a senator, Moseley Braun was used to wearing pantsuits during her tenure in the Illinois legislature, where rules were more relaxed. One morning in early 1993, not long after she was sworn in as a Democratic senator, she chose an Armani pantsuit to wear to work. “I walked onto the floor of the Senate, and the gasps were audible,” she later said. The dress code — which required women to wear dresses or skirts with a jacket — was enforced primarily by peer pressure, as well as the whims of the Senate doorkeepers who allowed people into the chamber. 

Female aides initially tried to challenge the dress code in 1972, but their request was reportedly ignored. By 1993, thanks to an increasing number of women senators, the tide began to shift. After Moseley Braun’s unintentionally bold move, Senator Barbara Mikulski did the same. (Although no official Senate record confirms which senator first wore pants on the floor, most available information suggests it was Moseley Braun.) Female staffers, journalists, and other senators soon began advocating for an official allowance to wear pants. Shortly after, Senate Sergeant at Arms Martha Pope issued an amendment to the dress code, allowing “coordinated pantsuits” as part of the acceptable attire for women — a major win in what’s been called the “pantsuit revolution.”

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The U.S. started allowing babies on the Senate floor in 2018.

In April 2018, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed a resolution allowing senators to bring their children under the age of 1 onto the Senate floor during votes. Senator Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat from Illinois, played a significant role in this historic decision. Just days before, Duckworth herself made history as the first U.S. senator to give birth while in office, and she had already been advocating for a rule change — a rarity in the Senate — so she could continue her governmental duties while caring for her newborn. “Whether you are a woman or a man… you should be able to bring that child on to the floor and continue to do your job,” she said at the time. Ten days after giving birth, Duckworth became the first senator to cast a vote on the Senate floor with her baby cradled in her arms.

Thomas Edison didn’t invent the lightbulb.

Swan's carbon pencil lamp
Smith Archive / Alamy Stock Photo
Author Darren Orf
August 15, 2023

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Thomas Edison is the brilliant mind behind many inventions: the automatic telegraph, the phonograph, and the kinetograph, to name a few. The world-changing invention he’s most often associated with, however, is the incandescent lightbulb. There’s just one problem: Edison didn’t actually invent it. He was the first to produce a practical and commercially viable incandescent lightbulb, but the science behind the lightbulb had been around for more than a century before Edison took a crack at it in 1879. 

Back in March 1761, English scientist Ebenezer Kinnersley wrote in a letter to Benjamin Franklin that he successfully got a wire so “red hot” that it gave off light. This is known as “incandescence” and is the science inside every incandescent lightbulb. Kinnersley’s discovery was far removed from the lightbulbs we use today, but laid the foundation for the technology to develop in the coming decades. In 1841, English scientist Frederick de Moleyns scored the first patent for an incandescent lamp, though the lamp’s platinum filaments were too expensive and unreliable to be practically usable. Then came Joseph Swan, yet another English scientist, who created the first lightbulb with a carbon filament in 1878. Although still highly inefficient, these bulbs were at least better than the soot-spewing gas that lit up cities at the time, and they kicked off the switch to electric lighting. 

Although Edison didn’t invent the lightbulb, it can certainly be argued that he perfected it — something he did often with inventions throughout his career. In 1879, Edison realized that higher electrical resistance was needed for lightbulbs to last longer; he tested more than 6,000 materials and finally settled on carbonized bamboo. Within the year, Edison’s bulbs could last between 600 and 1,200 hours, showing the world that electric lighting was economically possible.

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Thomas Edison created the predecessor to the cat video.

Thomas Edison was a man ahead of his time — and in the case of cat videos, a full century ahead. After inventing the kinetograph, a kind of proto-film camera, in 1891, Edison got to work making a series of short films showing off his new creation. One featured a trapeze artist; another, an employee sneezing (Edison found the need to copyright that one). But one of the more adorable films, created in 1894, was “The Boxing Cats,” which, just as it sounds, starred two fuzzy felines wearing cat-sized boxing gloves in a cat-sized boxing ring. It was filmed at Edison’s Black Maria film studio in New Jersey some 100 years before funny videos of cats became an internet phenomenon. The more things change, the more they stay the same. 

Abraham Lincoln’s only hobby was “cats,” according to his wife.

Lincoln and his family
Glasshouse Images/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Darren Orf
August 3, 2023

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The White House has a long history of family pets, some more exotic than others. The first furry friends in the executive mansion belonged to its first presidential residents — John and Abigail Adams — who had two dogs named Juno and Satan. Teddy Roosevelt owned an entire menagerie during his term, including guinea pigs, snakes, birds, several horses, and many other animals. But few Presidents had quite as much affection for their pets as Abraham Lincoln did for his cats, Tabby and Dixie. 

Both Tabby and Dixie were gifted to the President by William Seward, his secretary of state, and the two kittens lived at the White House (likely along with other strays invited by the commander in chief). Many anecdotes from government officials, family, and friends speak to Lincoln’s unyielding affection for his feline friends. Caleb Carman, a friend of the President’s, once said that Lincoln could “talk to [cats] for half an hour at a time.” Lincoln himself, known for his sharp wit, once quipped that “Dixie is smarter than my whole Cabinet!” And supposedly, the President was even distracted at the 1865 Siege of Petersburg during the Civil War due to the nearby meowing of kittens. But the anecdote that most cements Lincoln’s ailurophilia into history comes from his wife, Mary Todd. When asked if her husband had any hobbies, she had one simple reply: “Cats.”

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The musical "Cats" is based on a book of poems by T.S. Eliot.

You may think that Andrew Lloyd Webber, the musical mind behind the Tony Award-winning Cats, would be a feline fanatic. But not so much. In interviews leading up to the show’s debut in London’s West End theater district, the British composer was quoted as saying he felt “quite neutral” about cats, and that the only cat he ever liked “was an old Siamese who was fond of Tchaikovsky.” So where did he find the inspiration for the musical? Cats is actually based on a body of work by poet T.S. Eliot, who himself very much loved the creatures. Published in 1939, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats collects poems Eliot originally composed for his godchildren, which explore the curious complexity of feline psychology. In 1983, nearly 20 years after his death, Eliot won two Tony Awards, for Best Book of a Musical and Best Original Score. His widow and collaborator Valerie Eliot received the honor in his place.

Rowdy sports fans nearly overthrew a Roman emperor.

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
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.

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
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
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.

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