The Countercultural History of Living Museums
In the 1960s and ’70s, guides began wearing period costumes and farming with historical techniques, a change that coincided with the back-to-the-land movement.
Casanova was Famous for Being Famous
Giacomo Casanova achieved celebrity not through any particular achievement but by mingling with famous people and making himself the subject of gossip.
Banning Christmas Dinner
Poor laws passed in Great Britain in the 1830s reversed a centuries-old tradition to forbid workhouses from serving roast beef and plum pudding at Christmas.
Paris’s Wild Costume Balls
As urban growth brought rich and poor Parisians closer together in the 1830s, masked balls encouraged class mixing and costumes that crossed gender lines.
The Magic of a Crooked Sixpence
Coins were used for centuries in many ritual contexts, but the English silver sixpence was a particularly common charm—for several reasons.
Passing Narratives That Pre-Date Black Like Me
In 1905, Robert Gilbert Wells used a fictional character to explore the experience of being a Black man in America.
What Skulls Told Us
The pseudoscience phrenology swept the popular imagination, and its practitioners made a mint preying on prejudices, gullibility, and misinformation.
Dawn of the Bathroom
The bathroom didn’t become a thing until the nineteenth century, and most working-class US homes added plumbed-in amenities in piecemeal fashion over time.
Water Logs
Log drivers once steered loose timber on rivers across America before railroad expansion put such shepherds out of work.
Laura Kieler: A Life Exploited
Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen mined Kieler's life for the plot of his most famous play, The Doll's House.