Officially, the modern bikini was invented in Paris in 1946, but women’s two-piece athletic garments go back to 1400 B.C. This mosaic, found in a Roman villa near Sicily, dates from 300 A.D. Evidently they had fans.
Roman Pinups
History
“A Bill Becomes a Law When the President Vetoes It”
Excerpts from students’ civics exams in the 1800s:
- “The three departments of the government is the President rules the world, the governor rules the State, the mayor rules the city.”
- “The first conscientious Congress met in Philadelphia.”
- “The Constitution of the United States was established to ensure domestic hostility.”
- “The Constitution of the United States is that part of the book at the end which nobody reads.”
- “Congress is divided into civilized half civilized and savage.”
— From Mark Twain, “English as She Is Taught: Being Genuine Answers to Examination Questions in Our Public Schools,” 1887
First Draft, Best Draft
Thomas Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration of Independence contained a passage denouncing the slave trade:
He [George III] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.
Congress removed it.
P.S. Need More Erasers
During the American Civil War, captured Union soldiers held in Libby Prison, Richmond, Va., were allowed only six lines in correspondence with their friends at home. Here’s a sample letter:
“My Dear Wife. – Yours received – no hopes of exchange – send corn starch – want socks – no money – rheumatism in left shoulder – pickles very good – send sausages – God bless you – kiss the baby – Hail Columbia! – Your devoted husband.”
Uh, Right
Decimal arithmetic is a contrivance of man for computing numbers, and not a property of time, space, or matter. It belongs essentially to the keeping of accounts, but is merely an incident to the transactions of trade. Nature has no partiality for the number 10; and the attempt to shackle her freedom with them [decimal gradations], will for ever prove abortive.
— John Quincy Adams, recommending against the metric system in 1821, as reported in Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal, May 15, 1852
All Right, Already
Warring governments can be kind of blunt. James Montgomery Flagg’s famous 1917 “I Want You” recruiting poster (left) echoed an earlier English poster featuring Lord Kitchener, and the Red Army wasn’t any subtler in the 1920s (“Did you volunteer?”).
In the long run, time and patience resolve everything. “When armies are mobilized and issues are joined,” wrote Lao-tzu, “the man who is sorry over the fact will win.”
“Duty to One Another”
From Manners and Conduct in School and Out by the Deans of Girls in Chicago High Schools, 1921:
- After dancing with a girl thank her and walk back with her to her seat, to her chaperon, or to her next partner. Never leave her standing alone in the middle of the floor.
- Girls, if your partner doesn’t dance well, take it pleasantly — but not as too much of a joke — and help him to do better.
- Avoid looking at a boy with your soul in your eyes. A girl holds the key to the social situation. She should keep such a situation at school on a cordial but wholly matter-of-fact basis, — absolutely free from sentimentality.
- Base your friendships on good comradeship, not on maudlin emotion, nor on propinquity. The right kind of girl and boy friendships may give joy for a lifetime; the wrong kind must be a continual menace.
- Don’t be prudes, girls, but let every boy know that he must keep his hands off from you. If he presumes, a cool glance on your part will usually restrain him. If it does not, avoid him; he is unworthy of your friendship.
- Boys, you can easily tell what girls would have you sit very close to them, and hold their hands, and put your arms around them. But, be manly. Always protect a girl; protect her from yourself, even from herself. If she does not wish to be so protected, avoid her as you would the plague.
- When you call on a girl, you shouldn’t remain after ten o’clock even though the girl wants you to. Girls, you should not urge. And, girls, observe how your boy friends fit themselves into the family group.
- A gift you should acknowledge at once and cordially. But, boys, let your gifts to girls be rare, and restricted to candy, books, and flowers.
- To force your presence upon those who seem not to want you, tends to crystallize their feeling of antagonism. On the other hand, nothing more quickly disarms this feeling of antagonism than evidence of delicacy on your part.
- Girls, it is poor policy to call up boys often by telephone, and bad manners to whistle to attract their attention.
- For you to sit at a social gathering with hat and coat on, girls, — even though you must leave in a few moments, — is discourteous both to your hostess and to the other guests.
Boom!
Czech architect Jan Letzel deserves some kind of prize. His Prefectural Industrial Promotional Hall in Hiroshima, Japan, withstood the 1945 atomic bomb, though the blast took place almost directly overhead.
He’d reinforced it in case of earthquakes.
The ruin was made a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1996 — over the objections of the U.S. and China.
“Errors of the Press.”
“The following paragraphs will shew how completely the sense is altered by the omission of a single letter of the word in Italics”:
- “The conflict was dreadful, and the enemy was repulsed with considerable laughter.”
- “Robert Jones was yesterday brought before the sitting Magistrate, on a charge of having spoken reason at the Barleymow public-house.”
- “In consequence of the numerous accidents occasioned by skaiting on the Serpentine River, measures are taking to put a top to it.”
- “When Miss Leserve, late of Covent Garden Theatre, visited the ‘Hecla,’ she was politely drawn up the ship’s side by means of a hair.”
- “At the Guildhall dinner, none of the poultry was eatable except the owls.”
- “A gentleman was yesterday brought up to answer a charge of having eaten a hackney-coachman for having demanded more than his fare; and another was accused of having stolen a small ox out of the Bath mail; the stolen property was found in his waistcoat pocket.”
— Salem Register, 1827, quoted in The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities: Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts, 1886
Human Zoos
Now decried as racist, “human zoos” attracted millions to fairs and exhibitions in the 19th century.
They purported to show how other peoples lived in their “primitive” state, but they often revealed more about their white organizers.
In 1906, the Bronx Zoo exhibited a Congolese pygmy next to an orangutan, as an example of the “missing link.” The pygmy was finally removed after a public outcry. Clergyman James H. Gordon said, “Our race, we think, is depressed enough, without exhibiting one of us with the apes.”