Those are bison skulls, in the 1870s, waiting to be ground into fertilizer. Before Columbus there were 60 million bison in North America; by 1890 there were 750. They were holding up our railroads. Now they’re back up to 350,000, but 70 percent of those are being raised for human consumption.
Thomas Jefferson once composed a secular version of the Christian Gospels. He said he wanted to study Jesus’ teachings without “the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled by priests, who have travestied them into various forms, as instruments of riches and power to themselves.”
He called the Bible’s supernatural content “nonsense,” from which Jesus’ ideas were “as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill.” His narrative ends like this:
“Now, in the place where he was crucified, there was a garden; and in the garden a new sepulchre, wherein was never man yet laid. There laid they Jesus. And rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulchre, and departed.”
During the German hyperinflation of the early 1920s, prices doubled every 49 hours.
That meant that paper currency notes were cheaper than firewood.
In November 1941 a U-boat torpedoed the British battleship Barham, but the Germans didn’t realize they’d hit it. The British Admiralty managed to keep the loss a secret for two months, but in the interval a Scottish spiritualist named Helen Duncan announced that the Barham had sunk. She said she’d heard the news from a dead sailor.
The British authorities arrested Duncan, hoping to discredit her story. They appealed to an old law against fraudulent “spiritual” activity … which unfortunately was called the British Witchcraft Act of 1735.
So: History records that a practicing medium who revealed an “unknowable” secret at a séance in 1941 was convicted under a witchcraft law. She served 9 months.
When Cleopatra was born, the Great Pyramid was already 2,500 years old.
It’s not quite true that Custer’s entire detachment was killed at Little Bighorn. Two days after the battle, this horse appeared, badly wounded but still alive. It had been the personal mount of one of Custer’s captains.
Nursed back to health, Comanche was named a “second commanding officer” in the 7th Cavalry. He was buried in 1890 with full military honors.
This is magnificent — it’s a document written on birch bark in 12th-century Russia, unearthed in 1951.
A 6-year-old boy named Onfim was learning to write — and doodling on his homework.
In 1946, the inflation rate in Hungary reached 4.19 quintillion percent, a modern record.
By August, all the Hungarian banknotes in circulation would have bought one-thousandth of one U.S. cent.
On May 31, 1886, tens of thousands of workers pulled the spikes from railroad lines throughout the South, shifted one rail 3 inches, and spiked them in again.
No one had standardized the gauges.
That hollow column on the right is a “priest-hole,” a hiding place for Catholic priests, who were hunted with Elmer-Fudd-like tenacity when Elizabeth took the English throne around 1560. A “papist” could be hanged for saying mass; converting a Protestant was high treason.
Fortunately, the priests had a Bugs Bunny in the shape of Nicholas Owen, a Jesuit laybrother who spent his life devising secret chambers and hiding places for persecuted Catholics. “Pursuivants” could spend as much as a fortnight fruitlessly tearing down paneling and tearing up floors while the priest held his breath a wall’s thickness away.
Ickily, some of these hidden priests starved to death.