Fitness, as we know it today, may seem to be a relatively modern invention, but physical exercise obviously goes back much further than that. Starting from the early 20th century, people used elaborate contraptions, painful machinery, bizarre devices, a…
Nobody could tell exactly when it began and nobody could predict when it would end. At the outset, they didn’t even call it a depression. At worst it was a recession, a brief slump, a “correction” in the market, a glitch in the rising curve of prosperit…
Between the 1860s and 1930s, the monowheel (also referred to as a monocycle) was frequently suggested as a serious new form of transportation. Numerous inventors came up with their own versions of the monowheel, some human-powered, some electric, some w…
In the early 1930s, groups of eager thrill-seeking stunt drivers would perform stunning acts in front of an audience. They performed an array of stunts such as wrecking cars, driving the car through a firewall, ramp to ramp style stunts where the stunt driv…
Although the birth control pill and other hormonal contraceptive devices are modern inventions, birth control forms have been around for thousands of years. The earliest known recordings of birth control methods date back to ancient Mesopotamia, around …
In the late 1920s and early 1930s, photographer Clifton R. Adams was commissioned by the National Geographic to document life in England. Adams’ beautiful autochromes—a process of producing color images by using potato starch—present images that capture…
New Yorkers have been taking the plunge in the Big Apple since the late 1800s, when the state legislature passed a law mandating free bathhouses in cities with populations over 50,000. The state believed it was necessary to provide bathing facilities fo…
The image of Las Vegas that emerged in the 1970s was one that would take decades to shed: a tacky tourist trap with aging casinos, cheap restaurants, and showrooms filled with performers whose careers were on their last legs. With a few exceptions, investme…
The Maya people have been called many names over the years, such as “the mysterious Maya” and “the magnificent Maya,” and many scholarly books have been written about this ancient Mesoamerican civilization. Many years before European explorers came to t…
The use of mechanical means for the application of exercise in therapeutics was first systematized and employed in a complete way by Dr, Gustav Zander, of Stockholm, about 1857. Zander’s vision of regular exertion using machines to honor health and well…
Arising as a daredevil stunt in the aerial shows of the 1920s, wing walking was the act of moving along the wings of a biplane during flight. It started around 1920 at aerial barnstorming shows and originally began as a demonstration of planes’ balance …
By the outbreak of the Second World War, Poland’s Military Aviation, quite commonly and incorrectly called the Polish Air Force, was inferior in every aspect. From having the world’s first all-metal built and fastest fighter plane in the mid-1930s to fl…
The flight attendant occupation took permanent shape in the 1930s as “women’s work,” that is, work not only predominately performed by women but also defined as embodying white, middle-class ideals of femininity. As the nascent commercial aviation indus…
After the Civil War, former slaves sought jobs, and planters sought laborers. The absence of cash or an independent credit system led to the creation of sharecropping which was a system agricultural labor in the South. In this article, we've collected a…
When an earthquake ripped through Santa Monica on March 10, 1933, the city was already in bad shape. The quiet community on the Pacific coast had prided itself in being socially elite and culturally refined, but that pride hadn’t stopped the Great Depre…
Keedoozle was the first fully automated grocery store in the United States; a most futuristic shopping experience that the world just wasn’t ready for. The story begins with Clarence Saunders who revolutionized grocery shopping, in a way that defines th…
Decades after her death, Eva Braun, the long-time mistress of Adolf Hitler, remains a mysterious and notorious figure. This is the photographic life story of a woman who met Hitler as a teenager and, in the last days of the war, became the Führer’s wife…
Annelies "Anne" Marie Frank (12 June 1929 – early March 1945) was just an ordinary Dutch girl from an ordinary family. The family happened to be Jewish, which is why terrible things happened to them. Born in Frankfurt, Germany, she lived most of her lif…
The history of women's workwear tells a unique story about the events of the twentieth century and the changing role of women. The amount of control that women have had over their clothes depended largely on what type of job she had. In domestic service…
The knocker-upper profession started during and lasted well into the Industrial Revolution when alarm clocks were neither cheap nor reliable. A knocker-up's job was to rouse sleeping people so they could get to work on time. They would be paid a few pen…