In the summer of 1867, Chinese laborers working on the Central Pacific Railroad in the Sierra Nevada went on strike, demanding a pay increase and a ten-hour workday. Desperate to resume the railroad’s progress, executives considered asking the Freedmen’s Bureau to send African American laborers to take over. “A Negro labor force would keep the Chinese steady,” one executive wrote, “as the Chinese have kept the Irishmen quiet.”
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Maurice Sendak, author of classic picture book Where the Wild Things Are, claimed in a 2011 interview never to lie to children. “I refuse to cater to the bullshit of innocence,” he said. He was also in search of a “yummy death,” which he believed could be done “if you’re William Blake and totally crazy.” Two months later, less than a year before he died, Sendak returned to the topic. “I’m a happy old man,” he said. “But I will cry my way all the way to the grave.”
Charlotte Brontë wrote to a friend about a woman who “must be a regular bore with her unfortunate homophobia,” advising, “Don’t look for that word in the dictionary.” This may indicate, notes a scholar, “fear or dislike of men,” from the Latin homo (man), not the Greek homo (same). The word is unclear in the manuscript; it could also be monophobia, fear of being alone.
In 1710 the mayor of Albany, New York, presented four American Indian chiefs at the court of Queen Anne in London. Along with their visit to Buckingham Palace, the Mohawk and Mohican men attended a performance of Macbeth at the Queen’s Theater in Haymarket. The performance was interrupted by the audience, which demanded to see the faces of the visiting chiefs.
A scholar in Peking contracted malaria in 1899 and was given medication with an ingredient labeled “dragon bones.” The bone chips, he found, were inscribed with writing dating back to China’s second dynasty. Thousands more were uncovered in the decades following; many of these “oracle bones” had inscriptions recording celestial events, which scientists have since used to calculate changes in the length of an earth day and in the rate of the earth’s rotation.
Punishments have been used throughout history to leave marks of shame on the body. “Perhaps the most important” one inflicted on men, writes Richard Trexler in Sex and Conquest, “was depilation, especially the burning off of anal and pubic hair. The practice was known to ancient Jews—Isaiah prophesied that they would be humiliated in this way—and to the Athenians. In both cases the insult lay in part in the fact that only women singed their pubic hair.”
British historian Orlando Figes admitted in 2010 to posting scathing reviews on Amazon for books by other Russian-history specialists. Using the name Historian, he called one work “dense and pretentious” and complained another was not “worth the bother of ploughing through its dreadful prose.” Of Figes’ own The Whisperers, Historian posted that it “leaves the reader awed, humbled, yet uplifted” and wrote of its author, “I hope he writes forever.”
“Those on the right and those on the left you have placed in your lap,” proclaimed an Assyrian prophetess in 680 bc in support of King Esarhaddon, who had defeated his brothers in civil war. Another prophetess promised to “tear apart” those “conniving polecats and rats.”
Before the nineteenth century, a conductor’s baton was a baseball-bat-size implement that was banged against the floor to keep time. This could be dangerous. In 1687, while conducting a symphony playing Te Deum for Louis XIV, who had just recovered from serious illness, composer Jean-Baptiste Lully accidentally struck his foot with his baton, causing inflammation in his toe. He refused amputation, and an infection spread, killing him two months later.
The Ongee of the Andaman Islands base their calendar on smell: their names for seasons derive from the flowers that are in bloom at the time.
Dale Carnegie’s best-selling How to Win Friends and Influence People originated from a popular nighttime lecture he used to deliver at the YMCA. The book lists six ways to make people like you: be interested in others, smile, remember a person’s name, be a good listener, talk in terms of the other person’s interests, and make the other person feel important. Novelist Sinclair Lewis summed up Carnegie’s advice: “Smile and bob and pretend to be interested in other people’s hobbies precisely so that you may screw things out of them.”
At the end of The Tempest, Prospero relinquishes his “rough magic” and declares, “I’ll break my staff,/Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,/And deeper than did ever plummet sound/I’ll drown my book.” In W.H. Auden’s “commentary” on the play, The Sea and the Mirror, Prospero says at the beginning, “Now, Ariel, I am that I am, your late and lonely master,/Who knows now what magic is:—the power to enchant/That comes from disillusion. What the books teach one/Is that desires end up in stinking ponds.”
According to his nephew, Pliny the Elder liked to rise in the middle of the night and study by lamplight. “Admittedly, he fell asleep very easily,” Pliny the Younger wrote, “and would often doze and wake up again during his work.”
Ottoman humorist Yusuf al-Shirbini of Egypt railed against unfair levies, referring to them as “things being called innovation.” Al-Shirbini quoted scripture: one who brings about “an innovation or provides accommodation for an innovator, upon him be the curse of God.”
Wikipedia editing guidelines ask that page authors avoid including mission statements in entries. “These usually focus on platitudes rather than specifics,” the site warns. “In short, they rarely tell us anything useful.”