As a child in Mexico in the 1650s, the nun and writer Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz “abstained from eating cheese because I had heard that it made one slow of wits, for in me the desire for learning was stronger than the desire for eating—as powerful as that is in children.”
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Residents of North Yorkshire from the eleventh to fourteenth centuries were so afraid of the dead rising to attack the living that they would dismember, decapitate, burn, and otherwise mutilate corpses before burying them. The process was generally undertaken shortly after death, when the bones were still soft.
In 2020 bioarchaeologists found evidence that six individuals buried in southern Peru’s Chincha Valley during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries began their lives hundreds of miles away, on the country’s upper coast. The findings support colonists’ descriptions of the Incan Empire forcibly resettling populations to quell dissent and increase the procurement of natural resources. “The state generally sought to put people in ecological zones similar to their home,” the researchers noted, and the Chincha Valley would have been “a prime destination for the resettlement of northern water-management specialists and miners.”
After watching a performance of his play Peter Pan with his five-year-old godson, J. M. Barrie asked the boy what he had liked best. “What I think I liked best,” the boy replied, “was tearing up the program and dropping the bits on people’s heads.”
According to an Aztec myth, the war god Huitzilopochtli sent a group of Mexica on a journey to establish the new center of the world. After some two hundred years of wandering, they saw an eagle resting on a cactus with its “wings stretched outward like the rays of the sun.” Taking the bird to be a divine sign that they had reached their destination, they “began to weep and dance about with joy and contentment.”
As he watched the mushroom cloud form at the first atomic-bomb test in July 1945, physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer recalled a line from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
In Japanese tradition, ghosts and spirits are more likely to appear at dusk or dawn than in the middle of the night. “In order for people to see them and be frightened by them,” wrote folklorist Kunio Yanagita, “emerging in the pitch-dark after even the plants have fallen asleep is, to say the least, just not good business practice.”
Concerned about pigeons carrying military communications, German troops in occupied Belgium during World War I would shoot at overhead flocks. Such fears had not abated by World War II, when the British government ordered a systematic slaughter of pigeons throughout the UK, and inmates at British and Australian interment camps were banned from approaching birds on compound grounds.
A letter dated to the eighteenth century BC sent by a servant to Zimri-Lim, the king of Mari, details a system of long-distance signal fires, thought to be the first ever in use.
After thousands of dockworkers went on strike in the Los Angeles area in 1923 and the Industrial Workers of the World called on workers in other industries to strike in solidarity, the police announced a ban on public meetings. Upton Sinclair organized a rally in response, saying, “We’re testing the right of the police to suppress free speech and assemblage.” As soon as he took the platform, a police captain threatened, “I’m taking you in if you utter a word.” Sinclair began reciting the First Amendment and, according to a longshoreman who was present, the captain promptly “grabbed the people’s novelist by the collar” and arrested him.
The practice of yobai, “night crawling,” was common in rural communities in medieval Japan, and continued into the twentieth century. A young man would visit a young woman’s house after dark, disguising his features with a cloth to avoid embarrassment should his advances be rejected. These premarital liaisons could become formal if a child were conceived.
When Apple released its Shuffle feature for iPods, users were deceived by the true randomness of its playback; songs from the same album or artist were often grouped by chance. Complaints led Steve Jobs to alter the device’s programming and begin offering Smart Shuffle, which allowed users to adjust the likelihood of hearing similar songs in a row. “We’re making it less random,” he said, “to make it feel more random.”
In his Brief Lives, John Aubrey wrote that in 1618 Walter Raleigh “took a pipe of tobacco a little before he went to the scaffold, which some formal persons were scandalized at, but I think ’twas well and properly done to settle his spirits.” Often credited with popularizing smoking in England, Raleigh was sentenced to death for treason by King James I, who had published his Counterblaste to Tobacco in 1604.
In 1942 a contaminated yellow-fever vaccine caused an outbreak of hepatitis B among more than 300,000 U.S. Army and Allied troops. Nearly 50,000 clinical cases resulted from the contamination, including 29,000 incidents of overt jaundice. There had been medical evidence of postvaccination epidemics of hepatitis in both men and horses since 1885.
A growing market for ejiao—a gelatin made from donkey hide believed by practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine to increase libido and slow aging—has led to a global trade of millions of donkey skins each year. Asses are often kidnapped from rural African villages, where their labor is valued highly, then taken to markets and slaughtered for export. “The donkeys,” said a sanctuary manager while visiting a market in Tanzania, “are very stressed.”