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Hidden History

Hidden History
The French Space Cat Felicette France joined the Space Race in the 1950s, and one of her missions was a test flight involving the...
2 months ago
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2 months ago
France joined the Space Race in the 1950s, and one of her missions was a test flight involving the first (and so far only) cat to enter space. It did not end well for the cat. In the aftermath of the Second World War, France, under the leadership of General Charles De Gaulle, was...
Hidden History
The Story of the Cow The history of the domestic cattle goes back at least 10,000 years. There are well over 1000...
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The history of the domestic cattle goes back at least 10,000 years. There are well over 1000 distinct breeds of Cattle in the world today, and somewhere between 1 and 1.5 billion individual animals, making them, by some counts, the fourth most numerous mammal in existence behind...
Hidden History
The Great Horse Flu Epidemic of 1872 An epidemic of “Horse Flu” in 1872 virtually shut down the US economy and paralyzed the entire...
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3 months ago
An epidemic of “Horse Flu” in 1872 virtually shut down the US economy and paralyzed the entire country. By the 1870s, the once-rural agrarian United States was beginning to emerge as an industrial power. The Civil War had spurred the rapid development of industry such as iron...
Hidden History
Antarctic Snow Cruiser In 1939, the United States began work on a colossal motor vehicle to be used for exploration and...
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In 1939, the United States began work on a colossal motor vehicle to be used for exploration and field work in Antarctica. By 1939 Antarctica remained as one of the last unexplored regions on the planet. Norwegian adventurer Roald Amundsen had been the first human to reach the...
Hidden History
The 1914 Christmas Truce [NOTE: I re-run this diary every year.] The Christmas Truce of 1914 was one of the most famous...
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[NOTE: I re-run this diary every year.] The Christmas Truce of 1914 was one of the most famous events to come out of the First World War. Some have called it the last gasp of the chivalric age of professional militaries and gentlemen officers, to be followed by the full horrors...
Hidden History
The First Appalachian Trail Thru-Hiker The first backpacker to thru-hike the entire 2100-mile Appalachian Trail in one trip was a troubled...
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The first backpacker to thru-hike the entire 2100-mile Appalachian Trail in one trip was a troubled WW2 veteran who did it as a kind of therapy. For most of human history, people got around from one place to another by walking. Although Rome pioneered an extensive network of...
Hidden History
The Marco Polo Bridge Incident For Europeans, the Second World War started on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. For...
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For Europeans, the Second World War started on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. For the United States, it began with the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. But for Asians, the war began on June 7, 1937, at the Marco Polo Bridge in China. The Second...
Hidden History
The 1968 Utah Sheep Kill In 1968, a malfunctioning nerve gas test at the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah killed several...
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In 1968, a malfunctioning nerve gas test at the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah killed several thousand sheep and provoked an outcry. In March 1968, researchers at the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah were scheduled to perform three experiments involving a lethal nerve gas known as...
Hidden History
The Vigenere Cipher The Vigenere Cipher is an encryption system that was developed over 500 years ago, and a variant of...
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a month ago
The Vigenere Cipher is an encryption system that was developed over 500 years ago, and a variant of it was still being used by Soviet KGB spies in the 1950s. Ever since people have been writing, they have been searching for ways to make their written messages secure. This has...
Hidden History
The Fantasy Game of Tak The board game Tak (pronounced to rhyme with “back”) originally appeared as a prop in the...
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The board game Tak (pronounced to rhyme with “back”) originally appeared as a prop in the fantasy/scifi book series The Kingkiller Chronicle, and was then brought to life in the real world. History In 1994, aspiring author Patrick Rothfuss began work on his first book,...
Hidden History
Cloud Gate, Chicago’s “Bean” This futuristic sculpture in Millennium Park has become an icon of Chicago. In 1997, the city of...
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This futuristic sculpture in Millennium Park has become an icon of Chicago. In 1997, the city of Chicago was making plans for a patch of land near Grant Park on the shore of Lake Michigan that had previously been a parking lot and a railroad yard. At first, there was talk of...
Hidden History
The First Space Launch Everybody knows about the Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1950s and...
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Everybody knows about the Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 60s, which began with the Russian Sputnik and ended with the American moon landing. But in reality, the first man-made object to enter outer space was not Russian, and not...
Hidden History
The Albuquerque “Broken Arrow” Nuclear Accident In 1957, a B-36 nuclear bomber accidentally dropped a Mark 17 hydrogen bomb while landing at...
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In 1957, a B-36 nuclear bomber accidentally dropped a Mark 17 hydrogen bomb while landing at Kirtland Air Force Base just outside of Albuquerque NM. In January 1950, President Harry Truman announced that the United States would begin a crash program to develop and deploy a weapon...
Hidden History
The Assassination of Malcolm X Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference based their strategy on two...
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Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference based their strategy on two ideas; the idea that nonviolent civil disobedience, in the tradition of Thoreau and Gandhi, was the only method that the civil rights movement should use, and the idea that white...
Hidden History
The Sobibor Rebellion In October 1943, inmates at the Nazi extermination camp in Sobibor, in Poland, organized an uprising...
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In October 1943, inmates at the Nazi extermination camp in Sobibor, in Poland, organized an uprising that destroyed the camp and led to the escape of hundreds of prisoners. In January 1942, a group of fifteen Nazi government officials met in the Wannsee suburb of Berlin with...
Hidden History
The Japanese Mafia and the Card Game of Koi-Koi The card game of Koi-Koi is closely identified with the Japanese Mafia, known as Yakuza, which had...
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The card game of Koi-Koi is closely identified with the Japanese Mafia, known as Yakuza, which had its origin some 400 years ago in early attempts by the Shoguns to ban gambling and European playing cards. History When the Portuguese arrived in Japan in 1543, they established...
Hidden History
Project Mercury Project Mercury was America’s entry into the Space Race and was intended to put a human into space...
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Project Mercury was America’s entry into the Space Race and was intended to put a human into space before the Soviet Union did. The Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite in October 1957 caused a near-panic in the United States and led to desperate calls to “catch up”. President...
Hidden History
Museum Ship Destroyer USS Kidd The Fletcher-class destroyer USS Kidd was named, not after the famous British pirate, but after a...
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The Fletcher-class destroyer USS Kidd was named, not after the famous British pirate, but after a Rear Admiral who was killed on board the Arizona during the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Kidd served in both the Second World War and the Korean War. The destroyer USS Kidd  was...
Hidden History
The Ancient Egyptian Game of Mehen Mehen may be the oldest true board game in the world, and dates back to at least 3000 BCE. But...
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Mehen may be the oldest true board game in the world, and dates back to at least 3000 BCE. But recent study has completely changed the way we think about this game. History In 1861, French archaeologists Auguste Mariette and Jacques de Morgan found a tomb at Saqqara that was...
Hidden History
The Last Day of World War One At 5am on November 11, 1918, the French, British, American and German representatives signed the...
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At 5am on November 11, 1918, the French, British, American and German representatives signed the armistice treaty that formally ended hostilities in the First World War. Under the terms of the Armistice, the war would officially end at 11am that day. All the troops in the...
Hidden History
World War One Trench Songs Today, we remember the First World War as a long drawn-out stalemate that resulted in four years of...
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Today, we remember the First World War as a long drawn-out stalemate that resulted in four years of blood but no gains by anybody—and a peace treaty that did nothing but cause another World War twenty years later. But less often remembered is the fact that the war was one of the...
Hidden History
The Ocarina The Ocarina, also sometimes called the “sweet potato flute”, is an ancient instrument that was...
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The Ocarina, also sometimes called the “sweet potato flute”, is an ancient instrument that was developed in Meso-America, and was resurrected in 19th century Europe. When we hear the word “flute”, most of us think of a long thin wooden or metal tube with holes along its length...
Hidden History
A Tale of Kale (And Cabbage, and Brussels Sprouts, and Broccoli, and Cauliflower…) These vegetables (and Kohlrabi, and Collard Greens, and Gai Lan, and Bok Choy, and Red Cabbage) may...
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These vegetables (and Kohlrabi, and Collard Greens, and Gai Lan, and Bok Choy, and Red Cabbage) may be familiar in the kitchen, but they do not exist anywhere in nature—and they are all the same species of plant. The Brassica is a very large and diverse family of plants, with...
Hidden History
Pennsylvania Dutch Shoofly Pie (A diary in honor of my native state of Pennsylvania, which may or may not decide the outcome of one...
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(A diary in honor of my native state of Pennsylvania, which may or may not decide the outcome of one of the most consequential US elections in modern history.) The story of a Pennsylvania Dutch classic dessert is as colorful as its unusual name… In 1517, Martin Luther began a...
Hidden History
Sailing Ship “Star of India” The Star of India is an iron-hulled merchant sailing ship built in England in 1863. On display at...
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The Star of India is an iron-hulled merchant sailing ship built in England in 1863. On display at the Maritime Museum of San Diego, she is billed as “the world’s oldest active sailing ship”. In 1863, the Gibson, McDonald & Arnold shipbuilding company, on the Isle of Man, began...