Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

A recent post looked at the tensions created by ambassadors declaring war in WW2. Today, instead, some descriptions of declarations of war from World War 1. The initial impression is that there was more formality and more old world charm. Some of the ambassadors may have believed they would be back in their host capitals by […]

1940 Coney Island Drowning. What’s most interesting the respiration equipment or the girl’s incredibly inappropriate Bay Watch smile?

***thanks to Tacitus from Detritus for sending this one in*** Symmachus and the far more famous Boethius were Roman nobles after the end of the Roman empire, an uncomfortable time to be ‘senators’. Boethius fell into disgrace with the emperor Theoderic: he essentially got into trouble for defending, in the law courts, an enemy of Theoderic. […]

Last four couples at the chicago dance marathon c. 1930

Beach has long consoled himself with the thought that he is in the Bubble: the three generations that have lived since the Second World War in the western nations, surfing the greatest economic wave in history, buoyed along by petroleum, micro-chips, and the internet and paradoxically protected from violence by the threat of thermo-nuclear war. […]

Dear Reader, spring in the air here now in Italy. Just ordered some giant yellow daisies and rats have appeared in the garden: March the hungriest month… Six more weeks of classes then a summer of writing. Getting an itch under my typing fingers already. Thanks, as always, to the multiple linkers: Amanda, Chris, Chris […]

The Index Biography is a new form of biography pioneered by this blog and introduced in a previous post. The creator must find a biography of a famous individual from history, they must turn to the index and write down eight peripheral facts about the individual’s life. We offered up previously here Sheridan le Fanu and Joseph […]

John Durand’s wonderful cittern picture…  

The hair harvest was the trick of selling your beautiful head of hair, an option open to hirsute young women, to the local barber for a sovereign (or somewhat less). The practice was common enough in Victorian Britain that it appears in a Hardy novel, The Woodlanders, where Marty lops off her hair and sells […]

  No comment

First, a small rider. Beach would prefer to spend ten minutes in the company of medieval artists, than two hours in the company of the Renaissance ‘masters’. However, he has recently been disappointed in a search for pain among his favourite twelfth-, thirteenth- and fourteenth-century painters. In his naivety he thought that crucifixion scenes and […]

Italian soldiers in Alps, WW1: warriors with feathers, never a good sign…  

One of the most exciting areas of plague research in the last year has been the question of what transmitted the Black Death from central Asia into the distant but well populated margins of Euro-Asia in the fourteenth century. The answer which has been patly trotted out for over a hundred years now is that a rat […]

Lest we forget: Hungarian patriots rise against the Soviets.  

When is a swastika a good sign? The answer is, crudely, when it predates the Nazi party’s adoption of the crooked cross in 1920, for the swastika is one of the most ancient and one of the most widespread of human symbols. In many countries it remained an essentially religious symbol, locked into a pre-modern memory […]