Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

At the chancellery: Nazi medals on the ground.

It is a story still told in hushed voices by archaeologists and classicists. Here is a recent version by Ken Albala from his (very good) lecture series on the history of food. So there is this revealing story of this group of Egyptologists and they find this perfectly sealed jar of honey and they open […]

Love the beard pulling…

There is lots of enjoyable nonsense about the Welsh and the Romans. The medieval Welsh genealogies are full of supposed Welsh connections to Caesar and other luminaries of the Empire. If memory serves correctly Gerald of Wales claims that the Welsh of his time sported Roman hairstyles (or was it their clean beardless faces that […]

This is a fascinating case of a well attested nineteenth- and twentieth-century phenomenon: the connection of bogeymen to new technologies and foreigners (particularly when foreigners had, as in colonial societies, a great deal of power) [1862] A very curious superstition agitates at present in an alarming manner the native population [in Batavia, the Dutch East […]

Pythagoras (c. 570-480 BC) is a shadowy figure who stands at the beginning of the Greek philosophical tradition: though we are not sure really whether he ‘did’ philosophy at all. He is also often sold as a kind of long-haired Greek guru: though others have argued that he had little interest in religious matters. Still […]

Sherwin, Japan’s WWII Legacy Fascinating subject, let’s hope he delivers…

When was the last occasion on which a western government burnt one of its citizens alive judicially? Well, there are several examples from elsewhere in the world, including a North Korean who was supposedly executed by flame thrower in 2014 and various ISIS murders. However, in a western country on the instructions of a judge? […]

Feiring, For the Love of Wine Georgia, of course. Always wanted to try Georgian wine…

There has been much theorizing about what really happened at the séance. Let’s review the possibilities. The first possibility is that the séance never took place; that it was a simple legal strategy to give information to the police without having to actually implicate anyone or explain where that information came from. The second possibility […]

Remarkable shot as a unit crosses road

In the previous post Beach introduced the Moro Seance. Here instead let’s go into more detail about the actors around the table. There were, by most accounts, twelve people including girlfriends, in the house that day but three names stand out: Romano Prodi, Mario Baldassarri and Alberto Clò. The three names were all economics professors […]

Stunt men being blown away….

On 16 March 1978 the Rome commando of the Red Brigade carried out a deadly and efficient attack on a leading Christian Democrat politician Aldo Moro. They murdered five bodyguards on the spot and carried Moro into a two month captivity that would end with this death in the boot of a car. The Moro […]

OK, OK there were no personal computers in 1884. But the following ‘Oracle’ sounds as if it was mapping out, imaginatively, the territory that computers would make for themselves. We are in the UK: our source the Leighton Buzzard Obs, 1 Jan 1884. Dr. Lloyd, the medical officer of St. Giles’s Workhouse, attended before Sir […]