Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Admirer (American) comes to kiss Adolf Hitler…

Two ideas interested late nineteenth-century crime fiction writers. First, the ridiculous notion that finger prints were unique and that they could be recorded to incriminate this or that thief or murderer; and, second, optography, the sensible-sounding proposition that a murder victim would record the last thing he or she saw on the eye’s retina. Take […]

No smiles here…

Weak old humanity has long tried to wring drops of the future out in the present by: cutting open live calves, watching birds, reading palms, throwing bamboo rods and, well, hundreds of other methods. It is rarely that Beach comes across a form of divination that has most others beaten. His reference work is a […]

Baltic fisherwomen

Italy has a long history of emigration. Between 1869 and 1939 eighteen and a half million Italians left their home country, travelling to all corners of the world. After the Second World War emigration started up again, particularly towards northern Europe, and there was massive internal migration as five million southern Italians came to the […]

!!!! ‘A Custom’

A WIBT moment from early nineteenth-century Portugal. Thousands of well dressed but harassed men and women are milling and pushing in Lisbon harbor before a score of great British and Portuguese ships. The tense silence is suddenly broken as a piercing scream begins from behind. The woman’s voice, from a royal carriage is continual. Maria […]

Great book covers…

Beach has been interested, nay fascinated, this summer, by the way in which certain people have serial transformative ‘psychic’ experiences as they grow through adolescence and towards middle age: let’s use very loose terminology and call it the shaman ‘s apprenticeship. In a modern industrial or post industrial society these experiences are usually ignored, kept […]

Masha Gessen, Where the Jews Aren’t Might be a good one for bizarrists, the Soviet attempt to create a Jewish homeland. Naturally, this being the Soviet Union, it didn’t end well…

It would be futile to discuss which historical man or woman had the most interesting life: what, after all, is ‘interesting’? However, if we think of places visited and people met, then a good candidate is surely Francisco de Miranda (1750-1816), South American patriot, playboy, soldier, sexual athlete and general n’er-do-well. Consider, just as a […]

Beach has previously looked at tall Arab tales about trees, including the mythical children tree. However, what about this pleasing nonsense associated with Britain and Ireland? The source is Rashid al-Din and we are in the fourteenth-century. Opposite [Spain] in the midst of the Encircling Ocean are two islands, of which one is Ireland. From […]

Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy Always been curious about Attica, looking forward to getting this.

German musicians in the UK early 1800s