Category: Pasts
21 min read
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Getting High with Shakespeare? It Might Have Happened
From clay pipe residues to cryptic sonnet lines, a long-running theory proposes that William Shakespeare experimented with mind-altering substances, raising…
105 min read
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The Eccentric Soviet Composer Who Conducted a City: Arseny Avraamov and the Sound of a Future That Never Arrived
In September 1922, amid the fifth anniversary commemorations of the October Revolution in the capital of Azerbaijan, a little-known Russian…
5 min read
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The Australian Afterlife of Elvis Presley
Each year on August 16, Elvis fans gather at a Melbourne cemetery on the anniversary of his death, observing the…
16 min read
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One Free Ride: When Texas Prison Inmates Became Rodeo Cowboys
For more than fifty years, the Texas Prison Rodeo turned incarceration into public entertainment, drawing massive crowds to Huntsville to…
48 min read
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The Bulldozer Exhibition: When the Soviets Tried (and Failed) to Literally Crush an Art Show
In 1974, Soviet authorities used bulldozers, arrests, and violence to destroy an unsanctioned outdoor art exhibition, only to ignite an…
16 min read
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Ancient Roman Brutalism? This Tomb Defies Classical Expectations
Two thousand years before concrete brutalism, this ancient Roman tomb built to honor a former slave appears staggeringly modern, but…
13 min read
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The Belgrade Phantom: The (Mostly) True Story of Yugoslavia’s Most Legendary Car Chase
A stolen white Porsche 911 in 1970s Yugoslavia turned an ordinary car thief into an urban legend. For several nights,…
9 min read
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A Door Dedicated to Death in the World’s Most Powerful Church
To the left of the main entrance of St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City stands a controversial bronze door that…