Charles d’Éon de Beaumont went to Russia in 1755 as a secret correspondent of French king Louis XV. Disguised as a woman, he obtained an appointment as reader to a Romanov empress; he returned for a mission the next year dressed as a man. By the 1770s speculation about his gender reached such fervor that odds were quoted by London brokers. An 1810 postmortem finally confirmed that he was anatomically male; Marie Cole, his companion of fourteen years, reportedly “did not recover from the shock for many hours.”
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A 2006 University of Cambridge study found that meerkats teach pups how to hunt by first introducing them to dead prey, then to injured prey; when the pup is ready, the adults present them with live prey. “There were clear post-provisioning costs involved in feeding pups live prey,” the researchers wrote. If the prey escaped, the adults were able to recapture it only about 26 percent of the time. “On around 7 percent of occasions, helpers further modified the prey before returning it.”
While manager of the Tampa Bay Rays, Joe Maddon put his batting lineup in order for a July 2014 game using the field position numbers 8-6-7-5-3-0-9 in honor of the Tommy Tutone hit. The designated hitter served as the 0; the catcher (2) and second baseman (4) batted eighth and ninth. The Rays lost the game to the Detroit Tigers by a score of 1–8.
According to a biographer, Honoré de Balzac called out on his deathbed for Dr. Horace Bianchon, a fictional creation that appeared in thirty-one of his stories. “Send for Bianchon,” the novelist said to his attending physician.
In 1882 the nawab of Bahawalpur ordered a bed from a Parisian manufacturer that included four life-size bronze gurines of naked women with natural hair and movable eyes and arms, holding fans and horsetails. Wires were arranged so downward pressure on the mattress set the gures in motion, fanning and winking at him, while a selection from Gounod’s opera Faust played from a built-in music box.
“When Simonides or someone offered to teach him the art of memory,” Cicero noted in his De Finibus, the Athenian politician Themistocles “replied that he would prefer the art of forgetting. ‘For I remember,’ said he, ‘even things I do not wish to remember, but I cannot forget things I wish to forget.’ ”
In 1662 diarist Samuel Pepys saw two plays by William Shakespeare performed in London. Of Romeo and Juliet he wrote, “It is a play of itself the worst that ever I heard in my life, and the worst acted that ever I saw these people do.” A Midsummer Night’s Dream he described simply as “the most insipid, ridiculous play that I ever saw in my life.”
While walking around New York City, a young Meyer Lansky was stopped by a group of Italian teenagers demanding protection money. Their leader, later known to the public as Lucky Luciano, had been recruited into the Lower East Side’s Five Points Gang at a young age and would go on to develop a national crime syndicate. “Go fuck yourself,” Lansky responded. A lifelong friendship between the two gangsters grew out of this encounter. “They would just look at each other,” recalled Bugsy Siegel. “A few minutes later, one would say what the other was thinking.”
“No concrete test of what is really true has ever been agreed upon,” wrote William James in 1893. “When, indeed, one remembers that the most striking practical application to life of the doctrine of objective certitude has been the conscientious labors of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, one feels less tempted than ever to lend the doctrine a respectful ear.”
“History is more or less bunk,” Henry Ford told the Chicago Tribune in 1916. “It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”
Gustav Mahler set five poems from Friedrich Rückert’s Songs on the Death of Children to music between 1901 and 1904. In that time he and his wife, Alma, had two children, the eldest of whom died in 1907. About the compositions, Mahler later said, “I placed myself in the situation that a child of mine had died. When I really lost my daughter, I could not have written these songs anymore.” He died in 1911, Alma not until 1964—having twice remarried, to Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius and then to author Franz Werfel.
When Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic as a passenger in June 1928, the New York Sun ran an article with the headline MISS EARHARD SPURNS FASHIONS: SHE CARES LITTLE ABOUT CLOTHES, DOES NOT USE LIPSTICK—LIKES TO FENCE AND DRIVE CAR. “Flying is a perfectly natural thing in her opinion,” it read, “and requires no special togs: a dress is as good air equipment as trousers.”
“The movements of the air and water,” wrote French mathematician Joseph Fourier in 1824, “the extent of the oceans, the elevation and form of the surface, the effects of human industry, and all the accidental changes of the earth’s surface modify the temperature of each climate.”
President Warren Harding embarked on a journey to Alaska in June 1923, taking with him his secretary of commerce, Herbert Hoover. “If you knew of a great scandal in our administration,” he asked Hoover, “would you, for the good of the country and the party, expose it publicly or would you bury it?” Hoover urged the president to reveal what would become known as the Teapot Dome scandal, but Harding feared the political fallout. He died of a heart attack in San Francisco two months later.
William Gladstone, prime minister of England four times between 1868 and 1894, walked the streets of London at night hoping to rescue prostitutes from their lives of vice. In 1848 he cofounded the Church Penitentiary Society Association for the Reclamation of Fallen Women; he would, it is said, offer streetwalkers a place to sleep, protection from their procurers, and a chance to give up their way of life.