Four years after the Romanovs were executed by Bolsheviks, a woman claiming to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia surfaced. She impressed skeptics with her ability to recall various details of the royal family’s life, and after Nicholas II’s cousin Grand Duke Alexander spent two days with her, he exclaimed, “I have seen Nicky’s daughter!” The woman spent decades fighting to be the legal heir to the Romanov fortune, losing her last suit in 1970. In the 1990s DNA evidence posthumously proved she was an imposter.
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A March 2018 report in the Wall Street Journal about a pre-Passover speech delivered by Israel’s prime minister included an error; a correction ran the following day. “An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated Benjamin Netanyahu said Moses brought water from Iraq,” it read. “He said the water was brought from a rock.”
“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.”
Abdul Kassem Ismael, a tenth-century Persian grand vizier and author of an extensive Arabic dictionary, had a library of 117,000 volumes. According to one account, the scholar declined an invitation to serve in the court of the Samanid ruler Nuh II, insisting that four hundred camels would be required to transport his library. Other accounts report that Ismael did undergo the trip, and that the camels were lined up in the alphabetical order of the volumes they carried.
During the 1679 plague of Vienna, a drunken balladeer named Marx Augustin passed out in a gutter. Gravediggers, mistaking him for dead, carried him beyond the city walls and threw him and his bagpipes into a pit filled with the bodies of plague victims. Upon waking the next day, Augustin was unable to get out of the mass grave. He played his bagpipes and was eventually rescued. “Ach, du Lieber Augustin,” a defiant song of loss based on his misadventure, remains a favorite in Vienna today. In 1908 composer Arnold Schoenberg quoted the folk song in the second movement of his String Quartet no. 2 in F-sharp Minor, op. 10.
For Kid Nation, a reality show that aired in 2007, forty children went to stay in a New Mexico ghost town for forty days. They lived as laborers, cooks, merchants, or an upper class; many worked fourteen-hour days to earn buffalo nickels to spend on root beer. In the final episode, some participants raided the dry goods store. “It’s free,” said one kid, his mouth stuffed with gummy bears. Another raider was heard announcing, “There is a god.”
Paul Cézanne’s father, a banker, was fond of telling his son, “Young man, young man, think of the future! With genius you die, with money you live.” At least this is according to Émile Zola, who recalled the words of admonishment in one of his letters to his friend Paul. The two had first met as teenagers at boarding school in the 1850s.
Hip-hop producer Devo Springsteen was once asked why he had sampled Nina Simone’s 1965 recording of the song “Strange Fruit” instead of Billie Holiday’s 1939 rendition. “Because of the rawness of her voice,” he said. “There is something really black about her voice. And when you are trying to make black music, there’s not a much blacker voice than Nina Simone.”
Dorothy Parker was once asked to use the word horticulture in a sentence. “You can lead a horticulture,” she replied, “but you can’t make her think.”
The Cincinnati Commercial complained in 1871 about the game of fly loo, a “detestable canker that destroys men’s souls.” Players selected sugar lumps and bet on which would attract a fly first. “Every afternoon from twenty to thirty of the very flower of our mercantile population retire to a private room and under locks and bolts give themselves up to this satanic game,” the article noted, “while the deserted ladies are languishing for a little male conversation below.”
According to Diogenes Laërtius’ third-century Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers, Plato was applauded for his definition of man as a featherless biped, so Diogenes the Cynic “plucked the feathers from a cock, brought it to Plato’s school, and said, ‘Here is Plato’s man.’ ” When asked about the origin of his epithet, cynic deriving from the Greek word for dog, Diogenes replied that it was given to him because he “fawns upon those who give him anything and barks at those who give him nothing.”
In 2020 bioarchaeologists found evidence that six individuals buried in southern Peru’s Chincha Valley during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries began their lives hundreds of miles away, on the country’s upper coast. The findings support colonists’ descriptions of the Incan Empire forcibly resettling populations to quell dissent and increase the procurement of natural resources. “The state generally sought to put people in ecological zones similar to their home,” the researchers noted, and the Chincha Valley would have been “a prime destination for the resettlement of northern water-management specialists and miners.”
After he was captured by pirates, Diogenes of Sinope was sold as a slave to Xeniades, who had the Cynic philosopher educate his sons. “At home he taught them to attend to their own needs,” writes Diogenes Laërtius in his Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, “to live on plain food and water, to wear their hair short and unadorned, to go barefoot and without a tunic, and to be silent and keep their eyes lowered when walking in the streets.”
Students at the Federal Polytechnic Institute in Zurich wrote to Carl Jung in 1949 to ask what effect he thought technology had on the human psyche. “The danger lies not in technology,” Jung responded, “but in the possibilities awaiting discovery.” The question regarding new discoveries was “whether man is sufficiently equipped with reason to be able to resist the temptation to use them for destructive purposes.” This, Jung concluded, “experience alone can answer.”
The Umayyad poet Dhu al-Rumma, of the Bedouin tradition, was known to ask his listeners to transcribe his poems as he was reciting them, declaring that a book “does not forget or alter words or phrases which have taken the poet a long time to compose.”