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Fun Historical Facts
Grizelda
(1500s — Elizabethan Era)
*The Reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England: 1558-1603
*In Grizelda's day, medicines were not so advanced. It really was not worth getting sick. You may be asked to induce some powdered burnt swallow feathers, red coral, pigeon's dung or your own, mistletoe taken in the month of March, syrup of poppy, earthworms, and if a prepared pill or suppository was coated in gold, it might work a lot better. One cure for kidney stones was a mixture of white wine, salad oil, powdered crab's eyes and the bone in a carp's head. No wonder why Grizelda is so fucked up!
*On Elizabethan streets, one could be confronted with many types of beggars and rogues. According to A Dictionary of Rogues (1561), an Abram-man is "he that walketh bare-armed, and bare-legged, and feigneth himself mad, and carryeth a pack of wool, or a stick with bacon on it, or suchlike toy, and nameth himself Poor Tom."
*Ladies clothes were mix and match. Sleeves, bodices and skirts were not connected. One had to connect the different pieces with straight pins. (Safety pins weren't invented until 1849.) Even if you owned only two dresses, you could end up having a lot more if you mixed it up right.
*Men's codpieces really weren't a place to put the penis at all. Often, they were stuffed or a man could keep things (money, important papers) in them for storage.
*Pets, like miniature spaniels, were popular for Elizabethans. They also enjoyed exotic creatures such as monkeys and parrots. (Don't monkeys throw their own shit at you when they get mad???)
*It was common knowledge that if a person wore a ring containing a piece of unicorn's horn, they would for certain be protected from poisonings.
*Whatever was good for the gander was also good for the goose. Many well-bred married ladies would take on lovers to make up for their tiresome arranged marriages. A female transvestite named Mary Frith (aka. Moll Cutpurse) not only rented out women to sexually satisfy men, she also pimped out respectable men to middle-class women.
*Card games such as Gleek and Primero were popular back then. Queen Elizabeth I enjoyed playing such games against her gentlemen courtiers…and she often won!
*In England, young men would play female characters in theatrical roles. Women were not allowed on stage at the time. Somehow, Elizabethans and foreign visitors who did have female actresses in their countries regarded this custom as normal.
*Aside from the theatrical stage, Elizabethans believed there was a difference in genders right from the start. A male fetus was thought to grow on the right side of the womb and the female, the left. Fortunately, the reasoning for malformed or unusual-looking children was switching from the idea of the mother copulating with the Devil to the more "forward-thinking" concept of Maternal Impressions. Apparently, if a pregnant woman saw something that startled her, the baby born would have some resemblance to that particular thing, such as a girl with a cat's head or horsey face or a boy with scaly skin like a fish. Even craving strawberries could cause a woman's unborn child to be born with a wine stain birthmark on its skin. Weird, just plain weird.
Frenchy
(1700s — French Revolution)
*French Revolution: 1789-1799
*Wax working was a popular craft at the time. When the French hacked off the heads of King Louis XVI and Marie Antionette, they paraded them around on sticks. Afterward, the rioting crowds showed up at the door of Madame Tussaud (now popular for "Madame Tussaud's Wax Museums") and demanded she sculpt exact duplicates of their decapitated heads out of wax.
*Church ceilings could also be seen with wax body parts such as arms and legs dangling from them. It was believed that if a person wanted an ailing family member to heal, they should construct a wax duplicate of the sick person's disease-infested body part and hang it in a church. What fun!
*In Frenchy's day, women and men powdered their wigs with lead and also wore lead-based make-up to hide all their pockmarks. Unknowingly, these lead concoctions were extremely detrimental to their health. Basically, beauty was killing them. But, they did look so lovely.
*Marie Antoinette loved to dress up as a simple peasant girl or shepardess with her lady subjects at court playing milkmaids. She had a little rustic hamlet designed for her and
her friends to milk cows and pretend to be commoners. Although this crazy pasttime is often attributed to Marie Antoinette only, it was typical entertainment for many of the aristocracy of the time to build themselves these "model farms."
*The streets of Paris were alive with entertainments. One could see performing fleas pulling tiny carriages, conjurors, snake charmers, a concert of musical glasses, puppet shows, trained dogs who could count, fire eaters and a tremendous favorite to all: children swallowing boiling oil!
*A Phantasmagoria Show was one in which images of ghostly phantoms could be seen projected on the walls of a dark theatre. There were also sounds of thunder, screams, groans, and optical images of magic lanterns. And, if you were really lucky…the audible sound of a disembodied voice coming from the middle of the room!
*Royal members of the French Court would bleach their teeth to get them their whitest. Unfortunately, they used heavy-duty bleaches and lost their teeth quite frequently. Fortunately, false teeth of wood or ivory were made to replace those awkward-looking spaces.
*In 1789, Dr. Guillontin invented the…well, guillotine. It was meant as a more humane decapitation device than the hacking off of the head by an executioner, but would not make its debut until 1792.
*It was the fashion for ladies to wear thin red cords around their necks to symbolize the beheadings.
*After the French Revolution, the huge powdered wigs went out of style with the youth. Hair on females and males was often cropped shorter and jagged into a "Titus style" and brushed in crazy directions. These wacky hairdos often resemble 1970's rock star and 1980's new wave hairstyles. Rod Stewart was not the first guy to wear his hair that way!
Violet
(mid 1800s — Civil War Era)
*American Civil War: 1861-1865
*A new invention called the hypodermic needle made it easier to send morphine into a soldier's bloodstream when he needed a limb amputated on the battlefield. Sears and Roebuck eventually sold a hypodermic needle in their popular catalogue which aided all the ex-Civil War soldiers who were now hooked on the stuff.
*In Violet's day, walking hand and hand in a cemetery was a popular romantic way to spend a date.
*The electric telegraph was patented by Samuel Morse (the guy who brought us Morse Code) in 1837. Mass communication was just beginning. The world was speeding up!
*Gold was first discovered in California in 1848 at Sutter's Mill. Why they called the pioneers making their way to the Golden State, forty-niners, I do not know. Maybe the telegraph wasn't working fast enough!
*The Industrial Revolution brought on other new kooky inventions such as the elevator, which was first seen in 1852 at a New York store. "Elevator Sickness" was a condition brought onto people from the fast motion of this new futuristic contraption.
*On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin was published in 1859. This "atrocity" shocked crowds of goodly and godly church-going people everywhere.
*With P.T. Barnum, the art of hoaxing and humbugging came into vogue. The Feegee Mermaid was one of his most famous hoaxes. It was the head of a monkey sewn onto the body of a fish. People clamored to see this spectacle and believed it to be real…or was it??? Edgar Allen Poe even authored a hoax when he worked for a magazine. He claimed the crossing of the Atlantic Ocean by balloon in just three days. Disappointingly, when people looked into the sky, no one ever saw that speedy balloon.
*Ladies in hoop skirts found it fashionable to wear lace gloves with the fingertips cut off (or not really sewn on to start with.) This made it easy for the lovely lady-bird to hold her food and drink in a dainty manner. Oddly enough, the same fashion reemerged in the 1930's Depression Era (though not nearly for the same reason and those gloves weren't lace!)
*Lucky people were beginning to switch from kerosene to gas as the new way to power their homes. Gas gave off deadly fumes, Thomas Edison argued later in his fight to switch gas power to electricity.
*The Fox Sisters, Maggie and Kate, began hearing strange ghostly rapping sounds on their walls and their table would lift off the floor. Could the dead be trying to contact the living? It was believed these two girls had mediumistic powers. Séances were the popular craze in this new philosophy called Spiritualism.
Adeline
(late 1800s — Victorian Era)
*As we can see, medical cures had hardly improved by Adeline's heyday. A remedy of a mustard sponge bath or an alcohol vapor bath might cure a stomach complaint called "Dyspepsia." And then again, it probably would not!
*"Railway Brain" and "Railway Spine" were two new medical conditions brought about by the speediness of commuter trains in the cities. People believed their brains were being shaken around in their skulls, (not that riding a horse wouldn't cause the same damage.) Even Freud diagnosed himself with "Railway Neurosis" because of a fearful childhood incident in which he thought he saw his mother naked on a train. Leave it to Freud!!!
*Queen Victoria made it fashionable to wear black to a funeral and after…waaaay after! This was not the custom before her. And when it came to Victorian people, the older they got, the more black they wore. Black was the new black!
*A silly new fad called the automobile made its way into the public eye by the end of the 1800's. Of course, they were considered just a crazy hobby for the rich and idle and were not expected to last for long.
*Ever wonder why New York drops a big huge ball in Times Square every New Year's Eve? Time balls, which were large metal globes in the Victorian Era, were placed up on tall structure in cities and would drop and rise again at noon so people could set their watches by them.
*An enormous fear for Victorians was the idea of Premature Burial. One magazine of the time claimed that one person every week was buried alive. A reason for this nutty fear was that when a coffin was exhumed from the ground and opened, sometimes the body would be shifted. Of course, that body was buried alive and was helplessly attempting to pry its way out! Many patents came out to remedy this common problem. Long tubes leading from the coffin would contain a rope for the corpse to pull which would ring a bell or wave a flag on the ground above them. Strangely, no bell was ever reported ringing or flag waving.
*Though most of their steps were backward in this Era, women were finally learning to read and take education seriously. A belief held by many men of this time was that all that academic fiddle-faddle could send the learned woman off into bouts of melancholy or fits of hysteria. Most likely, the mental problems only came from having a corset tied far too tight or perhaps, the pitiful woman having nowhere to go with her precious education once she got it.
*People first used packaged toilet paper in this era. No more Sears Catalogue to wipe the ass!
*The science of Anthropometry, (the measurement of body sizes), allowed factory-made, ready-to-wear clothing to be bought by people for the first time. This science, and product created by it, was a result of the need to mass-produce soldiers uniforms in different sizes for the Civil War.
*Traveling Medicine Shows were becoming a nifty spectacle and making their way westward. It was the only entertainment one could get living in a rural part of the US. These medicine show quacks would do anything to sell cocaine-filled Snake Oils, useless liniments, beer-filled Kickapoo Cures, and the most exciting part of the show…PAINLESS TOOTH EXTRACTIONS!
Minnie
(Roaring Twenties — Jazz Baby Era)
*Prohibition (1920-1933) was an act of US law which made the sales and consumption of alcohol illegal. Somehow, this law had the opposite effect and made the thrill of drinking booze even more delectable and profitable. Speakeasies were sprouting up everywhere…or rather sprouting downward in basements underground. One could only enter one of these illegal joints with a secret knock or codeword. Texas Guinan, a former cowgirl star of silent movies, was the Queen of the speakeasy ownership in NYC. She coined the sassy phrase "Hello suckers" as she greeted her customers who would pay any amount for her booze. King of bootlegging and racketeering in Chicago? Al Capone, of course.
*In Minnie's time, corsets were thrown in the trash as women exchanged the hourglass figure for the new androgynous boyish look: small bust, low waistline and even short bobbed hair. These scandalous ladies even took to smoking and drinking just like the fellas. The mystic of the female creature being completely naive, dependent and passive was gone forever…well, until the 1950's.
*Fads and ballyhoo were all the rage in this zany carefree time. People took to attention-getting pranks like swallowing goldfish, flag pole sitting, dance marathons 'til you dropped, and even crossword puzzles using tiny crossword puzzle dictionaries that fit on one's wristband. Mahjong, (a favorite of the Evil Sisters), was a popular game from Ancient China involving tiles. Ladies who played would wear kimonos and sit on the floor to appear more exotic.
*With the number of automobiles rising and the realization the car thing was not just a madcap fad, campgrounds and tourist courts with cabins, (the proto-type to the motel), were popping up everywhere to accommodate traveling motorists across America.
*The glamorous silent movie, (originally called Flickers), were on everyone's minds. People went wild over stars like Clara Bow, Rudolph Valentino, Gretta Garbo and Buster Keaton. Audio accompaniment for flickers had actually been invented in Edison's laboratories before this silver screen craze, but not perfected, thus leaving movies silent with a live orchestra in the theater. It wouldn't be until 1927, with The Jazz Singer starring Al Jolson, when talkies changed the sound of movies for good.
*A new type of newspaper emerged called the tabloid. They were the first papers completely devoted to gossip and sensationalized stories.
*1921 brought on the very first Miss America contest in Atlantic City. That contest was only entered by eight girls, but after that, it couldn't be stopped. The contestants represented cities instead of states as they do today. The ladies got a chance to wear bathing suits in public and Americans loved the idea of a "Little Miss Nobody" becoming Miss America overnight.
*The radio also became a favorite entertainment for folks who preferred to stay home for the night. Due to the introduction of commercial sponsorship, radio shows popped up all over the stations. People could now listen for free to singers, orchestras, comedy shows, soap operas and interviews with real live movie stars!
*No longer needing to send personal letters across the country by those old-fashioned trains, (and forget the Pony Express), mail began to be delivered by airplane. In fact, passenger plane travel began to flourish when people heard about Lindberg's successful flight from Long Island to Paris in 1927.
*A new type of music called Jazz came straight out of Harlem. This "jazz baby" sound created naughty dances like The Charleston, The Black Bottom and The Shimmy. It was fast, wild and damn perfect for those notorious speakeasies!
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