A really great artists on the history of Japanese whisky, with pictures.
Tag: history
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Life and history lessons in a storage locker
He stopped at #3361 and unlocked the padlock. A musty odor emerged. He looked inside. The unit was crammed with birdcages, cedar chests, old paperbacks, barstools and Art Deco lamps.
“I think I’ll make good money off this locker, which isn’t bad, since I bought it for $140,” Michael said. “Copper is at $6 a pound right now, so I can sell the lamps to the scrap yard. It’s all about squeezing every dollar out of the locker.”
While some teenagers hang out after school, playing Fortnite or shooting hoops, Michael has taken up a more enterprising hobby. He buys abandoned storage lockers at bargain prices from public lien auctions with the aim of selling their contents for profit. It began two years ago, when he watched a rerun of “Storage Wars.” He has been on an urban treasure hunt since.
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Two cities under siege
I’ve thought about this often lately, how much does today compare to the years running up to the American Revolution, where British troops attempted to force compliance in its populace? Boston 1770 and Minneapolis 2026 share similarities.
The rage from those pre-revolution clashes in Boston continued to linger for years into the Constitutional Convention, and then the debate over the Bill of Rights. The Founders were also students of history, and saw how the domestic use of the military led to the fall of the Roman Republic. This, in large part, is why we have the Second, Third, and Fourth Amendments, and why the Constitution splits control of the military between the president and Congress. You really can’t overstate how much the Founders worried about . . . exactly what we’re seeing in Minneapolis.
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The history of tarot
Playing cards have been around for nearly 500 years, but their form as tarot cards has only been around since the mid 18th century.
Whether or not we believe that the cards of the tarot have supernatural powers, we all think of them primarily as tools for divination. It might seem as if they’ve played that cultural role since time immemorial, but in fact, that particular use only goes back to the eighteenth century. They were, at first, playing cards, used for a game known as tarocchi in Renaissance Italy. That was the original purpose of the oldest tarot cards in possession of the Victoria and Albert Museum, which you can see unboxed by curator Ruth Hibbard in the video above.
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100 years ago, an all-Black team beat the KKK on a baseball diamond
100 years ago, an all-Black team beat the KKK on a baseball diamond.
The Monrovians’ game against the KKK might have been set in motion by an open invitation that the Black team had announced in the Wichita Eagle three weeks earlier, saying they were “open for games with any team in Kansas,” according to a 2008 story by the Society of American Baseball Research.
The game, which took place 11 years before Jesse Owens would shatter the myth of white supremacy by winning four gold medals at the 1936 Nazi Olympics, provided a less-noticed dent, with the Monrovians winning, 10-8.
There was little coverage of it in the press. “Monrovians Beat K.K.K.,” ran the headline in the Wichita Eagle, in a story that was just two sentences long: “The Wichita Monrovians won from the K.K.K. team in a close and interesting baseball battle at Island Park, Sunday 10 to 8. A good sized crowd watched the colored team win the contest.”
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Paul Hubbard creator of the huddle
In 1884, a deaf football player created the huddle.
During a tight game in the fall of 1894, Paul Hubbard—quarterback for the Gallaudet University Bison, and known as “the Eel” for his canny maneuvers—made a simple move that changed sports forever: Concerned that his hand signs were tipping off his plans to the opposing defense, Hubbard summoned his offense and directed them to form a circle around him, creating what many consider the first football huddle.
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Automobile polo
There was a time in the early event of the automobile, polo matches were held. Cars. A ball. A person with a mallet hitting said ball.