Weird History

In 1920, John B. Watson, a renowned psychologist, and Rosalie Rayner, his assistant and eventual wife, decided to combine love, science, and a fair bit of cluelessness in an experiment that would go down in history as “The Little Albert Experiment.” The idea was bold, the execution debatable, and the results as ethically murky as a midsummer mud puddle. Thus, in a story one might mistake for the beginning of a Dickensian epic, Little Albert’s fate was sealed.

While no two births are quite the same, everyone enters the world the same basic way - someone cries, someone else yells, and a third person tries to remember where the towels are. Amid this flurry of chaos, there exists an age-old profession - midwifery. You’d think helping parents bring their children into this world would be considered a noble pursuit. But being a midwife has never been simple. They were lauded as heroes in one century, persecuted as witches in the next, and are still given the occasional side-eye today.

The ocean. From Ishmael of “Moby Dick” to the captains of “Deadliest Catch,” something about calls to the adventurer in all of us. But while life on the sea may seem romantic, you can never forget that at any given moment, Poseidon is waiting to destroy you in an infinite number of ways.

Despite the fact that she was quite tiny, Queen Victoria looms large over most of the 19th century. She was every bit a woman of her time, engaging in the overblown sentimentality and culture of death so pervasive during the age that bears her name. When she died at 81, the queen left secret, detailed instructions on how to handle her body and what items to place in her coffin. There are, indeed, a number of strange Queen Victoria death facts worth exploring.