We think of the corsets and voluminous petticoats of the 1800’s as painfully limiting to the women who wore them, but a group of female gang members in 20th century London would be inclined to disagree. Enter the “Forty Elephants”,…
The doughnut– America’s favourite indulgence– has an unexpected heroic history. Despite having been invented in the 1800s, the doughnut wasn’t popularised until WWI, when the ring-shaped pastries brought comfort to thousands of soldiers serving in the trenches during the brutal years far…
Like many West Coast settlements, Seattle is a city built on sin. As a logging town and port city their main industry might have been lumber, but the businesses that kept them competitive were the ones that could keep the sailors…
Amelia Earhart might be the first woman aviator that comes to mind, but she was only one of an incredible group of flying female record breakers during the golden age of aviation in the 1920s and 30s. The Ninety-Nines was founded in…
Fredericka “Marm” Mandelbaum, better known as the “Queen of Fences” was a homely Prussian immigrant running a dry goods store with her husband and four children. She was also one of the biggest crime bosses the city of New York had ever…
Some underground histories are famous, but some have remained just that, underground. Even if you live on the West Coast, you might not have heard the urban legend of Portland’s infamous Shanghai Tunnels. Portland, a port city in Oregon near…
