The Tour de France is a Beautiful Mess and Maybe that’s How it Should Be

For a long time, I didn’t really “get” the appeal of the Tour de France. A bunch of men in spandex torturing themselves on two wheels, each producing enough sweat to flush a toilet 39 times? (That was one of the more unusual statistics I found floating around out there). And how does anyone take…

Let’s Raise a Glass to America’s Black Wall Street

Something else they forgot to tell us about in history class: Black Wall Street. Why is it that our textbooks neglected to tell us about the African Americans who opened their own banks, did business with the Rockefellers and prospered as entrepreneurs decades before the Civil Rights Movement? Yes indeed, long before desegregation, America had…

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Greetings from the Colonies: Postcards of a Shameful Past

Of course we’re all familiar with the postcard as a small souvenir we send to friends and family from faraway vacations, or as something we buy to decorate our walls. But are you familiar with the postcard as a form of European colonial propaganda? Postcards were invented around 1860 (at a time when European countries were…

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For Sale: The Lost Island Kingdom of a 1920s Bad Girl

“I ran a country”, boasted the tattooed, cigar-smoking, openly gay It-girl of the 1920s, whose life reads like an unwritten book by F. Scott Fitzgerald. She built her own private island kingdom, was hailed the “fastest woman on water” as a champion motorboat racer and had her suits made on Saville Row. But Marion Barbara ‘Joe‘ Carstairs said herself, she…

She Raced the Boys and Took Their Trophies

She began driving secretly at the age of 14 in her father’s ‘borrowed’ Citroën 2CV and her earliest races took place on the gravel roads of the French riviera, trying to carve off the journey time between work and home in a Renault 4. Michèle Mouton became the first woman in rally driving to win a…

The Most Beautiful Car Race that Ever Was

It was the kind of race where if a car broke down, the driver would have been invited inside by locals for spaghetti. The track, littered with horseshoe nails, meandered through the tiny twisting streets of quaint Sicilian mountain towns while villagers watched Ferraris speed by at 100 miles an hour, perilously close to their doorsteps. The Targo Florio…

Rare Kodachromes of 1950s Hot Rods to Send your Heart Racing

Motorcar racing has taken place at the Bonneville salt flats in Utah since 1914, but for three years between 1953 and 1955, one die-hard fan attended the races to capture the surreal scenes like never before– in brilliant Kodachrome colour. Don Palmer only published a few of the photos and most of his snaps have sat…

An Illustrated Guide to the Human Race circa. 1960s

The internet is a little bit like a maze of doors, some that lead to a spiralling descent of procrastination and some, though not many, can lead to forgotten treasure. Today I picked the winning door and found one of the most impressive online collections of vintage ephemera I’ve ever had the pleasure of stumbling across. Pages and…

The Great Parisian Waiters Race

If ever you’ve had an unpleasant experience with a French waiter (I’m guessing that’ll be just about everyone reading this), perhaps you might not be averse to some light entertainment at their expense. A bizarre sporting event that dates back more than a hundred years, the Waiters Race, better known to the French as the…