Author: Erin

In December 1794, a young man in London named William Henry Ireland brought his father, Samuel, a devoted collector of antiquities and curiosities, a parchment document sealed with wax. After carefully opening up the parchment, Samuel was astonished at what he saw: a mortgage deed dated 1610, signed by William Shakespeare and John Heminges, an actor in Shakespeare’s King’s Men troupe of players.

At the time, only a handful of signatures were known to have survived from Shakespeare’s handwritten records, so to have a personal document like this was an extraordinary coup. William Henry explained that the document was one of dozens like it he had found while rummaging in an old chest belonging to a rich gentleman whom William Henry described only as “Mr. H.” The gentleman wished to remain anonymous to avoid being bothered, William Henry explained, but had assured the young man that he had little interest in the documents and could take whatever he liked.

Eager to figure out whether the documents were real, Samuel Ireland contacted the College of Heralds (an organization devoted to coats of arms and genealogical research), who determined that the documents were genuine, although they were unable to identify the image on the Shakespearean wax seal. Fortunately, Samuel’s young assistant Frederick Eden was an authority on seals, and he decided that the impression on the seal looked like a quintain—a revolving target used by knights in jousting practice. A tenuous association with actual “shaking spears” was all Samuel needed: These documents must indeed be Shakespeare’s own, he decided, and he promptly put them on display in his curio-filled home on London’s Norfolk Street. Before long, A-list literary types were queuing up to take a look—and still young William Henry continued to unearth ever more impressive examples.

 
At a time when interest in Shakespeare’s work was at the highest it had been since his death almost two centuries earlier, the Irelands had seemingly unearthed a gold mine of Shakespearean memorabilia. Handwritten IOUs, love letters to his future wife “Anna Hatherrewaye,” signed actors’ contracts, theatrical receipts, and even a bizarrely cartoonish self-portrait all found their way out of William Henry’s seemingly boundless document chest and into his father’s display. But that was just the tip of the iceberg. Books from Shakespeare’s library with his own annotations in the margins also soon emerged, as did a first draft of King Lear hand-prepared by Shakespeare, and perhaps most significant of all of the Irelands’ discoveries, an entirely new play, Vortigern and Rowena.

The literary world was suitably shaken up. Although never a fan of Shakespeare (and despite saying he thought its script was “crude and undigested”) Irish playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan was impressed enough to acquire the performance rights to Vortigern and Rowena, which he planned to stage at his newly expanded Drury Lane, then the largest theater in London. Even more impressed was James Boswell, biographer of lexicographer and noted Shakespeare fanatic Samuel Johnson. Aging and in poor health, Boswell arrived at the Irelands’ Norfolk Street home and was ushered into Samuel Ireland’s study. A glass of warmed brandy in one hand and the documents in another, he went through the pages one by one, holding them up to a light to examine their penmanship in more detail. After several hours’ analysis, he lowered himself onto one knee and kissed the collection of pages before him. “I shall now died contented,” he reportedly said, “since I have lived to see the present day.” Three months later, he was dead [PDF].

On Christmas Eve 1795, about a year after the first documents came to light, Samuel Ireland published Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments Under the Hand and Seal of William Shakespeare—a lavish anthology of all the papers in his collection, featuring facsimiles and reprints of the pages. The book was a success, but its popularity brought the Irelands’ discoveries under more widespread scrutiny.

While some experts of the day had been keen to authenticate the documents, over time the inconsistent handwriting and poor-quality prose began to raise suspicion. In March 1796, the foremost Shakespeare authority of the era, Edmond Malone, published An Inquiry Into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments—a detailed analysis arguing that the documents were nothing but a “clumsy and daring fraud.” Even still, opinion was divided; Malone’s book was long and scholarly, and not everyone had the patience to sort through its arguments, damning as they were.

 
In April 1796, Sheridan staged the performance of Vortigern and Rowena at Drury Lane theater. But trouble was brewing: although the first few acts were received enthusiastically, the writing went drastically downhill, and several skeptical actors overplayed their lines for effect. One, John Philip Kemble, the era’s leading theater performer, stole the show in the final act by pronouncing the line “and when this solemn mockery is ended” in a rumbling, drawn-out, overly dramatic voice, prompting minutes of laughter and whistling from the audience. When the curtain came down, the audience erupted into both applause and booing, and a fight erupted in the pit between those who believed the work was genuine, and those who did not.

London was divided. On the one hand, Malone and his supporters saw the Irelands’ collection as an elaborate and heartless deception. On the other, there were those who steadfastly wanted to believe that they were authentic, and that a true goldmine of Shakespeare’s lost works had been uncovered. Boswell and other diehard believers, including Poet Laureate Henry Pye, had even drawn up a “Certificate of Belief” stating that they “entertained no doubt whatsoever as to the validity of the Shakespearean production.” The latter camp, however, was about to be bitterly disappointed. Late in 1796 William Henry Ireland published An Authentic Account of the Shaksperian Manuscripts—in which he confessed that the entire collection were forged.

Knowing that his father was an obsessive collector of Shakespearean memorabilia, William Henry had staged the very first document—the mortgage deed—by copying Shakespeare’s signature from a facsimile printed in an edition of his plays. Doctoring the ink made the writing look aged. Blank pages were torn from old books as a cheap supply of old paper, and scorching the papers with a candle gave them a convincing brown tinge.

As time went by and Samuel’s collection began to gain prominence, William Henry grew bolder in his forgeries. Extracts from Shakespeare’s plays were rewritten with spellings tweaked and lines reworked, sometimes with entirely new sections added. The love letter to Anne Hathaway was made up entirely—as was the entire script of Vortigern and Rowena. No wonder Sheridan had found the text so badly written; it appeared to have been written by a 19-year-old.

Even after his son declared the whole thing a hoax, Samuel Ireland refused to believe the works were forgeries. He went to his death in 1800 believing his son incapable of such an elaborate fraud, and committed to the idea that the works were genuine. William Henry, meanwhile, found it hard to get work once his deceit was uncovered: After a time in debtor’s prison, he moved to France, where he wrote books about French history and culture. He also published his own edition of Vortigern in 1832 and a series of gothic novels, but still struggled to make ends meet, and died in poverty in 1835.

Nowadays, William Henry is viewed more sympathetically: his father, it has emerged, was cold and distant in his childhood, caring more for his precious collection than for his young family. Although naïve in producing his forgeries, William Henry was seemingly only trying to foster some common ground with his father—and the more he brought him, the better the two got on. Alienating themselves from the literary community, it appeared, was just an unwelcome consequence. No matter how he and his work are viewed, however, William Henry Ireland’s great Shakespeare hoax remains an extraordinarily audacious—and, for a time, extraordinarily successful—literary deception.

Since 2002, the third Thursday of April is recognized as National High Five Day—a 24-hour period for giving familiars and strangers alike as many high fives as humanly possible. A few University of Virginia students invented the day, which has since evolved into a “High 5-A-Thon” that raises money each year for for a good cause. (For 2017, it’s CoachArt, a nonprofit organization that engages kids impacted by chronic illness in arts and athletics.) Here are a few more facts about the history of the hand gesture to get you in the high-fiving spirit.

UP HIGH

That may sound like a lot of celebration for a simple hand gesture, but the truth is, the act of reaching your arm up over your head and slapping the elevated palm and five fingers of another person has revolutionized the way Americans (and many all over world) cheer for everything from personal achievements to miraculous game-winning plays in the sports world. Psychological studies on touch and human contact have found that gestures like the high five enhance bonding among sports teammates, which in turn has a winning effect on the whole team. Put ‘er there!

DOWN LOW

There is some dispute about who actually invented the high five. Some claim the gesture was invented by Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Glenn Burke when he spontaneously high-fived fellow outfielder Dusty Baker after a home run during a game in 1977. Others claim the 1978-79 Louisville basketball team started it on the court. Since no one could definitively pinpoint the exact origin, National High Five Day co-founder Conor Lastowka made up a story about Murray State basketballer Lamont Sleets inventing it in the late ’70s/early ’80s, inspired by his father’s Vietnam unit, “The Fives.”

Regardless of which high-five origin story is more accurate, there is little question of its roots. The high five evolved from its sister-in-slappage, the low five. The gesture, also known as “slapping skin,” was made popular in the jazz age by the likes of Al Jolson, Cab Calloway and the Andrews Sisters.

GIMME FIVE

As the high five has evolved over the past few decades, variations have developed and become popular in and of themselves. Here are five popular styles:

The Baby Five
Before most babies learn to walk or talk, they learn to high five. Baby hands are much smaller than adult hands, so grownups have to either use one finger, scrunch their fingers together or flat-out palm it.

The Air Five
Also known as the “wi-five” in the more recent technology age, this one is achieved just like a regular high five, minus the hand-to-hand contact. Its great for germaphobes and long distance celebrations.

The Double High Five
Also known as a “high ten,” it is characterized by using both hands simultaneously to high five.

The Fist Bump
It’s a trendy offshoot of the high five that made headlines thanks to a public display by the U.S. President and First Lady. Instead of palm slapping, it involves contact between the knuckles of two balled fists. In some cases, the fist bump can be “exploding,” by which the bump is followed by a fanning out of all involved fingers.

The Self High Five
If something awesome happens and there’s no one else around, the self high five may be appropriate. It happens when one person raises one hand and brings the other hand up to meet it, high-five style. Pro-wrestler Diamond Dallas Page made the move famous in his appearances at WCW matches.

YOU’RE TOO SLOW!

Don’t fall for that old joke. The key to a solid high five is threefold. Always watch for the elbow of your high-fiving mate to ensure accuracy; never leave a buddy hanging; and always have hand sanitizer on you. Have a Happy High Five Day!

Have you ever had a “Love Jones,” or even a “Basketball Jones”? Do you occasionally jones for a “hot now” Krispy Kreme donut (only to find that store closed)? Did you know that when you use that terminology you are actually indulging in some (gasp) drug slang?

In the early 1960s, a “jones” was a craving—but strictly a craving for heroin. Clever junkies had been using “Mr. Jones” as a code name for the drug since it became popular with Beatniks in the late 1950s. “I’m looking for Mr. Jones” was a subtle way to score when you were new in town and didn’t yet have a regular dealer. The term evolved over the next several years so that eventually when an addict was alternately sweating and shivering while in need of a fix, he or she was described as “jonesing.” In the early 1970s, “jones” had expanded to describe any sort of severe longing or craving, whether for food or a relationship or a shiny new sports car.

This isn’t the first time drug-related terminology has entered our everyday jargon; the word “yen” (as in “She has a real yen for men”) started out as a corruption of the 1920s-era Cantonese phrase “yin-yan,” or “opium craving.”

Have you got a Big Question you’d like us to answer? If so, let us know by emailing us at bigquestions@mentalfloss.com.

In 1725, one of the most peculiar cases in British legal history was brought before the Court of Exchequer. John Everet (or Everitt) and Joseph Williams, who had gone into business together, made an oral agreement to divide all the costs and profits of their enterprise equally. But after one particularly lucrative transaction went awry, Everet became suspicious that Williams was taking more than his fair share—so he took his partner to court.

Ordinarily that wouldn’t make for such an unusual case, and indeed, the official court documents seem to suggest that nothing in the pair’s dealings was out of the ordinary: In entering into their partnership, the records show that the pair had quite rightly agreed to share the cost of all the equipment their enterprise would require, “such as horses, bridles, saddles, assistants and servants,” they were merely involved “in dealing and in buying and selling several sorts of commodities.”

But as above board as all that sounds, Everet and Williams were both highwaymen—and their “business” amounted to nothing more than robbing unsuspecting gentlemen in and around north London and the surrounding countryside.

How the case even ended up in court at all is unclear, although one account claims that it was, in fact, Williams who made the first move: After a quarrel over the value of a gold watch they had acquired in a recent robbery, Williams sued Everet for £200. When Everet failed to show up to court (perhaps understandably, given the true nature of their business, although Everet would claim he was in prison), the action against him went undefended, and Williams won not only the case but Everet’s share of the spoils as well. In response, Everet—presumably aggrieved that Williams had won the case—then raised his own case against Williams. He took the unusual step of hiring a pair of solicitors, William Wreathock and William White, to represent him. Wreathock and White, in turn, hired legal counsel, a barrister by the name of Jonathan Collins, who drew up an official complaint and took the highwaymen’s case to the Court of Exchequer.

The bill Collins compiled—which requested that Williams account for the value of the goods in question, and repay any money owed to the plaintiff—is a masterclass in legalese. At no point are the criminal aspects of Everet and Williams’s business alluded to, and instead Collins merely wrote that:

“… pursuant to the said agreement, [Everet] and the said Joseph Williams went on and proceeded jointly in the said dealing with great success on Hounslow Heath, where they dealt with a gentleman for a gold watch … [Williams informed Everet that] Finchley was a good and convenient place to deal in, and so they dealt there with several gentlemen or divers watches, rings, swords, canes, hats, cloaks, horses, bridles and other things to the value of £200 and upwards.”

According to Collins’s statement, after this “deal” had been concluded, Williams took charge of all the goods the pair had acquired, but Everet became suspicious when Williams “began to shuffle with him,” and refused to give him any kind of account or inventory of the items involved.

In explaining why the dispute was being brought to court—and seemingly unaware of the irony of what he was doing—Collins declared:

“My client, John Everet, is relievable only in a Court of Equity before Your Honours, where just discoveries are made, frauds detected, and just accounts settled.”

In fact, it is presumed that in bringing the case to court, Collins’s plan was to force Williams’s hand and compel him to agree to an out-of-court settlement before the case ever came before a judge. He hadn’t banked, however, on Williams holding his nerve: Collins’s bill was presented in October of 1725, and a month later, the case was officially heard in court. The court was far from impressed.

Faced with resolving a dispute between two criminals and doling out the stolen profits of an illegal enterprise, the court dismissed the case as “scandalous and impertinent”—but the judges weren’t done yet. An order was issued for the arrest of Wreathock and White, Everet’s solicitors, on a charge of contempt of court for even bringing the case to the court’s attention at all. And for his part in the fiasco, barrister Jonathan Collins was ordered to pay all the costs himself—earning him a unique place in British legal history as the only barrister ordered to pay the costs of a failed case.

With the authorities now fully aware of Everet and Williams’s activities (not to mention the precise locations they liked to ply their trade), both men were eventually apprehended and tried: Williams was hanged at Maidstone in Kent in 1727, while Everet was hanged at Tyburn in London in 1730. In one final bizarre twist, William Wreathock was found guilty of robbery five years later and sentenced to transportation in 1735.

As the curious case of Everet vs. Williams—or “The Highwayman’s Case,” as it has become known—drifted into obscurity, for many years the unlikely tale of two highwaymen taking each other to court to resolve their dispute was believed to be a myth, until a law journal found a supposed reprinting of the case, and was able to verify key information. Since then, the case has gained an understandable reputation as one of the strangest in legal history, and is frequently cited as an example of the legal principle ex dolo malo non oritur action—“no right of action can have its origin in fraud.” Or, in other words: You can’t expect the law to help when what you’re doing is illegal in the first place.

Victorian England was infested with rats. Rodents were in your basement, your sewers, your garden, your pantry, your parks, your pipes—and it was a huge problem. An untold number of rats crippled crops, spoiled food supplies, clogged drains, and, of course, had helped spread a plague that killed about 60 percent of Europe’s population. (Though gerbils may deserve some blame, too.)

Residents resorted to a handful of techniques to stop the critters. Farmers were known to catch rats and strap bells around their necks, or singe their fur, hoping a horde of jangly burnt rodents would scare fellow pests away. It didn’t. “Rats are everywhere about London,” said a man named Jack Black, “both in rich and poor places.”

Black would know. He was England’s royal rat-catcher.

 
“Rat-catcher” may not be a job you see at Career Day anymore, but in Victorian England, it was a popular and sometimes lucrative career. According to author Barbara Tufty [PDF], a decent rat-catcher could earn “special privileges” if he caught at least 5000 rats a year, or about 13 rats a day. The job was so common that rodent-chasers in England established their own professional rat-catcher guilds. The occupation even inspired a popular folktale: The Pied Piper was a rat-catcher.

During the Victorian era, Jack Black was the king of the rat-catchers. The official “rat and mole destroyer to her Majesty,” Black got his start doing government work as a young man after he noticed London’s royal parks were spilling over with rats. (Literally: They had gnawed through the bridge drains.) His talent for catching rodents proved unmatchable, and he was eventually appointed by Queen Victoria to the post of supreme rat-catcher.

Black strolled around London with the swagger and audacity of royalty while maintaining the appearance of a court jester. He wore a homemade uniform of white leather pants, a scarlet waistcoat, a green topcoat, a gold band around his hat, and a sash emblazoned with metal rat-shaped medallions, which he had made by secretly melting down his wife’s saucepans.

Ever the showman, Black ambled around the city with a cart full of rats and peddled a homemade brew of varmint poison. After finding a crowd, he would set up a small stage, open a giant cage of rats, and reach inside. The rodents would jump onto his arms, scurry over his shoulders, and scamper from one hand to the next. The crowds oohed and ahhed—Black was rarely bitten. (Whenever a rat did sink its teeth in, Black treated his wound by visiting the local pub and having some “medicine,” a.k.a. stout—although if the bite was really bad, he would make sure to clean the wound.)

After luring a crowd, Black would begin hawking his poison to onlookers. “I challenge my composition, and sell the art of rat-destroying, against any chemical ray-destroyer in the world, for any sum,” he’d bark. “I don’t care what it is. Let anybody, either a medical or druggist manufacturer of composition, come and test with rats again me.”

After a pleasant afternoon selling rodenticide, Black would descend into London’s basements and sewers with a legion of ferrets and dogs to catch more rats. Black had trained the ferrets to sniff out vermin, while he trained the dogs to track down the ferrets in case they got lost or stuck in a sewer pipe, according to Lapham’s Quarterly.

Black tried using other animals to catch vermin. He trained a badger, two raccoons, and a monkey, but most of them couldn’t compete with dogs and ferrets. “I’ve learnt a monkey to kill rats,” he said, “but he wouldn’t do much, and only give them a good shaking when they bit him.”

Black didn’t kill every rat he caught, though. He often kept them alive and bred them for sport.

Nineteenth-century Europeans have an unfortunate history of enjoying animal bloodsports: Monkey-baiting (Can a monkey armed with a stick fight a dog?); fox-tossing (Who can throw a fox highest in the air?); and goose-pulling (Can you decapitate a goose while riding a horse?) were just a few. During Black’s time, rat-baiting, in which dozens of rats are tossed in a pit with a dog, was one of the most popular pastimes in London taverns. The bloodsport was so beloved that the government taxed the rat-killing dogs. London’s premiere rat pit owner, Jimmy Shaw, bought 26,000 live rats each year from rat-catchers like Black.

But Black also bred rats for gentler reasons. He knew that some people wanted rodents as pets—and that some folks would pay handsomely for an equally handsome rat—so he began breeding “fancy” rats. Whenever he discovered a rat-of-a-different-color, he’d take it home for “ladies to keep in squirrel cages.”

Black was proud of his fancy rat-breeding skills. It’s rumored that he bred rats for the Queen and the author Beatrix Potter. He claimed that “I’ve bred the finest collection of pied rats which has ever been knowed [sic] in the world.” Which is probably true. The American Fancy Rat & Mouse Association says Black “can be credited as the originator of the first true domestic rats.”

But Jack Black’s legacy may dig even deeper: The first white lab rat—bred in Philadelphia—was descended from an albino rat that may have been bred by the rat catcher.

There’s no way to be certain, but as Robert Sullivan writes in his book Rats: Observations on the History & habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants, “I like to think that all the great scientific achievements that have been made in the modern scientific era as a result of work with laboratory rats are ultimately the result of the work of Jack Black, rat catcher.”

You can read more about Jack Black in Robert Mayhew’s 1851 classic oral history of everyday Londoners, London Labour and the London Poor—the fun starts on page 11 [PDF].

Born on February 9, 1737 (according to the Gregorian calendar), Paine was a brilliant essayist whose polarizing pen brought him praise and scorn on both sides of the Atlantic. Here are a few things you might not have known about the man John Adams once called “a mongrel between pig and puppy, begotten by a wild boar on a bitch wolf.”

1. HE ARRIVED IN AMERICA WITH A LETTER OF RECOMMENDATION FROM BEN FRANKLIN.

The first half of Thomas Paine’s life was marred by setbacks and sorrow. Born and raised in Norfolk, England, his formal education consisted of a five-year stint at Thetford Grammar School which ended when he began apprenticing under his father—a stay-maker—at age 13. By the time Paine turned 38, he’d suffered the death of his first wife and child, parted ways with his second one, and had twice been dismissed from his post at the English Excise Service. But around that time, Paine was introduced to Benjamin Franklin by their mutual friend, mathematician George Lewis Scott. Franklin encouraged Paine to emigrate to the American colonies, and in 1774, Paine set sail for Philadelphia with a letter of recommendation from Franklin. It instructed Paine to show the document to Franklin’s son-in-law, Pennsylvania businessman Richard Bache.

“The bearer, Mr. Thomas Paine, is very well recommended to me as an ingenious worthy young man,” Franklin wrote. “He goes to Pennsylvania with a view of settling there. I request you give him your best advice and countenance, as he is quite a stranger there. If you can put him in a way of obtaining employment … you will do well, and much oblige your affectionate father.”

At the end of a long and arduous journey, Paine arrived in the new world on November 30, 1774. As instructed, he showed the letter to Bache, who obligingly found him a tutoring job. The following year, Paine was hired as the executive editor of Pennsylvania Magazine, a monthly periodical, and within three months, Paine’s provocative essays on various social issues had driven the number of subscribers up from 600 to 1500.

2. JOHN ADAMS WAS RUMORED TO BE THE REAL AUTHOR OF COMMON SENSE.

Paine is primarily remembered, at least in the U.S., for writing Common Sense. Released on January 9 or 10, 1776 (sources differ), the essay championed the idea of American independence and the establishment of a New World republic—two subjects which, by and large, hadn’t been taken seriously in the colonies. Paine later said that the pamphlet sold anywhere from 100,000 to 150,000 copies, but modern historians doubt that.

At first, Common Sense was published anonymously, which led to speculation about who the author might be. In Boston, it was rumored that John Adams had penned the manifesto—but Adams didn’t fully agree with the premise of Common Sense, which he once referred to as a “poor ignorant, malicious, short-sighted, Crapulous Mass.” His biggest criticism involved the author’s call for a new American republic overseen by a unicameral (i.e.: “one-house”) legislature. To rebut Common Sense, Adams anonymously published a pamphlet of his own, titled Thoughts on Government, which advocated the creation of a bicameral legislature as one component of a three-pronged governmental system that would also include a judiciary branch and an elected governor. (Sound familiar?) Paine’s identity as the author of Common Sense was revealed on March 30, and Adams, who instantly regretted publishing his tract anonymously, also attached his name in later printings.

3. HE (BRIEFLY) WORKED FOR THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS.   

Specifically, Paine was brought onboard in April 1777 to serve as the organization’s Secretary to the Committee of Foreign Affairs. Paine was paid $70 a month, and his job consisted of maintaining the committee’s records and drafting letters to American diplomats stationed overseas. But he continued to write essays in support of the revolution on the side, which got him into serious trouble when he publicly mentioned top-secret negotiations with the French. He also made some powerful enemies by accusing diplomat Silas Deane of war-profiteering. In January 1779 Congress began taking steps to remove Paine from his position, but Paine voluntarily resigned.

4. PAINE ONCE DESIGNED AN EXPERIMENTAL KIND OF BRIDGE.

Like Franklin, Paine loved tinkering and was known to invent the occasional product (for example, a “smokeless candle”)—and when the Revolutionary War ended, he turned the world of infrastructure upside down with an inspired new bridge design.

During the late 18th century, the average bridge was constructed mainly out of stones and wood and was typically built with half-circle arches that allowed tall ships to pass beneath them. Unfortunately, steep arches like that forced architects to steeply incline both ends of the road on top of the bridge—a major inconvenience for pedestrians and carriages. It was possible to construct a bridge with support piers in the middle of the span, but ice routinely destroyed these bridges.

Paine came up with a radical alternative. In 1787, he sketched out the blueprint for a bridge with an incline free road made possible by an underlying arch that didn’t curve upwards so sharply. And for resiliency’s sake, he designed the whole thing to be made of iron. Since visual aids are always helpful, Paine built a 13-foot model that he showed off to Pennsylvania statesmen. Hoping to generate more interest, Paine returned to his native England, where he received a government patent for the design.

5. IN THE U.K., SEVERAL PRINTERS WERE ARRESTED FOR SELLING COPIES OF RIGHTS OF MAN.

When France’s revolution began in 1789, Paine—who had returned to England—vocally supported the uprising. But of course, not everyone shared his enthusiasm. In 1790, Irish-born politician Edmund Burke released the widely-read pamphlet Reflections on the Revolution in France, wherein he denounced the revolution as a risky and destructive political gamble. In response, Paine began working on Rights of Man, a fervent defense of the rebel cause. (The two-part essay was published in 1791 and 1792.) With its anti-monarchical sentiments, the treatise infuriated Britain’s government—so much so, in fact, that the authorities actually jailed printers who sold The Rights of Man within Great Britain. The prison sentences for guilty parties ranged from a couple of days to seven years in length.

6. THE AGE OF REASON WAS PARTIALLY COMPOSED IN A (RATHER LUXURIOUS) PRISON.  

Controversial as it was in Britain, Rights of Man was wildly popular in France. So when Paine fled there in 1792, he was greeted with open arms—at first. Shortly after his arrival, Paine was elected as a member of the country’s National Assembly, but he was soon stirring up controversy. Paine spoke out against guillotine usage and King Louis XVI’s execution, and on December 28, 1793, the political thinker was charged with treason, probably because of his stance on capital punishment (though the rationale behind this accusation remains unclear). Paine was taken to Luxembourg Prison, a palace-turned-jail where he was given a spacious room and free rein to explore the rest of the building during daylight hours. Inside, he busied himself with a new pamphlet he’d begun writing before his arrest: The Age of Reason; Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology.A critique of organized religion. The two-part document questioned the Bible’s legitimacy and made the case for Deism, the belief in a creator-God who doesn’t interfere with world affairs or the lives of individual people. Naturally, the text triggered passionate debate on both sides of the Atlantic, and still does so today.   

7. HE OPENLY CRITICIZED THE WASHINGTON ADMINISTRATION.  

James Monroe, then America’s minister to France, arranged to have Paine released from the Luxembourg in November 1794. While in prison, Paine had developed a grudge against President Washington, whom he’d admired during the American Revolution. As Monroe informed James Madison, “He thinks the president winked at his imprisonment and wished he might die in gaol [jail], and bears his resentment for it; also he is preparing an attack upon him of the most virulent kind.”

Just as Monroe said, Paine wrote a blistering open letter to Washington in 1796. Lambasting the president for not interceding on his behalf when the French seized him, Paine went on to accuse America’s chief executive of being a closeted monarchist. “Monopolies of every kind marked your administration almost in the moment of its commencement,” the pamphleteer charged. “The lands obtained by the Revolution were lavished upon partisans; the interest of the disbanded soldier was sold to the speculator … In what fraudulent light must Mr. Washington’s character appear in the world, when his declarations and his conduct are compared together!”

Americans of just about every political stripe were outraged by Paine’s statements. Combined with a strong backlash to The Age of Reason, the anti-Washington tirade brought Paine’s popularity to an all-time low in the states.

8. HE CALLED FOR AN EARLY VERSION OF SOCIAL SECURITY.

Paine spent the winter of 1795-’96 at Monroe’s home in Paris, where he authored what’s often considered his last great pamphlet, Agrarian Justice. In it, he recommended the establishment of a “National Fund” financed by 10 percent tax on inherited property. Money from this fund would then be redistributed: All citizens (of both genders) above the age of 50 or with disabilities were to receive a yearly stipend. Furthermore, every single citizen could also expect a one-time payment of 15 pounds sterling upon turning 21. “It is not a charity but a right,” Paine declared, “not bounty but justice.”

9. MOST OF HIS REMAINS ARE UNACCOUNTED FOR.

In 1802, at the invitation of President Jefferson, Paine returned to the U.S. For a time, he resided at a 277-acre farm in New Rochelle that had been gifted to him by the New York State Legislature in 1784. Unhappy with his life there, Paine relocated to Manhattan, where he died on June 8, 1809.

Paine was laid to rest on his New Rochelle farm without much fanfare; in fact, the service may have been attended by as few as five people. Strangely, though, Paine’s travels hadn’t ended yet. In 1819, a British admirer by the name of William Cobbett snuck onto the property and dug up the dead author’s body. Believing that Paine deserved to be buried in his birthland, Cobbett boxed up bones and took them back to London. But after years of trying to build a suitable memorial, Cobbett died himself. Paine’s bones were gradually sold off, and their current whereabouts remain a mystery. (However, the Thomas Paine Museum in New Rochelle does have a few strands of his hair under lock and key, and his mummified brain stem has been buried there in an undisclosed location.)

10. MARK TWAIN WAS AN ADMIRER.

Despite his contributions to the country’s revolution, most Americans held Paine in low regard throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. When he died, the New York Post Evening Post helped set the tone with a eulogy that read “he had lived long, done some good and much harm.” Other posthumous statements about Paine were even less charitable: Theodore Roosevelt famously called him a “filthy little atheist.” In the Gilded Age, he was so widely disliked that when a freethinking sculptor gifted Philadelphia’s Independence Hall with a marble Paine bust in 1876, the city refused to accept it.

Nevertheless, he still maintained an underground fan base in those days. One of the most famous Paine enthusiasts of all time was Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain. A celebrated critic of organized religion, Clemens was particularly keen on the ever-controversial Age of Reason. In his words, “It took a brave man before the Civil War to confess he had read” the pamphlet. Paine’s pro-deism treatise made an appearance in Those Extraordinary Twins (1894), one of Twain’s manuscripts that centered on a pair of conjoined brothers with wildly different personalities. To help accentuate their dissimilarities, the very first chapter sees one of them reading Christian devotionals while his counterpart flips through The Age of Reason.

11. THOMAS EDISON HELPED BREAK GROUND ON THE THOMAS PAINE MEMORIAL MUSEUM.   

In 1884, the Thomas Paine National Historical Association was founded, and in 1925, Edison became vice president of the group. “Paine’s teachings have been debarred from schools everywhere and his views of life misrepresented until his memory is hidden in shadows, or he is looked upon as of unsound mind,” Edison said. “We never had a sounder intelligence in this Republic [than Paine]. He was the equal of Washington in making American liberty possible. Where Washington performed, Paine devised and wrote. The deeds of one in the Weld were matched by the deeds of the other with his pen.”

Today, the association maintains the cottage Paine owned in New Rochelle along with the nearby Thomas Paine Memorial Museum. Construction on the latter began in the spring of 1925—and once the project broke ground, it was Edison who had the honor of turning the first shovel of dirt. Since then, Paine’s reputation in America and elsewhere has considerably improved. Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan both admiringly quoted him in their presidential addresses. A golden Paine statue has been erected in Thetford, England. And in 2002, he was ranked number 34 on the BBC’s list of the 100 greatest Britons of all time. 

Yesterday, Netflix announced that it was renewing Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij’s controversial show The OA for a second season, and released a teaser trailer that has glimpses of the Golden Gate Bridge and the word survived in Braille: 

It’s an appropriately mysterious peek at a show that left viewers guessing about whether or not the tale Prairie (Marling) told—which included near-death experiences, being held captive against her will, movements that open a door to another dimension, and angels—was even real. Will we see Homer again, find out if there’s an FBI conspiracy, or learn more movements in season two? Most importantly, will mental_floss make another cameo? So far, Marling and Batmanglij aren’t saying much. Here’s what we do know.

1. IT’S CALLED “PART TWO.”

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Batmanglij explained that The OA’s unusual format—which features episodes of varying lengths—was inspired by novels. “We wanted to take what we love about a novel and the novelistic experience and put it on the long-format series experience—not having all the characters in the first hour, not having all the chapters be the same length,” he said. “Could you imagine if the chapters of a book were all the same length? It would be funny. So we thought to ourselves about those constraints. Also, novels are often about something. They have an intention that the writer is trying to get across, and I think both Brit and I felt that we wanted to do that, too. We wanted to try to say something that we believed in.” He told Esquire that, “I think the novel analogy works really well; it’s a novel, but it could easily be a series of novels. And I think it would be best as a series of novels!”

That helped guide the co-creators when they decided what to call the second season. “We always thought of [the parts of the OA] almost like books, and there could be many different volumes,” Marling said in an interview with Vulture when asked about why the new season would be called “Part Two.”

2. THEY KNOW HOW THE SECOND SEASON WILL START—AND END.

Shortly after the first season of The OA debuted without warning on Netflix, Batmanglij told Esquire that, although he and Marling “wanted [season one] to be its own standalone piece,” they “didn’t want to go into it without having the larger picture planned out—I think the audience can always tell that, or feel it.” As he told THR, “This is a story that’s carefully planned … When we started, Brit and I spent two or three years conceiving of a whole world before we brought it to anybody, before it ever left our bedrooms.”

Marling assured THR—and fans of the show—that “there is an answer to every riddle and nothing is done to just be sound and fury going nowhere. It all goes somewhere.”

The goal, she explained to Entertainment Weekly, was to create a show that could stand up to the scrutiny of the Internet age. “Now you can stop and start, you can watch it three times, you can screengrab and share it and be on Reddit,” she said. “So you have to have a narrative that’s robust enough to live up to that expectation. So we really tried to think about that and make sure every image and every frame was honest, and if we should get more than one season out, you could go back and watch the first season again and go, ‘It was all there.’”

Which, of course, meant they had a clear picture of the second season: “There is a place that season two already begins in our minds and a place in which it ends,” she said. Hopefully this means we won’t have to wait too long for it!

3. IT WILL LIKELY EXPLORE THE FIRST SEASON’S SCIENCE FICTION ELEMENTS MORE DEEPLY.

“The first part is the story of a young woman who is traumatized and tells a group of boys this story and in so doing, allows them to face a moment of their own crisis at the end,” Marling explained to Vulture. “That is the self-contained story, but the more science fiction metaphysical threads are open-ended, so there can be a part 2 in which we can dive into those spaces.”

4. THERE WILL BE ANSWERS TO SOME OF THE SERIES’ MOST PRESSING QUESTIONS.

Marling told Marie Claire that “there are answers to all of the questions. That’s the delicious thing about the gap between seasons. People watch and take it in, revel in the mystery, argue about it online. And then, if they should be so lucky, the storytellers get to meet the audience when the story continues.”

But don’t expect any hints from either Marling or Batmanglij. When asked by Rolling Stone about some of the most discussed questions left lingering from season one, Batmanglij was coy. Kahtun’s realm is “not purgatory—or maybe it is. It’s supposed to be something specific … I don’t think anyone’s picked up on what it is just quite yet.” Was the FBI agent who randomly shows up in the Johnsons’ home in the last episode planting evidence? “I’m just glad people are asking that question. I was hoping they would be, and they are. [But] I can’t tell you just yet.” Are the books under Prairie’s bed an indication that she’s lying? “There are two obvious options and unlimited other options why those exist. One is, if you’re traumatized by something, you might read up on it. But there’s also a more cynical perspective that she was using those books to tell a story.”

Translation: You’re just going to have to tune in to find out.

5. MOST OF THE CAST DOESN’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT WHAT HAPPENS NEXT (OR IF THEY DO, THEY’RE NOT TALKING).

The cast had to sign standard seven season-long contracts, but that doesn’t mean they were all necessarily clued in to what would happen after the first season. Sharon Van Etten, who plays Rachel, one of Prairie’s fellow captives, told Billboard that “I can honestly say that they haven’t told me anything. I don’t know if anything happens next or what happens next. If they do something, I would love to be a part of it. I definitely want to know what happens to my character.” Brendan Meyer, who plays Jesse, tweeted, “I actually know very little about where the story is going!”

But some of the actors have theories: Patrick Gibson, who plays Steve, told Newsweek, “I fully geeked out and became a complete nerd on this. When I watched it, I’m like: ‘What does this mean?’ I’ve got my own theory but I’ll keep it close to my chest.” Phyllis Smith, who plays teacher Betty Broderick-Allen, told Vulture, “Who knows what the second season will be, if we have a second season, but my stance is that [Brit Marling’s character] truly was an angel and we’ll see how it goes from there.”

6. THEY HAVEN’T STARTED WORKING ON IT YET.

Netflix hasn’t announced a timeline for the release of the second season, and Batmanglij said that work on it hasn’t yet begun. But according to Jason Isaacs, who plays Hap, our parallel universe-living selves are much luckier:

In a parallel world you’ve already seen it. https://t.co/U9anaP82OQ

— Jason Isaacs (@jasonsfolly) February 8, 2017

There’s nothing weirder than learning that one of your favorite stories didn’t really happen that way. For the thousands of devoted fans of the Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, that problem is particularly acute. After all, the books are based on real events—but events that are also largely fictitious. Where does history end and fiction begin? On the 150th birthday of Laura Ingalls Wilder, here’s a reminder that truth and fiction don’t always coincide.

1. THE INGALLS FAMILY DIDN’T ALWAYS HEAD WEST

From the moment the Ingalls family sets out in their wagon and leaves the Little House in the Big Woods, the Little House books show an unceasing push West. Real life and Manifest Destiny don’t always line up, though, and in fact the Ingalls family tracked back and forth several times before setting down in De Smet, South Dakota.

The Ingalls family’s first stop after Wisconsin was Independence, Kansas (with a possible stop in Missouri), where they built a “little house” on the open prairie. But the land was not theirs to settle: It was owned by the Osage people [PDF] and the Ingalls family, like thousands of other settlers, were squatters waiting for the Osage to be driven out so that the United States could take it over. It’s not entirely clear why the Ingalls family left, but instead of continuing west they went back to Wisconsin.

Next, they went west again, this time settling near Walnut Grove, Minnesota. Then, financial difficulties, illness, and a plague of locusts forced them to move on. They went to visit family elsewhere in Minnesota, but while there, Laura’s 10-month-old brother, Freddie, died after a sudden illness. Then they continued on to Burr Oak, Iowa, where they ran a hotel. The Ingallses then backtracked to Walnut Grove, where Mary lost her vision, then went west again and eventually settled in what is now South Dakota.

Nonetheless, Laura and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane, who heavily edited and helped develop the first books, decided that the fictional Ingallses should always move West. The result is a sense of wanderlust and movement that gives the series its structure.

2. JACK, LAURA’S DOG, DIDN’T LEAVE KANSAS

Aw, Jack! Laura’s happy little puppy pal! Though faithful Jack tracks the fictional Laura through the books until she becomes an adolescent, Laura revealed in Pioneer Girl, the original autobiography that formed the basis for the books, that he was actually left behind in Kansas when Pa traded him for some horses and ponies. When writing the book, Laura decided to have Jack die peacefully in his sleep—perhaps in a way she could control, as opposed to the uncertain fate of her real-life dog.

3. MARY INGALLS PROBABLY DIDN’T HAVE SCARLET FEVER

Everyone knows the story of how Mary Ingalls contracted scarlet fever and lost her sight permanently. Except she probably didn’t. Dr. Beth Tarini, a professor and pediatric and adolescent medicine specialist, obsessed over Mary’s diagnosis from the time she was a child, then discovered in med school that scarlet fever can’t blind someone.

But viral meningoencephalitis can—and Tarini thinks that Laura and her daughter, Rose, attributed the blindness to scarlet fever either to make the story more accessible to kids or because the disease may have already been familiar from other novels like Little Women. She even published an academic paper about it [PDF]. (In real life, Laura wrote Mary had “spinal meningitis,” which she crossed out and replaced with “some sort of spinal sickness. I am not sure if the Dr. named it.” She also wrote that the blindness was caused by a stroke, but Tarini deemed a stroke unlikely since there were no other signs of one.)

Mary may not have gone blind from scarlet fever, but she did lose her sight. She ended up attending the Iowa College for the Blind, where she could take classes like civil government, botany, and piano tuning. Mary was an adept student and put the industrial training she got there to good use: After Pa died, she made fly nets to help the family earn more money.

4. THE INGALLS FAMILY HAD GUESTS DURING THE LONG WINTER

Houses were small in the pioneer era, but that didn’t mean that they were all devoted to single-family living. During the “hard winter” of 1880-81, the Ingalls family took in a couple named Maggie and George Masters. George was the son of a family friend and Maggie was his new wife, who had married him in an apparent shotgun wedding situation. “Maggie didn’t want the baby to be born at her folks’ and disgrace them,” Laura wrote in a letter to her daughter, Rose. “George’s folks were mad because he married her.”

The Masters family were not the best of houseguests. In her notes to Pioneer Girl, Ingalls scholar Pamela Smith Hill explains that Maggie had her baby in the house without the assistance of a doctor, and the newlyweds ran out of money and kept wearing out their welcome. “Times like this test people,” wrote Laura, “and we were getting to know George and Maggie.”

So why aren’t they in The Long Winter, the award-winning book that relates the story of a winter so extreme, the blizzards lasted six months? Chalk it up to authorial savvy: Laura felt it would dilute the power of a family stuck inside their house, forced to face the elements as a unit.

5. NELLIE OLESON WASN’T A REAL PERSON

If there’s a villain in the Little House books, it’s Nellie Oleson, the snooty brat who torments Laura when they’re girls and tries to steal Almanzo from Laura when they’re young women. In reality, though, there wasn’t a single Nellie Oleson. She is thought to have been a composite of three real-life people named Genevieve Masters, Nellie Owens, and Stella Gilbert. Laura had unpleasant run-ins with all three, interactions she apparently never forgot.

BONUS: “ALMANZO” WASN’T PRONOUNCED AL-MAHN-ZO

Laura gives her beau, Almanzo, a sweet nickname in the books: Manly. (She also referred to him as “the man of the house” in real life.) That’s for good reason—his name was pronounced Al-MAN-zo, not Al-mahn-zo.

The wrong pronunciation apparently took hold through the confounding influence that was the Little House on the Prairie TV show—a polarizing pop culture phenomenon that also introduced inaccuracies and anachronisms like adopted children and basketball into the fictional Ingalls family.

The inside of Apollo 17’s lunar module smelled of gunpowder. It was December 1972, the last of NASA’s manned moon missions, and astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison “Jack” Schmitt had just finished a successful survey of the Valley of Taurus-Littrow, a spot on the southeastern “coast” of the Moon’s Sea of Serenity. They had returned to the landing module with their spacesuits caked in moondust.

The men brushed themselves off and removed their helmets. Suddenly, Schmitt began having a sneezing fit. His eyes reddened. His throat itched. His sinuses clogged.

“I didn’t know I had lunar dust hay fever,” Schmitt said. Listening in, men stationed back on Earth began to bust Schmitt’s chops over the radio transmission. “It’s funny they don’t check for that,” said Joseph Allen at Mission Control. “Maybe that’s the trouble with the cheap noses, Jack.”

Schmitt, it turns out, was basically allergic to the Moon.

Of all the difficulties involved with putting a man on the Moon, “the major issue the Apollo astronauts pointed out was dust, dust, dust,” Larry Taylor, director of the Planetary Geosciences Institute, said in an interview with the Soil Science Society of America. The Apollo 11 astronauts griped that the “particles covered everything and a stain remained even after our best attempts to brush it off.” An Apollo 12 crew member moaned that the lunar module “had so much dust that when I took my helmet off, I was almost blinded.”

Moondust may look soft and pillowy, but it’s actually sharp and abrasive, largely the detritus of micrometeorite impacts. With no wind or moving water on the Moon’s surface, moondust never erodes. Effectively, no natural process exists on the lunar surface that can round its edges. When astronauts inhale what is essentially finely powdered glass, it becomes a huge health hazard [PDF]: The powder is so jagged that a deep breath could cause it to lodge in the lungs and pierce the alveolar sacs and ducts [PDF], resulting in a lunar version of “stone-grinder’s disease,” or silicosis, a deadly condition that commonly killed coal miners (and still kills 100 Americans a year). To complicate matters, lunar dust also contains a lot of iron—and this iron-laden dust has recently been implicated in hypertension among Apollo astronauts [PDF].

Reports of moondust misadventures from previous Apollo missions never deterred Harrison Schmitt. After all, the Harvard-educated geologist had dedicated the better part of a decade to studying the Moon’s landscape. Working for the U.S. Geological Survey’s astrogeology department, he used telescope photos to map the Moon and planets. So when the NASA asked if any scientists were interested in visiting space, Schmitt hardly hesitated. “I thought about 10 seconds and raised my hand and volunteered,” he said in a 1999 oral history project with NASA.

No astronaut knew more about lunar geology than Schmitt. Previously, every other Apollo flyboy had had a background as a military pilot. Schmitt was the first, and only, professional scientist to walk on the Moon. As a result, the press didn’t romanticize or hype the geologist astronaut. The New York Times described the 37-year-old as a “quiet, serious bachelor who does not own a television set or a stereo.” As he trained to go to the Moon, completing a 53-week flight training course and logging 2100 hours of flying time, the scientist never imagined that he would wind up being allergic to the lunar dust and rocks he had spent years studying from afar.

In December 1972, Schmitt landed in the Moon’s Valley of Taurus-Littrow, surrounded by mountains and endless stretches of moondust. During their first moonwalk, the lunar roving vehicle lost a fender. The tires spun, and the rover kicked up a cloud of dust.

The sediment got lodged in every wrinkle, fold, nook, and cranny of Schmitt’s spacesuit. The dust “gummed up the joints” of his suit so badly that he had trouble moving his arms. The powder chewed up his footwear, too. “The dust was so abrasive that it actually wore through three layers of Kevlar-like material on Jack’s boot,” Taylor said.

When the astronauts returned to the lunar module, it took forever to brush the dust off. Schmitt later complained [PDF] of “a lot of irritation to my sinuses and nostrils soon after taking the helmet off … the dust really bothered my eyes and throat. I was tasting it and eating it.” The symptoms lasted for about two hours. His condition was consistent with the findings of Dr. Bill Carpentier, a NASA doctor who had evidence suggesting the dust could cause allergic responses [PDF].

Schmitt’s pesky moon allergies couldn’t stop his true grit. Thanks to his background as a geologist, Apollo 17 collected more rock samples than any other mission. One sample, the 4.2-billion-year-old hunk of rubble called “Troctolite 76535,” later helped unlock secrets of the Moon’s magnetic field [PDF].

Schmitt also discovered bright orange beads of volcanic glass on the Moon’s surface. Not only did these samples prove that the Moon was once volcanically active, they also provided evidence that it contained water. And before they packed for home, Schmitt and his fellow Apollo 17 astronauts snapped a photo of Earth. Today, it’s one of the most iconic photographs of our home: the Blue Marble.

In the United States, the most common pronunciation is feb-yoo-air-ee. Both Merriam-Webster and American Heritage dictionaries consider the common pronunciation correct, along with the less common, more traditional standard feb-roo-air-ee.

This gets fans of the traditional standard all worked up. But the loss of the first r in February is not some recent habit propagated by lazy teenagers. People have been avoiding that r for at least the last 150 years, and probably longer than that. Given certain conditions having to do with word stress and the other sounds in a word, we simply do not like to have two r’s so close to each other. The name for the linguistic process where one sound drops out because another of the same sound is too close to it is dissimilation, and it affects lots of languages.

Consider your pronunciation of the following words, and be honest about whether you really say the r’s in parentheses: su(r)prise, gove(r)nor, pa(r)ticular, be(r)serk, paraphe(r)nalia, cate(r)pillar, southe(r)ner, entrep(r)eneur, p(r)erogative, interp(r)etation. Not everybody drops these r’s, but at the same time, nobody seems to get too upset when they hear others do it.

There are, however, a few cases of r dissimilation that get people very worked up, namely, lib(r)ary and Feb(r)uary. Lib(r)ary attracts attention due to its association with commonly disparaged dialects. Feb(r)uary only seems to attract attention when someone asks what the proper pronunciation should be.

Here’s a little help from the (parody!) guide Pronunciation Manual: