Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

…So it is almost certain that Europe would have known of crocodiles at least by Alexander’s death; and possibly some 1,500 years earlier, when the Aegean ‘Sea Peoples’ terrorized even…

…provided the Pope, and also brought with them “maps of the entire world”-and there are some extant European maps from that time frame that show a great deal more than…

…of Balkan ancestry. Lactose intolerance grows the further you go from traditional dairy areas in Euro-Asia-Africa: e.g. northern Europe and north-eastern Africa. In other words we are not strictly speaking…

…able to find the story online – In the mid-80s a college kid coming back from Europe was trying to catch a connecting flight from Los Angeles to Oakland, but…

…was a different matter when it came to Japan). But he also believed that European Jewry should commit suicide en masse and that the British should throw themselves off the…

…group while writing off the second group) has been crazy old Margaret Murray, an Egyptologist who decided, in the 1920s, that witches were part of an ancient European fertility cult…

…be many, many others… drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com To these there are two non-native additions that seem, though, on the basis of European archaeology to have been brought down…

…of the rise and fall (and, in Europe, the resurrection) of the railway might be an instructive way to think through what has gone wrong in countries like America and…

…cannot escape… Madonna and Fairies: Sixteenth-century Conjuring: Cruelty in the Orient: Desperately Seeking Marjorie: Craufurd: Islam Makes Europe: Lewis Chessmen: Roman Japan: Worthless Currencies: Thomas Digges: Tree Rings and Supernovas:…

…religious matters, the majority of the population was Orthodox, but there were important Catholic and Jewish minorities. Of course, multicultural dreams were just that in nineteenth-century Europe: the different groups…

…ill, the poor…) and European or Amerindian bogeys believed to live in the same wildernesses. The modern sasquatch germinates somewhere in the leaf mould of these, for the most part…

…fools of God, fanatics, saints and hard-headed businessmen. Listening to modern Islamists talk about the crusades is a particularly instructive experience; but look out too for homegrown European Jeremiads. Among…

…(Pennsylvania) before the American Revolution, due to William Penn’s unusually tolerant religious policy. I like to think we in America got the good Germans, leaving the bad ones in Europe…

…of course, a supernatural being who hovers uneasily between the world of fairies and the world of spirits. She can be found, under different names, through much of Western Europe….

…poor state of our evidence it is beyond proof. In northern Europe, including Britain, there was a strong medieval tradition of revenants or zombies: the dead who would not rest…