Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Rick Antonson has just brought out Full Moon with Skyhorse. Always intrigued by the Noah’s Ark legend…  

Beach recently stumbled upon a small book of early nineteenth-century British toasts: literally hundreds of them, composed in a time where standing an offering a pithy sentence at drinking was a fundamental part of being a gentleman. Of course, toasts went out with the Second World War so it is difficult to compare them with […]

Andrew J. Bacevich, America’s War for the Greater Middle East A long military perspective. Greatly looking forward to this one.

Another in our Victorian Urban Legends series. This looks like the ancestor (or more likely one of the many ancestors) of the modern Mafia Neighbours, story. You know the one, young married couple move into the neighbourhood, all their new furniture is stolen while they are on their honeymoon, but when they tell an elderly […]

Possibly my two least favourite people in the history of the western hemisphere, hand in hand.

Based on the Bayeux Tapestry. Remarkable.

There are a number of fairy oaks in Wales, as Chris from Haunted Ohio Books, previously illustrated. But this one, the fairy oak of Wrexham, is particularly interesting because of a curious legend associated with it. This article appeared in a book of Welsh poems in 1837. Apparently the fairy tree had grown on a […]

19 Cent Romanticism and bad art but somehow…

Robert E. Lee led the army of North Virginia, the central institution of the Confederacy, for just under three years (1862-1865). In that time he was able to rely on the most important military resource of all: not acumen, not courage, not atom bombs but sheer dumb luck. In Lee’s case the luck was deserved: there […]

Beach has frequently pointed to burning libraries, lost books or in this case lost sheaves of papers. First, let’s introduce the author ‘Ariel’ writing in the Blackburn Standard in 1892. ‘Ariel’ wrote a column for this publication from the late 1880s and then right through the 1890s apparently ending in 1900: normally termed ‘Passing Notes […]

So awkward, love the eyes… EC writes, 30 May 2016: I don’t have an ironclad source but the internet is saying that the woman is Clara Bow and the picture dates to the 20s, i.e. before the NSDAP had worked up a head of steam. (1), (2) https://www.tumblr.com/sydneyflapper/53971362765/missclarabow-leafwoman-i-used-to-think    

If you don’t know what an aquamanile is look it up. I had to and am now a better person for it…

Chanan Tigay, The Lost Book of Moses (Harper-Collins, 2016) This blogger has a dilemma. There are three pages of a century-old book he wants about an obscure English county. The book is not present in any library in the world, but one copy exists in the hands of a bookseller who wants about two hundred […]

Michael F. Robinson, The Lost White Tribe (Oxford University Press) Really intrigued by this one: a bit of pleasant Victorian madness. They’ll be talking about Welsh Indians in Iowa next.  

This was one that really whets the curiosity. We are brought back to London in the early seventeenth-century, whereas this is being remembered in the later 1600s. What the hell is going on here? Dr Lamb, who was killed by the Mob for a conjurer, about 1640,* met one Morning Sir Miles Sands and Mr […]