They say truth is stranger than fiction, and they’re not wrong. We often look for entertainment on the big screen or media only to forget the biggest amusement park of wonder, exploration and ingenuity called human history.
So today, we are taking a look into the weird, bizarre and simply incredible world of the past thanks to the Twitter page “Weird History.” Boasting 186.4K followers, the account shares historical peculiarities not everyone knows today.
From pin boys lining up the bowling pins before automated machines to the fact that Harvard had three campus breweries, to a photograph of a boy experiencing television for the first time in 1948, these are the moments worthy of books.
The professor reminds the viewers that colorized photography has an interpretative aspect to it and we should be aware of it. “Because colorized photos have so clearly been manipulated by artists to tell a certain story, they remind us that the process of telling history always involves a certain amount of creative interpretation,” Yaszek said.
She added that it’s okay, “because it means that we all have opportunities to contribute to ongoing conversations about history and its relations to the present and future, much as we find in Reddit and other communities devoted to exploring the past through historical photography.”
