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Every so often, the White House transforms its South Lawn into something unexpected. While best known as the backdrop to American political power, the grounds have doubled as high-stakes playing fields and performance spaces for over a century.

Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks brim with visionary designs for flying machines and armored tanks, yet he was an artist who started more than he finished. In particular, his completed painted oeuvre only consists of fewer than 20 attributed works. Within this slim catalog, some of his Renaissance masterpieces stand apart for both their technical brilliance and the extraordinary lives they have led in the five centuries since da Vinci laid down his tools.

A better life raft, the first practical dishwasher, cataract removal tools, and kevlar!

The Swift, Often Comfortable Ride On The Transcontinental Railroad Opened Up The American West To New Settlement.

— Erin Blakemore | Published: October 16, 2020 | Updated: July 29, 2025

Photo12/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

Velvet cushions and gilt-framed mirrors. Feasts of antelope, trout, berries and Champagne. In 1869, a New York Times reporter experienced the ultimate in luxury—and he did so not in the parlor of a Gilded Age magnate, but on a train headed from Omaha, Nebraska to San Francisco, California.

Just a few years before, the author would have had to rely on a bumpy stagecoach or a covered wagon to tackle a journey that took months. Now, he was gliding along the rails, passing by the varied scenery of the American West while dining, sleeping and relaxing.

The ride was “not only tolerable but comfortable, and not only comfortable but a perpetual delight,” he wrote. “At the end of our journey [we] found ourselves not only wholly free from fatigue, but completely rehabilitated in body and spirits. Were we very far from wrong if we voted the Pacific Railroad a success?”

The author was just one of the thousands of people who flocked to the Transcontinental Railroad beginning in 1869. The railroad, which stretched nearly 2,000 miles between Iowa, Nebraska and California, reduced travel time across the West from about six months by wagon or 25 days by stagecoach to just four days. And for the travelers who tried out the new transportation route, the Transcontinental Railroad represented both the height of modern technology and the tempting possibility of unrestricted travel.

Railroads Passed Through ‘Untouched’ Indigenous Land

The completion of the Transcontinental Railroad, originally the Pacific Railroad. The Last Spike ceremony, where the track from the East was joined to its counterparts from the West, took place at Promontory, Utah, on May 10, 1869. The Print Collector/Getty Images

The first passenger train on the line took 102 hours to travel from Omaha, Nebraska to San Francisco, and a first-class ticket cost $134.50—the equivalent of about $2,700 today. It traveled what was known as the Overland Route, threading its way through prairies, mountains and deserts that had been nearly impassable just years before.

Passengers were impressed by the landscape’s beauty and seeming desolation. “For hundreds of miles we saw no other persons except now and then a station with a few hovels about it,” wrote Celia Cooley Graves, a Massachusetts woman who took the Overland Route to San Francisco in 1875.

At the time, the areas through which the train had been built were not yet home to large numbers of white settlers. In fact, millions of acres of the land the new railroad traversed had belonged to Indigenous people—but the U.S. Congress had granted the land to railroad companies.

For many Native nations, the railroads represented an unwelcome intrusion as they soon introduced a wave of white settlement. The trains provided supplies for those relocating from the East and allowed people with means to use the railroad instead of covered wagons.

First-Class Passenger Cars Offered Luxury

Passengers traveling across the continent in the dining salon car of the Pacific Railroad, circa 1870. MPI/Getty Images

The journey west on railroads wasn’t only faster and easier than covered wagons, it could also be luxurious. First-class passengers reveled in what they saw as the comfort and modernity of the trains themselves. The train cars were “a constant delight,” wrote Henry T. Williams in an 1876 guide to railroad travel in the West. “One lives at home in the Palace Car with as much true enjoyment as in the home drawing-room.”

Williams was referring to Pullman palace cars, ornate train cars used for first-class passengers on the Union Pacific railroad. The cars, which included sleepers, dining cars and parlor cars, were lavishly decorated and full of sumptuous details like painstakingly carved wood and velvet hangings. Unlike the parlors of the Gilded Age’s rich and famous, palace cars were open to anyone who could pay the fee.

According to historian Lucius Morris Beebe, this had a lasting effect on American culture. “Before [Pullman’s] first palace cars few enough Americans had any least conception of what constituted true luxury,” he wrote; “three decades of first-hand contact with the manifestations of opulence available aboard the cars created a universal demand for rich living which had a profound effect on the American economy and national way of life which has not yet disappeared.”

The elaborate cars were specially influential for women travelers. At the time, traveling in public or doing so alone was considered highly unusual, and undesirable, for middle- and upper-class white women. But the Pullman cars helped calm the fears of those who did not like to see women stepping outside their “separate sphere” of home and family. According to historian Amy G. Richter, the train cars’ home-like setting, and the presence of women in the living-room-like cars, legitimized train travel for women and soothed those who feared that public life would endanger women and the moral order.

Second- And Third-Class Passengers Faced a Rougher Journey

Chinese immigrants who helped build the Transcontinental Railroad. Everett Collection

But rich travelers were not the only people who rode the new trains. The railroad system borrowed from the ocean liners that were bringing unprecedented numbers of immigrants to United States shores and offered different fares for different classes of travelers. The poorest travelers could ride the rails for less money, but their accommodations were less glitzy than those of the richer passengers.

Second-class passengers had upholstered seats; third-class, or “emigrant” passengers, paid half of what the first-class passengers did but had to sit on benches instead of seats and bring their own food. "The overland journey is no fairy tale to those who read it from a way car!” wrote a journalist in 1878, noting crowded conditions and discomfort in the ordinary passenger cars.

Racism rode the rails, too. When British author Robert Louis Stevenson rode the train in 1879, he noted that there was an entire car just for Chinese passengers. Though up to 20,000 Chinese immigrants had built the railroad, they were treated with contempt at the time, reflecting racist attitudes and socially sanctioned discrimination.

Though Black people did ride as passengers, they were more often spotted working as laborers or porters. From the 1860s, all of the porters in Pullman cars were Black men. Though the job could be demeaning, and perpetuated stereotypes of black men as servile, anonymous workers at the beck and call of white passengers, it also helped build a middle class among black men.

Dangers of The Journey on the Transcontinental Railroad

Train crossing a wooden trestle bridge on the Union Pacific Railroad, near Sherman, Wyoming, c. 1870. Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images

The trains shortened the journey across the country, but they weren’t without risk. In 1872, for example, Walter Scott Fitz’s journey toward San Francisco was literally derailed by a massive, weeks-long snowstorm. The men on the train, including passengers, had to dig it out of huge snow drifts in Wyoming. The passengers were so dismayed by the constant stops that they held what Fitz called an “indignation meeting” to express their outrage at the travel conditions. The hellish trip involved derailing, begging people who lived near their frequent stops to make the passengers food, and waiting days to move.

“There was, of course, much suffering amongst second class passengers, and others who could not afford to buy supplies & who were cooped up in ordinary cars,” Fitz wrote. “How they managed to eat, live, & sleep with two people in each seat will always be a marvel to me….Such a mess of filth, foul air and dirty people I never want to see again. The railroad people were so lazy that they refused to clean the cars, and, on the few occasions of cleaning, the passengers did it themselves.” The four-day trip ended up taking three weeks.

Eventually, the entire United States ended up being crisscrossed by train tracks that predated modern highways. The railroad changed life forever, enabling white settlement in areas of the West once considered desolate and forbidding and making it possible for people to strike out on the frontier without the dangers of months of travel in the open air.

And for those who made the once unthinkable trip, the Transcontinental Railroad inspired awe and wondered at the vastness and beauty of the American West. “We gazed long and enchanted on that scene of sublimity and beauty,” wrote Thomas A. Weed of an 1871 view of the Sierra Nevada. “With what interest did we look out upon this land of the extreme west.”

Transcontinental Railroad. Find Out How the Transcontinental Railroad Transformed America into One Nation.

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Chinese laborers at work on construction for the railroad built across the Sierra Nevada Mountains, circa 1870s. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

Joseph Blaney Starkweather/Fotosearch/Getty Images

These Seven Artifacts Show Us That Even Ancient Civilizations Couldn’t Escape Taxes.

— Crystal Ponti | April 14, 2025

Photo12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Taxes are a familiar part of modern life, showing up in paychecks, receipts and annual filings. Yet even in our digital era, traces of older systems persist. When archaeologists recently uncovered a 2,000-year-old pyramid-shaped structure in the Judean Desert—believed to be a Ptolemaic tax collector’s post—they weren’t just digging up the past. They were brushing dust off a blueprint of ancient governance.

“Most governments were quite highly motivated to extract as much revenue as possible within perceived political constraints,” says Taisu Zhang, a professor of law at Yale Law School.

What remains today, such as stone inscriptions, clay tablets and bamboo records, tells a story far beyond administration. These tax relics reveal how early states governed, what they valued and how they balanced power with the burden on taxpayers. From Sumer to China, civilizations devised ingenious, and sometimes bizarre, ways to track, collect and enforce taxes, leaving behind vivid clues of how they funded their ambitions—and proved that even in the Bronze Age, nothing was certain but death and taxes.

1. Clay Tablets (Sumer, Mesopotamia, 3,300–2,000 B.C.)

The clay tablets of ancient Sumer represent some of the earliest examples of economic record-keeping. In the city of Uruk, scribes used reed styluses to press proto-cuneiform symbols into wet clay, documenting grain, livestock and labor owed to temples. Each mark stood for a tangible asset—a bundle of wheat, a head of cattle or a day’s work. By around 2,600 B.C., in the city of Lagash, the system had grown more sophisticated, with some tablets recording instances of tax evasion and penalties for non-payment.

Administrative tablet of clay, Mesopotamian/Sumerian, 3100-2900 B.C. The earliest tablets with written inscriptions represent the work of administrators, perhaps of large temple institutions, recording the allocation of rations or the movement and storage of goods. Photo by Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images

2. The Standard of Ur (Ur, Mesopotamia, 2,600–2,400 B.C.)

The Standard of Ur, a wooden box inlaid with lapis lazuli, shell and red limestone, offers a striking visual of early resource distribution. One side shows nobles at a feast; the other, soldiers and laborers—an implicit hierarchy supported by the upward flow of goods. Though not a literal tax record, the artifact reflects a redistributive economy likely sustained by tribute or taxation.

The Peace frieze from the Standard of Ur. Photo12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

3. The Stele of Hammurabi (Babylon, 1,754 B.C.)

The Stele of Hammurabi, a 4,000-year-old Babylonian monument now housed in the Louvre, stands over seven feet tall and bears one of history’s earliest legal codes. At its top, a relief shows King Hammurabi receiving the laws from the sun god Shamash. While best known for its principle of “an eye for an eye,” the code also formalized taxation, detailing how much grain farmers owed, rents landholders paid and how debts were to be settled. By codifying commerce and tribute, it turned tax collection into law, introducing early forms of tax brackets and property assessments.

Law-code (in cuneiform writing): Portrait of Hammurabi, Babylonia, 2250 B.C. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

4. Nilometers (Egypt, 2,686 B.C.)

Nilometers—structures once used to gauge the Nile’s flood levels—served as an early tool for predicting harvests and setting taxes. Abundant floods meant plentiful crops and higher taxes. Low waters warned of scarcity, prompting reduced tax burdens. “The measurement of the flooding of the Nile started all the way back in the Old Kingdom with the Palermo stone and continued until the 20th century,” says Robert Littman, a professor of classics at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa.

Made of stone or marble, nilometers came in three forms: a river column, a stairway to the water, or a well connected by a culvert. Fewer than two dozen have been discovered. One of the best-preserved examples, located on Elephantine Island near Aswan, features inscribed steps that allowed officials to monitor the river’s rise

“This nilometer is of great significance, particularly because it may be the one mentioned by the Greek writer Plutarch in the first century A.D.,” says Littman.

Woman in front of the Nilometer on Elephantine Island. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

5. Assyrian Palace Reliefs (Assyria, 800–600 B.C.)

The Assyrian Empire immortalized its power through elaborate palace reliefs, wall carvings that depicted conquered peoples presenting offerings to the king. These tributes, featuring camels, gold and exotic animals like ostriches, served as both a form of taxation and a visual assertion of imperial power. The scenes reinforced the king’s authority, illustrating how wealth from across the empire was funneled into the heart of Assyria.

Assyrian Royal Lion Hunt From Nineveh, North Palace. Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

6. The Rosetta Stone (Egypt, 196 B.C.)

The Rosetta Stone, one of the most famous artifacts in history, is best known for unlocking the meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphs—but it also sheds light on ancient tax policy. Carved from granodiorite, a dense speckled stone similar to granite, the inscription contains a decree from Pharaoh Ptolemy V granting tax exemptions to temple priests and revising tribute requirements. Before the Ptolemaic era, temples had long served as Egypt’s economic and financial centers, playing a key role in tax collection.

“After Alexander's conquest and the establishment of the Ptolemaic dynasty, financial control shifted away from temples to a new state-run taxation system,” says Irene Soto Marín, assistant professor of classics at Harvard University. “This reduced the temples’ economic power, although the Ptolemies still recognized their cultural significance. To maintain social stability and prevent revolts, which were often triggered by taxes, they granted priests and temples certain tax breaks as part of a broader political strategy.”

It's a rare instance where a tax cut was literally immortalized in stone.

The "Rosetta Stone," Key to Egyptian Hieroglyphics, British Museum, London. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

7. Bamboo Slips (China, Qin and Han Dynasties, 221 B.C. – 220 A.D.)

Before the invention of paper, the Chinese recorded tax policies and official records on bamboo slips—narrow, flat strips of bamboo or wood inscribed with brush and ink. These slips were then strung together with cords, forming scroll-like volumes that functioned as early books.

Slips have been discovered at archaeological sites dating to the Qin and Han Dynasties, containing detailed records of tax registers, agricultural levies, census data and corvée labor obligations. These documents provide a clear view of the highly organized bureaucracy of early imperial China, where taxation was based on land ownership, crop yields and household labor.

Ancient tax relics reveal more than just economic systems. They reflect the shifting foundations of power, control, and shared obligation and show us who ruled, who paid, and who tried to avoid it. If history teaches us anything, it’s this: even at the dawn of civilization, someone was doing the counting—and someone else was footing the bill.

And sometimes, that bill included an ostrich.

— Crystal Ponti is a Freelance Writer from New England with a Deep Passion for Exploring the Intersection of History and Folklore. Her work has also Appeared in The New York Times, A&E Real Crime, Washington Post, USA Today, and BBC, Among Others.

New York's "colored" regiment Harlem Hellfighters (369th Infantry Regiment) returns home on Stockholm, February 12, 1919

Some of the "colored" men of 369th (15th N.Y.) who won the Croix de Guerre for gallentry during action. Front row, left to right: Pvt. Eagle Eye, Ed Williams; Lamp Light, Herbert Taylor; Pvt. Leon Fraitor; Pvt. Kid Hawk, Ralph Hawkins; Back row, left to right: Sgt. H.D. Prinas; Sgt. Dan Storms; Pvt. Kid Woney, Joe Williams; Pvt. "Kid Buck" Alfred Hanely and Corporal T.W. Taylor.

The Harlem Hellfighters were an African-American infantry unit in WWI who spent more time in combat than any other American unit. Despite their courage, sacrifice and dedication to their country, they returned home to face racism and segregation from their fellow countrymen.

like, history.com says that when india became an independent nation, it (for the most part) took down a toxic social hierarchy in its constitution! it still exists today and is used in some stuff, but looking down on lower classes is less common!

also, there are four main divisions of hinduism, and one of them worships a female goddess and is not overlooked! its so cool!

i got all this from history.com and am in no way an expert, so please correct me if i'm wrong on anything/everything! i just think this is SUPER DUPER COOL

(here's the article: https://www.history.com/topics/religion/hinduism#hindu-places-of-worship)

Who Was the Real St. Patrick? Was That Legend About the Snakes True? And Why Did So Many St. Patrick's Day Traditions Start in America?

— By History .Com Editors | March 7, 2024

Photograph By Anna Usova/Getty Images

While St. Patrick’s Day is now associated with wearing green, parades (when they're not canceled) and beer, the holiday is grounded in history that dates back more than 1,500 years. The earliest known celebrations were held in the 17th century on March 17, marking the anniversary of the death of St. Patrick in the 5th century. Learn more about the holiday’s history and how it evolved into the event it is today.

1. The Real St. Patrick Was Born in Britain

Much of what is known about St. Patrick's life has been interwoven with folklore and legend. Historians generally believe that St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, was born in Britain (not Ireland) near the end of the 4th century. At age 16 he was kidnapped by Irish raiders and sold as a slave to a Celtic priest in the area now known as Northern Ireland. After toiling for six years as a shepherd, he escaped back to Britain. He eventually returned to Ireland as a Christian missionary.

2. St. Patrick Was Never Canonized

Despite his status as a patron saint, St. Patrick was never actually canonized by the Church during his lifetime. This was primarily because such a process did not exist when he died in A.D. 461. It wasn’t until 993 that St. Ulrich of Augsburg became the first saint to be formally canonized, and it was not until the 12th century that the Church established an official canonization process overseen by the Pope. While St. Patrick has not been formally canonized, many consider him to hold saintly status.

3. There Were No Snakes Around for St. Patrick to Banish from Ireland

Among the legends associated with St. Patrick is that he stood atop an Irish hillside and banished snakes from Ireland—prompting all serpents to slither away into the sea. In fact, research suggests snakes never occupied the Emerald Isle in the first place. There are no signs of snakes in the country’s fossil record. And water has surrounded Ireland since the last glacial period. Before that, the region was covered in ice and would have been too cold for the reptiles.

4. Leprechauns Are Likely Based on Celtic Fairies

The red-haired, green-clothed Leprechaun is commonly associated with St. Patrick’s Day. The original Irish name for these figures of folklore is “lobaircin,” meaning “small-bodied fellow.” Belief in leprechauns likely stems from Celtic belief in fairies— tiny men and women who could use their magical powers to serve good or evil. In Celtic folktales, leprechauns were cranky souls, responsible for mending the shoes of the other fairies.

5. The Shamrock Was Considered a Sacred Plant

The shamrock, a three-leaf clover, has been associated with Ireland for centuries. It was called the “seamroy” by the Celts and was considered a sacred plant that symbolized the arrival of spring. According to legend, St. Patrick used the plant as a visual guide when explaining the Holy Trinity. By the 17th century, the shamrock had become a symbol of emerging Irish nationalism.

6. Ireland’s Only Female Patron Saint, Brigid, Has Her Own Holiday

One of Ireland’s three patron saints, alongside St. Patrick and St. Columcille, St. Brigid (or Bridget) is the patron saint of Irish nuns, newborns, midwives, dairy maids and cattle. Believed to have been born in Ireland sometime around A.D. 450, Brigid was the daughter of a pagan king and an enslaved woman. She grew up to serve the church by building a church in Kildare, which was the site of a former shrine to the Celtic goddess, eponymous to her.

Said to have died in A.D. 524, Brigid's memory was kept alive by the church, which canonized her as St. Brigid. In 2023, Ireland designated February 1 a permanent public holiday in Brigid’s honor.

7. The First St. Patrick’s Day Parade Was Held in America

While people in Ireland had celebrated St. Patrick since the 1600s, the tradition of a St. Patrick’s Day parade began in America and actually predates the founding of the United States.

Records show that a St. Patrick’s Day parade was held on March 17, 1601, in a Spanish colony in what is now St. Augustine, Florida. The parade and a St. Patrick’s Day celebration a year earlier were organized by the Spanish Colony's Irish vicar Ricardo Artur. More than a century later, homesick Irish soldiers serving in the English military marched in Boston in 1737 and in New York City on March 17. Enthusiasm for the St. Patrick’s Day parades in New York City, Boston and other early American cities only grew from there. In 2020 and 2021, parades throughout the country, including in New York City and Boston, were canceled or postponed for the first time in decades due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus. They returned in 2022.

8. The Irish Were Once Scorned in America

While Irish Americans are now proud to showcase their heritage, the Irish were not always celebrated by fellow Americans. Beginning in 1845, a devastating potato blight caused widespread hunger throughout Ireland. While approximately 1 million perished, another 2 million abandoned their land in the largest-single population movement of the 19th century. Most of the exiles—nearly a quarter of the Irish nation—came to the shores of the United States. Once they arrived, the Irish refugees were looked down upon as disease-ridden, unskilled and a drain on welfare budgets.

9. Corned Beef and Cabbage Was an American Innovation