For your information: It’s the fiftieth anniversary of perhaps the best song ever written about telling a bunch of interfering, judgemental hypocrites to eat shit.

Two hundred and seven years ago this September, novelist Fanny Burney—whose works include Evelina and Cecilia—had a mastectomy. She wrote about the experience in detail that can only be described as excruciating.

During World War II, Freddie Oversteegen and her older sister Truus made strategic use of the fact that so many people fail to take teenage girls seriously—by joining the Dutch resistance and killing Nazis.

My preference is always to purchase furniture that’s gently used but solidly made, rather than Ikea. That’s why I’m really hoping I can get a good deal on Marie Antoinette’s two gilded stools and Louis XIV ormolu-mounted writing table, up for auction in Paris. That’s basically the same as Craigslist, right?

Fascinating fact of the day: The coffee filter was invented by a woman who loved coffee, but hated the whole rigamarole with those disgusting grounds.

Here’s a fun quirk of history: It was the expertise involved in developing the innovative Playtex Living Girdle that helped create the spacesuits that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin wore all the way to the moon.

Here is a historical blind item.

The FBI has announced they’ve recovered a pair of Dorothy’s ruby slippers from MGM’s 1939 The Wizard of Oz classic, which have been missing since they were stolen over a decade ago.

How did you get your information about puberty? If you were receiving those details sometime after September 1998, there’s a good chance it was from the cozy illustrations of American Girl’s The Care and Keeping of You: The Body Book for Girls.

A first edition of Pride and Prejudice is coming up for auction and estimated to go for as much as $23,390. OK, but is that too much, or too little?

The first black woman to cover the White House is getting her own statue at Washington, D.C.’s Newseum on September 21.

Here is a historical blind item.

It’s the dog days of blog summer so here’s something wholesome: free museum tickets!

A writer has rediscovered Marilyn Monroe’s long-lost first nude scene—locked in a cabinet.

Some amount of unpublished material from The Autobiography of Malcolm X is about to come up for auction. Scholars are hoping it’ll be three missing chapters thought to have been cut after his assassination but before the book’s publication. If, that is, they ever existed in the first place.

A researcher has discovered what may be the earliest purchase of a Jane Austen novel. The customer was the man who would become George IV, i.e., the Prince Regent, who was basically a character out of Jane Austen—specifically, one of the overblown, money-wasting ones who just gets ruthlessly mocked for four hundred…

Breaking up is not only hard to do, but there’s little precedent for women being able to do it, observes Canadian journalist Kelli María Korducki. In Hard to Do: The Surprising, Feminist History of Breaking Up, Korducki examines the historical shifts that enabled women to end partnerships simply because they want to,…

Archeologists say that the remains of around 95 people recently discovered on a Texas construction site almost certainly belonged to African Americans essentially made to work as slaves after the institution’s official abolition, part of the state’s post-Civil War convict lease system.

Looks like they finally got that big ass sarcophagus open! What was inside?

Fifty five years ago this month, a group of teenage girls were locked in a 19th-century stockade in the Georgia heat, imprisoned for their activism on behalf of the Civil Rights movement.