Tove Jansson: The Woman Who Built Moominvalley
She painted, she mocked Hitler in wartime Helsinki, and she drew a troll that conquered the world. The life of Tove Jansson, and which Moomin books to actually read.
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How Finland’s ancient rituals became modern wellness trends
Ancient Finnish rituals — from sauna steam to icy plunges. Before wellness had hashtags, Finland had habits. Long before anyone said “mindfulness,” Finns were quietly practising it, in saunas, in forests, and occasionally in holes cut into frozen lakes. It’s easy to think of these as quirky northern customs, but most are older than the…
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The Real Stories Behind Iconic Album Covers
The story Iain Macmillan tells goes like this: ten minutes, a stepladder, and a policeman holding back traffic on a north London street. Six photographs taken. One chosen. Paul McCartney happened to be barefoot. And within months of the album’s release, a significant portion of America was convinced that Paul McCartney was dead. Album covers…
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How Finland went from Europe’s poorest country to its happiest
In the winter of 1867, lakes and rivers across Finland remained frozen well into June. The average temperature in Helsinki that May was 1.8°C — the coldest on record, eight degrees below normal. The rye had rotted in the fields. Within three years, roughly 270,000 Finns were dead: about eight and a half per cent…
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Britain’s Greatest Political Eccentrics Throughout History
By the time John “Mad Jack” Mytton arrived at his own dinner party riding a live bear — in full hunting costume, naturally — his guests had learned to expect the unexpected. The bear, unimpressed by the formalities, bit him through the calf. Mytton considered it one of the more reasonable evenings that year. Britain…
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The history of British protest: from Peterloo to punk
On the 16th of August 1819, somewhere between 60,000 and 80,000 people gathered peacefully at St Peter’s Field in Manchester to demand parliamentary reform. They brought their families. Some wore their Sunday best. The local magistrates, watching from a nearby house, decided this constituted a threat to public order. Within minutes, cavalry had charged into…
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Sisu: The Untranslatable Finnish Concept That Won a War
The Soviet Union invaded Finland on 30 November 1939 with 21 divisions — around 450,000 men — expecting to wrap the whole thing up in a fortnight. Stalin apparently wanted it done in time for his 60th birthday in December. The Finns had roughly 300,000 poorly equipped soldiers, no meaningful air force, and an economy…
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Quiz: How well do you know your 90s commercials?
Television shows and movies from the 1990s are getting a lot of love these days. But what about the commercials? Discovering that you still remember a 20-year-old ad word for word is not only testament to the power of advertising, but it can be a huge trip down memory lane for those of us who…
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Victorian Hairstyles: a short history, in photos
In the Victorian era, a woman’s hair was often thought to be one of her most valuable assets. Styles varied quite a bit throughout the nearly 7 decades of Queen Victoria’s reign, with everything from simple middle parts to elaborate pieces made from human hair being in fashion. Accessories such as combs, pearls, hats and…
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5 passionate protests that really did change the world
In the field of history, big one-off events are sometimes seen as high watermarks for important movements, or big bursts that have changed perceptions of affairs in their time and affected subsequent events. It’s up to academics to further the discourse on the relevance of events like these, but we’ve picked a list of some important…
