Why-mar Germany?
This hyperinflation year had Germans hauling cash in wheelbarrows — and historians hauling out their favorite economic charts.
1923
This band told the world that “All You Need Is Love,” which turned out to be only partly correct according to most historians.
The Beatles
This empire built roads, aqueducts, and enough intro-course confusion to keep historians employed for centuries.
The Roman Empire
Medieval monks helped perfect this bubbly favorite of brunchers and dissertation celebrators alike.
Beer
This ancient Greek doctor is credited with an oath that has haunted every first-year med student since.
Hippocrates
This political party’s name promised “the people’s community,” but mostly delivered beer-hall brawls and electoral chaos before 1933.
NSDAP
This American music festival of 1969 became synonymous with peace, love, mud, and logistical nightmares for local dairy farmers.
Woodstock
This Viking who “discovered” North America was later described as “lucky,” probably by someone who envied his name.
Leif Erikson
Prohibition in the U.S. inadvertently boosted this type of illegal drinking establishment, now a trendy bar theme.
Speakeasy
Before antibiotics, physicians treated syphilis with this toxic metal—because apparently the disease wasn’t bad enough.
Mercury
Named after a very respectable president, this economic plan stabilized the currency and made foreign loans cool again.
Dawes Plan
Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters helped popularize this psychedelic substance—strictly for “research purposes,” of course.
LSD
This North African city—famous for libraries, trade, and dramatic sieges—was ruled by the Fatimids by the 10th century.
Cairo
This Japanese drink, brewed from polished rice grains, has been consumed for over a millennium and was once used in Shinto rituals, presumably with great enthusiasm.
Sake
This 18th-century physician famously coined “inoculation,” helping pave the way for vaccines long before Twitter debates.
Edward Jenner
Weimar’s “Golden Twenties” brought cabaret, Bauhaus, and this androgynous dancer/actress who defined the era’s nightlife aesthetic.
Anita Berber
This U.S. city’s 1967 “Summer of Love” brought together hippies, runaways, and enough patchouli oil to alter the microclimate.
San Francisco
This early medieval legal code, compiled under Alfred the Great, mixed Mosaic law with Germanic custom long before “common law” became a thing.
The Doom Book
This 18th-century “craze” in Britain had satirists worrying that Londoners would literally drink themselves into oblivion.
The Gin Craze
This device, used for centuries in childbirth, allowed doctors to assist delivery when natural progress stalled.
Obstetric Forceps
This paramilitary group of disgruntled veterans provided “security” in Weimar Germany the same way raccoons provide “security” in your garbage cans.
Freikorps
This famous 1969 event in New York City is often considered the symbolic birth of modern LGBTQ+ activism—and no, it was not started by “a brick” according to the latest historiography.
The Stonewall Uprising
This Chinese dynasty, founded in 618, ushered in a golden age of poetry, art, and final exams for civil servants, and shares a name with a powdered drink with lots of "zip."
Tang Dynasty
This South Asian distilled spirit, produced from palm sap or sugarcane molasses, fueled anti-colonial debates in British India and occasionally entire riots.
Arrack
This 19th-century physician proposed that cholera spread through contaminated water, not “miasma,” and proved it by basically taking London on a pub crawl map tour.
John Snow