6

Beach Vacations Were Invented In The 18th Century

In the U.S. alone, hundreds of millions of people visit the beach each year. It's clearly the ideal vacation destination -- warm sun, toe-welcoming sand, relaxing waves, and Mai Tais that practically find their way to you of their own volition. You'd assume that's been the case for as long as humans have lived near beaches they could travel to. You'd be wrong

The vast majority of people throughout human history would view all those beachgoers as impeccably tanned lemmings marching toward their inevitable and gory demise. Because for them, the beach was a place not of summer lovin', but of shipwrecks, pirates, natural disasters, deadly diseases arriving from faraway lands, and sea monsters with an insatiable thirst for human liver smoothies.

Greek Mythology Wiki
Pictured: the beach, circa the 18th century.

Like afternoon tea and existential despair, the origins of the beach as a paradisaical destination -- and, in turn, of the vacation itself -- can be traced back to England. In the middle of the 18th century, the wealthy elite came to view the working class as healthier than they were, mostly due to their having to, you know, work. The answer to this, of course, was even more relaxation, and thus was born the idea of the "restorative sea." Doctors prescribed a dip at the beach for everything from leprosy to gout to the veritable holy trinity of Victorian diseases: tuberculosis, hysteria, and melancholy.

"Great for those who can't afford doctor diddles."

5

We Didn't Have Zero Until The Sixth Century (And It Didn't Hit Europe Until The 12th)

The value of zero belies its true importance in mathematics. It's downright impossible to solve complex equations without a numeral to represent zilch. As such, you'd think that even man's earliest attempts at counting would have accounted for zero -- for instance, "I killed precisely one woolly mammoth" pales in importance next to "I have a zero percent chance of outrunning this pissed-off herd of woolly mammoths." But you'd be several millennia on the side of wrong.

Christina Proust/Columbia University
A number which you can't represent because you don't have zero yet.

Though humans have been happily mathing since the development of the Sumerian counting system nearly 5,000 years ago, this and the other systems it inspired -- including that of the Babylonians -- glaringly omitted the all-important zero. When they needed to represent nothing, early mathematicians did so via jotting down a placeholder or ... well, nothing. It wasn't until around 500 CE that the concrete concept of zero was developed in India, and it took yet another century and change for astronomer and mathematician Brahmagupta to create a symbol for it: a dot beneath other numbers.

Over the next few centuries, zero made its way across China and to the Middle East, where it pigged out on shish kebab, spread from a dot into a circle, and found a new home in the Arabic numeral system. But it wasn't until the 12th century and the Moorish conquest of Spain that zero found its way onto the worksheets of Italian mathematician Fibonacci, who realized that you sort of need zero to, you know, be a mathematician.

Hans-Peter Postel/Wiki Commons
"Hey, fellas! I think this white guy is on to something!"

4

National Cuisines Are Modern Political Bullshit

Quick, picture Italian food.

nitrub/iStock
Racist.

We're betting you imagined a heaping plate of spaghetti and meatballs heavily doused in tomato sauce. Well, we've got some news for you: Spaghetti and meatballs is an American creation dating all the way back to the early 20th century. Not only that, but the same way ordering up a mound of General Tso's Chicken in China is likely to leave you with an empty plate and a hopelessly rumbling belly, ordering what we Americans tend to think of as the quintessential Italian dish in Italy is likely to get you something with olives, shellfish, or both.

As a matter of fact, seeing as how the tomato was brought to Europe from the Americas, and tomato sauce only found widespread use in Italy in the late 18th century thanks to heavy influence from Spain, it could be reasonably argued that marinara sauce is more of a joint American/Spanish concoction, which Italian immigrants to America later honed to scrumptious perfection.

adogslifephoto/iStock
Also, pizza is Greek and Persian.

In other words, almost everything you think of as a traditional "national cuisine" is bullshit. So why do we identify specific types of food with specific countries at all? Simple: Much like wartime propaganda posters or your high school gym teacher, a national cuisine is a tool. Specifically, it's a tool employed by a government looking to create a unified national identity.

3

The Concept Of Authorship Is Newer Than Shakespeare

For nearly five millennia after humanity discovered that a rock could be used to scratch stuff onto other rocks, there was absolutely no concept of having ownership of said scratches. If you were to write, say, a trilogy detailing the thrilling exploits of Rumble Thrustrod, international spy/archaeologist, some random chucklehead could come along and not only write a fourth volume, but also publish and sell it without acknowledging you whatsoever. Imagine a world in which fan fiction was a legitimate way for people to make money.

Mike Coppola/Staff/Getty Images
*cough*

2

Owning A Bible Was Nearly Unheard Of For Much Of Its Existence

When it comes to the world's best-selling book, the Bible handily trounces everyone, with Guinness World Records estimating more than five billion copies sold. And why not? The book itself commands you to buy one -- it's the Word of God that must be continually read and pondered. A faithful follower without a Bible on their nightstand is unthinkable ... until you realize that for much of the book's history, it was practically a sin to own one.

Francisco Goya
"What are you doing with that Bible? LOOKING AT DEVIL STUFF?!"

1

The White Race Is A Recent Invention

Somewhere on social media, someone is currently asking, "Why isn't there a White History Month?" or "Why does every White Pride parade spawn bitter protests?" To understand the problem, we have to explain why the concept of a "white" race is kind of weird to begin with.

First of all, the idea is very recent. The ancient Greeks, for example, noted that there were various lighter-skinned peoples to their north, whom they considered inferior and barbaric. This view, of course, did a horrific 180 as the world changed, but divisions based on culture and geographic location always trumped skin tone (although it did admittedly come in handy for determining who was and was not a filthy Nordic invader).

estt/iStock
How else will you figure out who needs to be stabbed? By talking to them??

Then, near the end of the 18th century, German anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach decided to make racism easier and more accessible for everyone. So he gathered up a shitload of skulls from all over the planet, lined them up, and classified them into five races: Caucasian (or white), Mongolian (or yellow), Malayan (or brown), Ethiopian (or black), and American (or red). Blumenbach was adamant that his work was not meant to signify that one race was inherently better than any other, and he was quick to condemn the earlier work of his contemporaries who had determined that Africans were an inferior race. Then he went ahead and noted that whites were obviously the prettiest.

Great American thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson took Blumenbach's work and further narrowed it, proclaiming that Anglo-Saxon was the white race to be. This notion of superior and inferior sub-races is clear up through the 19th century. Sure, the Irish were treated better than people of African ancestry, but political cartoons of the time still depicted them as pipe-smoking ogres who couldn't discern pots from hats. They obviously weren't "white."

Thomas Nast Cartoons
Frederick Burr Opper via Library of Congress
"Our Anglo-Saxon neighbors never wear pots on their heads, Connor."

This ideal morphed again in the late 1910s, when the "Saxon" was dropped because it was no longer cool to be associated with Germany for some reason we can't quite put our finger on. Finally, in the 1940s, anthropologists declared that there were only three races: White, Black, and Asian ... or, since that's not nearly offensive enough to have been conceived in the '40s, "one Negroid race, one Mongoloid race, one Caucasoid race." Suddenly, all of the bitter hatred of the Irish, Italians, etc was set aside long enough to establish one race of somewhat similar-looking people who could be smugly set apart from the others.

In other words, "White" became a label that truly meant "not one of those filthy minorities." So yes, the enthusiastic embrace of the label is something of a sore spot for many people.

AntonioGuillem/iStock
Despite what you're about to read in the comment section.

Nathan Kamal lives in Oregon and writes. He co-founded Asymmetry Fiction for all your fiction needs. Jordan Breeding is a part-time writer, full-time lover, and all-the-time guitarist. Check out his band at skywardband.com or on Spotify here.

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