This is Caterina Sforza, one of the most infamous people of Renaissance Italy. She had many feuds, the most prominent of which was with the Borgia family. This feud resulted in an interesting rumor—that she weaponized the Plague, and tried to assassinate the Pope with it.
Welcome back to our series on the history of makeup.
Think “Cocaine Kate” invented the misfit model? For as long as beautiful women have been posing, they’ve been wreaking havoc on the industry that catapulted them to fame. Here are four of our favorite badass beauties.
You know who doesn’t get enough love? Gentlemen in wigs.
In America, the fight for women’s suffrage began in 1848 at Seneca Falls, New York. There, 100 women signed the “Declaration of Sentiments,” which demanded they be given the right to vote by the federal government. But only one signer survived to see them get that right — Charlotte Woodward Pierce.
Couples who kill together — Fred and Rosemary West, Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo, David and Catherine Birnie — get plenty of ink. But what about siblings and larger family groups whose shared viciousness leads them into committing horrifying crimes? Read on for six especially nasty examples.
What narratively disappointing bullshit is this: True Detective’s second season will apparently no longer be about “the secret occult history” of transportation. Pfffft. That sound is my dreams deflating.
Welcome back to our series on the history of makeup.
What am I doing here? The question had lodged itself in my brain when I arrived in Southeast Asia two months ago, and it’d been reverberating in my skull ever since. I should have stayed in D.C., I thought, working on improving my GPA and hunting for a job post-graduation. Instead, I’d accepted a study-abroad spot in…
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer says that without the 1990s TV series Murphy Brown to inspire her, she wouldn’t have gotten where she is today. The show was so influential that Vice President Dan Quayle turned the main character, played by Candice Bergen, into a political meme. And yet this series isn’t available anywhere…
This is the first installment in ongoing series about the makeup trends throughout the ages. Today we'll be talking about the turn of the last century.
History doesn't have to be the stultifying grind you remember from high school. It can be shocking, and funny, and sad — and even if you don't remember all the dates and faces, it can leave you knowing more about the world. Here are 10 popular history books that will change your view of reality.
Hello, and welcome to Jezebel's home for anything to do with the olden days.
Some tropes are so ingrained in Medieval-inspired fantasy stories that it's tempting to think that they represent real aspects of Medieval life. But often these stories are just reinforcing myths and misconceptions about life in the Middle Ages.
At the end of the sixteenth century, there was an infant in France with an excess of skin on its head. The parents of the child were poor and carried their infant from town to town, putting him on display for profit. When they reached Paris, a magistrate questioned them, suspecting the pair of fraud. The parents…
You may be familiar with the espionage efforts of female spies like Josephine Baker and Mata Hari, whose lives have been committed time and time again to film. But there are numerous female spies who — even if we don't agree with all their politics — led fascinating lives, ones that could fill entire movie franchises.
You've probably heard that English is being ruined — by the Internet, by texting, by Americans, by young people who have no respect for proper grammar. But it turns out that people have always worried over English, and over the centuries, have accused all sorts of things of "ruining" the language.
Seppuku, a highly ritualized form of suicide that involved cutting one's own stomach, was once part of the bushido samurai code, and considered an honorable way to die and, until the 20th century, was quite common. So what happened? Why did this practice die out?
Flight attendants have a job that holds a lot of prestige in the eyes of most travelers, and they get called a lot of different things while doing their jobs — waitress, m'am, hey you, miss, air hostess, and trolley dolly. But one moniker that has pretty much gone out the emergency exit door is "stewardess," and…
Romance hasn't always been the stuff of bodice rippers and bad vampire movies. Back in the 18th century, the word "romantic" meant something akin to "foolish" or "fanciful." But then a bunch of hipster sentimentalists changed everything — and invented the idea of love as we know it today.
