Sugar glider

01Gerda Wegener's paintings of 'Lili' were exhibited and celebrated in Paris art circles in the 1920s before Einar's transition.
02Einar underwent at least four surgeries in Dresden and Berlin between 1930 and 1931 — among the earliest such procedures on record.
03The Danish government annulled Einar and Gerda's marriage in 1930, one of the first such legal acts related to gender transition in Europe.

Close-up of a barbed wire

Medieval English split tally stick ( front and reverse view). The stick is notched and inscribed to record a debt owed to the rural dean of Preston Candover , Hampshire, of a tithe of 20 d each on 32 sheep, amounting to a total sum of £2…

American mall vendors sell sugar gliders inside warm chest-pocket pouches for up to $500 each; isolated from colony mates, many self-mutilate — gnawing their own limbs down to bone.

Bill W.

Bill Wilson co-founded AA on the principle of complete abstinence, then took LSD with Aldous Huxley in 1956 and spent years lobbying AA's board to adopt it as a sobriety tool. The board said no. He kept taking it.

Regensburg

A Roman legionary fortress built around 179 CE forms the literal foundation of modern Regensburg — its stone walls, still standing to several metres, prop up the ground floors of inhabited apartment buildings.

Lili Elbe

Einar Wegener spent years modeling for his wife Gerda's paintings — posed as a woman named Lili — and gradually understood that Lili was not a costume. The story became 'The Danish Girl,' but the real life ended in 1931 in a Dresden hospital, aged forty-eight.

Scipionyx

One baby Scipionyx, dead 113 million years ago, still holds its liver, intestines, and windpipe in anatomical position. It is the only dinosaur fossil with soft organs visible to the naked eye.

William T. Anderson

Bloody Bill Anderson rode into battle at Centralia wearing a necklace braided from Union soldiers' scalps. He carried four revolvers and never took prisoners; his own guerrillas called him 'crazy' and meant it literally.

Barbed wire

Joseph Glidden's 1874 barbed-wire patent — filed after sketching the design on a coffee grinder — closed the American open range within a decade and then reappeared at the Somme, herding men into machine-gun fire.

Tally stick

For 700 years, the English Exchequer split hazel sticks to record royal debts — the king kept one half, the creditor the other. In 1834, Parliament burned the old sticks and accidentally set Westminster on fire.

Battle of Aspern–Essling

Marshal Lannes, Napoleon's oldest friend and most trusted commander, had both legs sheared off by a single cannonball at Aspern-Essling. Napoleon wept openly at his deathbed. It was also Napoleon's first battlefield loss — same week.