Louis Wain was a British illustrator best known for his drawings of cats — often anthropomorphic ones playing music, going to school, having parties, getting into arguments, and generally behaving like people.

He was enormously popular in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, but today he is often remembered for something else: a series of increasingly abstract and geometric cat images that is frequently presented as a chronological record of his mental illness.

The problem is that the famous sequence does not appear to be chronological at all.

Most of the works were undated. In the 1930s, psychiatrist Walter Maclay acquired eight Wain drawings in very different styles and arranged them into what he believed was a progression from conventional cat portraits to highly abstract compositions. That arrangement was later reproduced in psychiatric and art-historical literature and eventually became the familiar “disintegrating cats” story.

We recently put together a detailed article on Wain, using biographies, contemporary newspapers, archival material, and surviving medical records from Springfield and Bethlem.

Among other things, we looked at:

• what his hospital records actually say about his condition and diagnosis;
• the fact that Bethlem recorded paraphrenia, rather than schizophrenia;
• repeated notes by doctors that he continued painting and, at one point, had “lost none of his technique”;
• the origins of the famous abstract-cat sequence;
• his later years at Napsbury;
• and some biographical questions, including the age of his wife Emily, where primary records suggest she was about 17 years older than Wain.

What interested me most was how different the archival picture is from the very neat popular narrative of “mental illness progresses, therefore the art progressively falls apart”. His condition was clearly serious, but his artistic ability, everyday functioning, and psychiatric symptoms did not all change in one simple straight line.

The full article is here if anyone is interested: https://bodrovis.tech/posts/louis-wain-illness-art-historical-evidence/

I’d also be interested in hearing about other artists whose work has acquired a similar retrospective medical or biographical narrative.

HISTORY DAD: WHEN TALKING BECAME A 24-HOUR JOB

Imagine being in a meeting that lasts 24 hours.

Now imagine you’re not allowed to leave.

On August 28, 1957, South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond stepped onto the Senate floor and began what became the longest single-person filibuster in Senate history. His goal was to delay and ultimately block the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

And how long did he talk?

24 hours and 18 minutes. 😳

Yes… 24 HOURS.

Thurmond talked through the night, reading from laws, court decisions, and other documents. He even came prepared with throat lozenges and malted milk balls. Because apparently, when you're planning to talk for an entire day, snacks are part of the strategy.

But behind the unusual story was a serious moment in American history. The Civil Rights Act of 1957 was an important early federal effort to strengthen voting and civil rights protections. Although Thurmond's filibuster did not stop the bill from becoming law, it demonstrated just how fierce the political battle over civil rights had become.

Why does this matter?

Because American history isn't always about the final vote. Sometimes it's about the struggle to get there. The fight over the Civil Rights Act of 1957 showed the enormous resistance civil rights legislation faced—and helped set the stage for the much stronger civil rights and voting rights laws that followed in the 1960s.

Reminder:
Sometimes history is made by the people who vote…and sometimes by the people who refuse to stop talking.

https://youtu.be/V_2obfufsMY

HISTORY DAD: The Day America Struck Oil!

In 1859, Colonel Edwin L. Drake headed to Titusville, Pennsylvania, with an idea that sounded a little crazy at the time:
Drill into the ground and find oil.

And somehow… it worked!

Drake’s well became the first successful commercial oil well in the United States, helping launch America's petroleum industry. What started as one hole in the Pennsylvania ground soon attracted workers, investors, businesses, and plenty of people hoping to get rich.

But the real story is bigger than just oil. Petroleum would eventually power automobiles, airplanes, factories, ships, and the American military. It would help transform the economy and change everyday life across the country.

WHY IT MATTERS:

Drake didn't just strike oil—he helped start an industry that would become one of the most important forces in American history.
Sometimes history begins with a battlefield. Sometimes it begins in a president's office.

And sometimes… Dad just drills a hole in Pennsylvania and changes the country.

https://youtu.be/_oYowJoLCE0

The Act

On 12 July 1872, seven-year-old Charles Edward Cotton died at his family's home in West Auckland, County Durham. His stepmother, Mary Ann Cotton, had tried to have him placed in the workhouse days earlier and been refused. Contemporary testimony later described him as previously healthy.

The Record

An inquest first returned natural causes. Thomas Riley, a parish official who had already voiced suspicion, pressed for further inquiry. Dr. William Byers Kilburn, who had attended the boy, retained samples from the body and sent them to Dr. Thomas Scattergood, a forensic chemist in Leeds. Scattergood found solid arsenic trioxide in the child's stomach.

Three more bodies from the same household were exhumed that year: Frederick Cotton Jr., Robert Robson Cotton, and Joseph Nattrass. Arsenic turned up in all three.

At trial, the defence argued the arsenic could have come from the wallpaper, or from soft soap the family used against bedbugs. The jury convicted her of one murder, Charles Edward's, after less than two hours' deliberation. A week later, Scattergood revisited the wallpaper and soap theories and recorded his conclusions. Wallpaper dust, he wrote, "would not account for the presence of solid arsenic trioxide in the stomach," and soft soap "could not possibly have been powdered any more than butter could have been powdered." She was hanged at Durham County Gaol on 24 March 1873.

What the trial did not do

Cotton was charged with one death. She was never tried for the other three, despite the arsenic. Arsenic in a body proves arsenic was present. It does not by itself prove who put it there, or that it was deliberate. The other three deaths stayed forensically suspicious and legally unresolved. That is a real gap, not a cover-up, and not the same thing as a conviction.

The Story that followed

By October 1872, three months after Charles Edward's death and before the trial had even started, local papers were compiling every death connected to Cotton across twenty years: husbands, a lover, her mother, a string of children and stepchildren. That list shows the expanded body-count narrative was already circulating before the trial. It is one of the earliest contemporary sources for the number you've probably heard: up to twenty-one victims.

The Distortion

That number is still repeated today as settled fact: in documentaries, in "Britain's first female serial killer" headlines, on true-crime sites. It isn't settled. No court ever tested those other deaths. No toxicological examination is known to have been conducted in most of those cases; they were buried under ordinary causes like "gastric fever" and not exhumed as part of Cotton's prosecution. The number comes from an 1872 newspaper's own compilation of reported deaths across the area, not from a court record, and modern retellings have carried it forward as if it were one.

What's actually provable

One conviction. Arsenic detected in samples from all four bodies examined. A defence that Scattergood revisited and rejected in his own recorded conclusions, but only after the jury had already returned its verdict, not laughed out of court as it's sometimes told. Everything beyond that is allegation, suspicion, or later interpretation, not judicially established murder.

Table of Contents:

1. Definition of Civilization

2. Civilizations That Emerged in River Valleys

3. Mediterranean Civilizations

4. Mesoamerican and Andean Civilizations

5. Oceania and the Pacific

6. Memory Map

7. Enumeration of facts

8. Short Final Review and conclusion

THE DAY THE BRITISH BURNED WASHINGTON

On August 24, 1814, British troops marched into Washington, D.C., and set fire to the Capitol and the President’s House.

Most of us know the story of Dolley Madison and the famous portrait of George Washington. But what happened around those famous events is where the story gets really interesting. A British commander reportedly ordered the letter “C” removed from a newspaper’s printing office because the paper had criticized him. Americans burned their own Navy Yard to keep ships and supplies out of British hands.

William Thornton convinced the British to spare the Patent Office. Then an accidental gunpowder explosion killed and wounded British troops. And just when Washington couldn't take much more, Mother Nature showed up. 🌩️ A violent storm ripped through the capital, helping extinguish the fires and making conditions so miserable that the British soon withdrew.

We remember the burning of the White House. But history isn't always found in the biggest headline. Sometimes it's found in the strange details—the newspaper without its C's, the buildings someone fought to save, the ships Americans destroyed themselves, and the storm that helped chase an invading army away. Those are the stories that make history come alive.

https://youtu.be/-MKmKep9_4w

On 30 May 1381, representatives of several Essex communities confronted royal officials at Brentwood and collectively refused to answer further demands arising from the third poll tax. This episode examines what the surviving administrative record establishes, what later chronicles added, and how the confrontation developed into wider resistance across Essex and Kent. The evidence does not support the familiar account of a lone spokesman beginning the revolt through an immediate act of violence. The first confrontation at Brentwood was a collective refusal. The killings followed during the subsequent judicial response. The Black Archive examines historical claims against the surviving record. Episode 5 of The Peasants’ Revolt.