If you think there are a lot of protests in the United States in 2018, you'd be right, but it's not like we haven't done it before. Think back to the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War protests- those were only 50 years ago, and 50 years is a rather long stretch between major uprisings in America. After all, the country was born as a protest against Britain. Since then, we've seen the Civil War, the fight for women's suffrage, labor strikes, and more. Those were all sparked by people protesting against the status quo.     

The labor movement had been brewing since the Colonial era, and the first recorded strike—by skilled tailors protesting reduced wages—happened in 1768. At the time, most Americans did some farming to support their families, developing their craftsmanship in the winter months. Work hours were not much of an issue: Self-employed farmers put in the most hard labor for about six months of the year, estimated at 8-10 hours a day. In the early days of the United States, craftsmen began organizing trade unions in cities around the country to protect their fields from cheap and shoddy workmanship.

But as the Industrial Revolution progressed in the new country, it revealed cracks in the Enlightenment ideals about equality the United States was founded on. Mechanized production created three distinct classes, the upper class or the company owners, the middle class or the business professionals, and the working class who labored in the factories. The growing wealth gap between the upper and lower classes was at odds with American ideals. Some historians believe factory workers—men, women, and children—would work from sun up to sun down, with only Sunday off. It’s estimated American workers devoted 60 to 70 hours a week to their jobs during the 19th century.

The Working Men’s Party was established in 1828 in Philadelphia and in 1829 in New York City. The so-called “Workies” advocated for men of low economic status, demanding that all (white) men receive the right to vote while also fighting for shorter working hours, educational opportunities, and safeguards from debtor’s prison.

After the Civil War, industrialization took off in earnest as coal, steel, and railroad equipment were in demand to develop the American West. Industry magnates employed bevies of European immigrants in low-wage jobs in their plants. The overworked and underpaid coal miners, steel workers, and train-car builders, among others, began organizing and striking against their wealthy bosses for better pay and improved working conditions. These strikes often led to violent clashes with company guards, police officers, and even the U.S. Army, where striking workers would sometimes be shot and killed. The union members sometimes retaliated with guns and pipe bombs of their own.

Read a chronological rundown of some of the biggest protest movements in American history at Collectors Weekly.

(YouTube link)

Matt Silverman and his kids Amelia and Arthur sing Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" with new lyrics about toys and media that kids have loved through the years, from Howdy Doody to Minions. The lyrics are at the YouTube page, but the video clips illustrate them well enough. -via Tastefully Offensive   

The Knights Templar was a Catholic military order that took part in the Crusades and in consolidating the rule of the Church in Europe. They were also unusually healthy for their time. While the average European in the Middle Ages would be lucky to see the age of 50, many of the Knights were fighting into their 60s. That may have been due to the rules they lived by. As monks, they took a vow of poverty and their diet was kept simple, unlike the rich dishes of the wealthy class. But as warriors, they had to stay in fighting shape and power their extensive training, so they were permitted an amount necessary to stay strong.

The knights’ diets seem to have been a balancing act between the ordinary fasting demands on monks, and the fact that these knights lived active, military lives. You couldn’t crusade, or joust, on an empty stomach. (Although the Knights Templar only jousted in combat or training—not for sport.) So three times a week, the knights were permitted to eat meat—even though it was “understood that the custom of eating flesh corrupts the body.” On Sundays, everyone ate meat, with higher-up members permitted both lunch and dinner with some kind of roast animal. Accounts from the time show that this was often beef, ham, or bacon, with salt for seasoning or to cure the meat.   

Read about the rules for the Knights Templar, including their diet, at Atlas Obscura.

During the Age of Exploration, ships sailed all over the world, mainly looking for new products to sell, new sources for existing products, and new markets to sell them to. Along the way they found strange lands, strange people, and saw strange things in the ocean that were difficult to describe -and that's how you get mermaids. The legend of mermaids had already been around, but between 1610 and 1784, there were so many documented reports of merpeople that History Today put together an interactive map of them. Use the right arrows to read them in chronological order, or drag the map around to find a sighting near you. -via Nag on the Lake 

(YouTube link)

What is that thing? What's it doing? Where's it going? A clowder of cats at what looks to be a cat shelter encounter a robotic vacuum cleaner. Their curiosity is way ahead of their caution, which is where we got the adage "curiosity killed the cat." -via Digg

The soda fountain at Jacob’s Pharmacy in Atlanta sold the very first Coca-Cola on May 8, 1886. The tonic, made of carbonated water, sugar, lime juice, cocaine, and other flavorings, was marketed as a medicinal tonic for all kinds of ailments.   

Whatever the case, as to how its inventor, pharmacist John Pemberton, came up with the tonic, he was specifically looking for a cure for his own morphine addiction. You see, Pemberton was a former Confederate soldier who nearly had his head lopped off in the Battle of Columbus. During his recovery from his wounds, as with so many others at the time, he became addicted to morphine and so was looking for something to wean him off the habit.

This all led him to experimenting with coca-leaf extract, and thus Pemberton’s French Wine Coca was born, which he claimed did the trick. (Though it should be noted that when he died of stomach cancer two years later in 1888, he was still addicted to morphine.)

Unfortunately for him, his initial concoction also included alcohol (from wine), which became banned in Atlanta where he lived in the same year he debuted his tonic, resulting in him substituting the wine with sugar and citric acid. He also, of course, mixed the whole thing with carbonated water, owing to, at the time, fizzy water being thought to be good for your health.

The public response was pretty much meh, a disappointment for Pemberton and his investors. Read about the birth of Coca-Cola at Today I Found Out.

(YouTube link)

The source material for Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was the 1958 suspense novel Red Alert by Peter George. However, Red Alert was not at all funny, just a terrifying story of nuclear armageddon. In Kubrick's hands, the tale became absurdist satire all around. Cinefix tells the tale of how the transformation took place and left us with a classic black comedy. -via the AV Club

Dutch sculptors Adrie and Alfons Kennis are the artists behind many of the recreations of early man you've already seen, like Otzi the Iceman and the recent Cheddar Man. They are also twin brothers. The Kennises are most renowned for their sculptures of even older people -Neanderthals and other hominins. Their third display in the UK will open in October at St Fagans National Museum of History in Wales. To do the work they do, the Kennis brothers have studied human anatomy, evolution, DNA, and anthropology. The results are sculptures that appear startlingly lifelike while still being different from what we know.   

This alien-ness is tempered, however, by their particular skill for facial expressions, giving life and personality to the clay. Each full-sized reconstruction takes half a year, but a face alone can take a whole month, and although the brothers refuse to refer to themselves as artists, this is obviously the area that gives them the greatest artistic freedom and satisfaction. “There are some things the skull can’t tell you,” admits Adrie. “You never know how much fat someone had around their eyes, or the thickness of the lips, or the exact position and shape of the nostrils.”

This personal quality is what makes Kennis models so captivating, and so desirable to museums: they don’t simply depict a generalised early man, but a specific man or woman, an effect that allows onlookers to glimpse human prehistory with immediacy, even familiarity. But while curators and museum-goers are sometimes surprised by the vivid, emotive features of the Kennis models, there is only one person Adrie needs to impress: “If Alfons doesn’t like the face, I am disappointed. But if he likes it, if we are both satisfied, then we can handle the whole world.”

Read about the sculptors' process, and get a preview of their Neanderthal recreations at The Guardian. Article contains some Neanderthal nudity. -via Metafilter

(YouTube link)

Gravity wins again! The Apollo moon landings were the first time humans walked on a celestial body besides Earth, and the astronauts found that it was quite different. While there is less gravity, it still works. But the other forces of physics were no different, so just moving around was a learning experience. And those cumbersome spacesuits didn't help. YouTuber Martian Archaeology put together a blooper reel of sorts from NASA footage. It's okay, since 50 years on, we know they made it back home in one piece. -via Tastefully Offensive 

Nappone at the upholstery shop.

Italian photographer Marianna Zampieri presents a series called C-AT Work that features cats who go to work with their humans. Librarians, hair stylists, musicians, craftspeople, office workers, and store owners go about their day as their cat presides over their domain.

Fulvio in his theater.

The goal of this project is always to try to capture the beauty of the relationship that is created between cats and people with whom they share most of the time, demonstrating the great dignity and incredible adaptability of these animals in any situation. All seasoned by the setting that the most diverse work environments can give, creating the astonishment that can be born seeing the cats placed in environments where we are not used to see them.

Nando at the newsstand.

You can see the series in slideshow format at Facebook and more of Zampieri's cat photography at Instagram. -via Laughing Squid

(YouTube link)

Ze Frank suddenly has another True Facts video. This one isn't about some weird animal, but the weird plants that eat animals. He talks about plants eating bugs as payback for us eating plants, but that only works if you feel closely related to insects. And if that's the way you feeel, the video might strike you as a bit gruesome. Contains NSFW language. 

In 1958, America's new space agency called NASA launched an extensive search for men who would become astronauts. Of 508 candidates, the Mercury 7 were selected via a battery of physical, psychological, and intellectual tests.

Hopefuls sat in extreme heat and cold, did math in 145-decibel rooms (normal conversation is 60 dB), and spent hours in isolation chambers. On top of all that, candidates took 12 intelligence tests. These exams sought to predict a wealth of unknowns: how the men would maneuver spacecraft, if they could problem-solve midflight, and whether they grasped the science that would keep them aloft.

While the physical tests can't be taken online, Popular Science is offering us the chance to try a small portion of the intelligence tests those men took 60 years ago. I tried it; all I can say it I'm glad the questions aren't timed. Good luck! -via Mental Floss

(YouTube link)

We know crows are intelligent and good with tools. We know they learn from watching others do things. And in case you didn't know, they hang around train stations in Japan. This crow is using an automated kiosk to buy a ticket. When the machine says "insert credit card," the crow realizes he doesn't have one, but the women at the next machine does -so he takes it! The video stops before we find out if he got a ticket; let's assume the woman took her credit card back. Sure, he could have flown to his destination, but why flap your own wings when you can use someone else's money to ride? -via Digg

Wisteria sinensis, or Chinese wisteria, is blooming all over London. It's been a favorite in the city for a couple of centuries now.

Wisteria Sinensis was unknown in Europe before 1816, when several agents of the East India Company working in China sent cuttings back to England.[3] A 200 year-old vine, growing at Griffin's Brewery in Chiswick, London, planted that same year, is often cited as England's oldest living wisteria plant.[4][5] Over the next several decades the plant became, and remains, one of the quintessential ornamental vines in English gardens. The white-flowering form, Wisteria Sinensis Alba, was discovered in a garden by Botanist Robert Fortune in 1844, from whence he took cuttings for the Royal Horticultural Society.[6] It is most commonly trained along garden walls, along the exterior of buildings, or over a pergola to create avenues of overhanging blossoms during bloom.

The Londonist has a roundup of Instagram pictures of London's lovely wisteria in bloom from just the past week or so. If you want to see more, unrestricted by date or location, check out #wisteria at Instagram.  -via Nag on the Lake

(vimeo link)

One thing we don't have enough of is Western movies with giant monsters. There's Valley of the Gwangi (1969), and uh, that's about it. But now Fabrice Mathieu (previously at Neatorama) brings us a mashup with gunslingers defending the Alamo from a swarm of giant mutant insects! Far Alamo stars John Wayne, Charles Bronson, Yul Brynner, Richard Widmark, James Coburn, Clint Eastwood, Henry Fonda, Lee Van Cleef, and a host other actors you'd expect in a classic Western. This shoot-em-up was pieced together from a dozen different films, listed at the vimeo page. -Thanks, Fabrice!