HAistoric — Histories That Almost Were

— The Bourbon monarchy’s last-ditch effort to weaponize permafrost against the harvest cycle. —

— A certain Vice-Admiral Zinovy Rozhestvensky learns the hard way that a message in a bottle is not a reliable intelligence source. —

— A Westphalian abbess’s well-intentioned liturgical experiment results in the world’s first truly buoyant bible. —

— The Accidental Sovereignty of the People Who Weren’t There. —

— One iceman’s quest for perfect summer preservation ended up putting the entire city on ice. —

— Sometimes you try to buy a man a car, and you accidentally buy him 300 kilos of Sarin precursor. —

— The time a casting dispute over the role of Hercules led to a sitting senator fielding a private army of very dramatic gladiators. —

— A quartermaster’s clerical error did not, contrary to popular belief, derail the Navigator’s famed African expedition. It made it far, far worse. —

— One misplaced comma, a thousand years of consecrated cheese. —

— A 78% increase in jaw-related screaming at the court of Versailles, 1686–1692. —

— Or, how a garbled signal from Tehran gave the Soviets the last laugh on the Moon. —

— Sometimes, a man with a boat is more dangerous than a man with a plan. —

— 87% of Viking trade disputes were resolved by competitive churning, say sources. —

— 87% of disputed decapitations upheld on review, according to one Tetzcoco record. —

— An 8th-century Irish hermit’s quest for divine dampness accidentally invents the pilgrimage rave. —