Best Of MetaFilter

via theconversation.com, Teetotums were used in an era when dice were associated with vice. Museum Rotterdam/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Wobbuffet has a lovely, expansive post on the early history of geographical board games, with a special look at America's first board game, 1822's "The Travellers' Tour Through the United States" in which "whoever gets to New Orleans first, wins." A timeless goal, indeed!

Warren G. Harding by Forever Wiser (cc by)

In 2001 I was both stage manager and historic researcher for a play from 1911 about congressional sex scandals: EmpressCallipygos shares inhuman ecstatic shrieking and some hot goss on Warren G. Harding.

Copper engraving from 1755 shows Lisbon in ruins and in flames

Remembrances of things past via recent history posts on the blue:

More than 600 secret societies in the US, documented in 1899: here is "The Cyclopædia of Fraternities"; a compilation of existing authentic information and the results of original investigation

"Count Pier Francesco Orsini was a man much given to melancholy": Orsini's Sacro Busco, or the Park of Monsters

Ghosts at the Banquet: "Martin Gusinde documented the life and rituals of the Selk'nam people of Tierra del Fuego ... They had been nearly wiped out by a genocide led by Julius Popper, the Tyrant of Tierra del Fuego"

"In 1986, workers in Sichuan province in China were digging for clay for bricks when they stumbled onto an archaeological treasure: a major site for a Bronze Age civilization previously only guessed at"

Road tripping back in time on the Old Spanish Trail: "Today, you can still find remnants of that road, and there's a group of people who are trying to revive this historic highway."

"after the earthquake, King Joseph I was so afraid of buildings he moved out of Lisbon; his claustrophobia was so severe he lived in tents for the rest of his life. Artists depicted the chaos of the city in the aftermath of the disaster": The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755