Ye shall know us by our hula hoops…
Eras are marked by their conflicts (World War II), their leaders (The Victorian Era), the technologies that shaped them (The Space Age)– and by the fads that spread like pandemics through the cultures of one period and another.
CrazyFads.com has come to the aid of historians with a compendium of crazes, from the 20s up to today… from Flappers and the Magic 8 Ball through peasant skirts and lamps to Razor scooters and American Idol— they’re all here.
As we water our pet rocks, we might might spare a sympathetic thought for Dante Alighieri, who was exiled from Florence on this date in 1302… though we might temper that sympathy with gratitude, as it was on his subsequent wanderings that he wrote The Divine Comedy. (In June, 2008, the city council of Florence finally passed a motion rescinding Dante’s sentence…)
Signorelli’s portrait of Dante, from a fresco in the Duomo at Orvieto