8 Strange History Facts You Probably Never Learned About in School

2) Write Me a Letter

If it seems like characters in historical novels are constantly writing and receiving letters it’s because it was true- at least some of the time. Victorian Londoners, for example, had mail delivered 12 times a day! It was vitally important in a time of limited communication and vast empires to be able to urgently receive the latest info from your family, friends, and business partners.

If you think that we are obsessed with sending texts and emails these days, just imagine the effort it took to read and respond to potentially dozens of paper letters per day. It certainly is a good system if you need to constantly write to your boy-crazy friends or if you need to suddenly cancel an engagement later that day, but it does seem very time consuming.

1) Cheaper Than a Train Ticket

And speaking of mail, for a short time in 1913 children in the U.S. were legally mailed through the new parcel post system which allowed for heavier items to be sent across the country. Images have surfaced which show children in the mail carriers’ pouches. While this may seem horrific to some, these occurrences were few and far between. It’s not that it was encouraged, rather only that there were no specific postal regulations or child safety laws against it.

Mailing children was officially outlawed in June of 1913. And, Snopes suggests that if children were actually mailed, that it was most likely just across town and that they were delivered by a mailman that the family knew. Another theory is that the children were listed as ‘mail’ because it was cheaper than paying for a train ticket. If you ever got into trouble and your parents threatened to mail you to a relative, just know that in 1913 they could have actually done so!

That does it for these rarely told historical facts. For all the history lessons that we get in school, sometimes we don’t get the whole scoop. If you’re craving more strange history then you can read about the beer flood of 1814 right here.