Sweet and Sour

the Cabinet of Curiosities. Picture of Valentine's Day card. You probably see pink and red hearts, maybe a fun rhyme, maybe one of those postcards printed for students to hand out in class, Snoopy or some superhero saying beat my Valentine, ready to be passed along with some candy hearts and a shy smile. It's a sweet tradition, but for a day celebrating the chance to turn a private crush into

something more. Valentine's Day wasn't always so sweet, And of course there have always been people who didn't exactly feel warm fuzzies every time that day came around. So what's in it for them? Well, the Victorians had an answer for that. Recently, a historian looking through a British museum found a leather bound volume of Valentine's cards from around

eighteen seventy. The kind of display book that a salesman would bring to stationary stores to show business owners what they could bring their to their shelves on Valentine's Day. The first half of the book is predictable, cherubs, flowers, silver spirals, the kinds of classy cards Victorian lovebirds might buy for each other. The second half, though, is more for the mocking birds. The back of the album is full of postcards that were printed with devastating insults and

hurtful rhymes. The illustrations are rude caricatures and crass parodies of lovely greetings. Some of them even cross over the line from the hideous to the obscene. Compared to the other cards, they're a little rougher there, rented quickly on cheap sheets of paper. After all, you probably want to put most of your money into praising your friends, not insulting your enemies. Even so, there were plenty of choices

for the discerning buyer. Take, for example, the card showing a gentleman in striped trousers getting a bucket of water splashed in his face by a smiling woman. His hat flies off the edge of the page, and the rhyme underneath it reads it says as plain as it can say, old fellow, you best step away. Another example is a card that's covered in delicate calligraphy but ironically reads, indeed

you are a little prig for home. I do not care one fig. Now I'm not saying they would win any prizes for poetry, but if you want to put a suitor off your case, looking at the grin of the woman with the bucket of water gives us a glimpse of how someone might feel putting their coins down on the counter in the stationary shop. But these mocking

cards weren't just printed to stop unwanted attention. They were also called vinegar Valentine's printed in the event that you just wanted to insult someone in your life, holiday or no angry at a salesperson for how you were treated in their store. There's a card for that, illustrated with an obnoxious cashier behind the counter. There were cards printed to sling at school, teachers, neighbors, and so many more.

Look any trip to the comments section on a website will show you that cheap insults have never gone out of style. So that raises the question why there aren't more of these cards around the fact of the matter is they didn't last. First of all, they were probably thrown away when they were received because these Valentines didn't sing. They stun One writer from the time remembered getting one, and she said that she threw it directly into the fire.

Still enough of them have survived that today. Historians guessed that something like seven hundred and fifty thousand Vinegar Valentine's were being sent each and every year. But even as they rose in popularity, there was plenty of pushback to Valentine's Day has its fans, and they weren't too happy that a day celebrating innocent love was being polluted with overly malicious notes. And there's another twist on all this too that may be part of the outrage against Vinegar Valentine's.

You see, the Victorian era was a time like today when cards could be sent through the mail anonymously. What's different from the present is that these were the days before the English mail use stamps. Letters and cards could just be dropped into the mail without the sender paying up front to get them delivered. The mail still had to be paid for, though, and who ponied up the person who received the mail, which means that people actually

had to pay for the privilege of being insulted. Today, a lot has changed, and even for those of us who don't enjoy all the sugary sweetness of candy hearts, at least we can all be grateful to leave behind their tradition of adding insult to injury. Amelia was used to going anywhere she wanted. That's because she could fly. And yes, I'm talking about that Amelia Amelia Earhart. She

didn't start out as a pilot, of course. During the eighteen flu pandemic, she was one of the most trusted nurses aids in a military hospital, working night shifts in the pneumonia ward. But it was in the winter of that year that she first caught an interest in flying. She remembered that some of the military officers she knew from the hospital were being trained to fly, and in her time off from nursing duty, she would go to

their makeshift airfields and watch them take off. She never got over the sting of the snow on her face as it was blown back from the propellers. Within just a few years, those propellers were hers. She had her first flying lesson from another woman pilot named Netta Snook. By that summer, she had scraped together enough money to

buy a yellow biplane that she called the Canary. The next fall, Amelia broke a world record for female pilots, and she took her little plane up to fourteen thousand feet. She wasn't done, of course. She had always had a reputation for being curious and bold, and the more she flew, the more ambitious she got. In she became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean, but she wasn't the pilot. She became the first woman to travel over the ocean by air, but the fact that she was

only a passenger for the trip didn't sit well with her. Obviously, she knew how to fly. She had already been piloting shorter flights for almost ten years, so it's no wonder she wasn't quite happy sitting there while someone else worked

the controls. After all, she wasn't a woman who was happy with being bred to humility, as she later said, No, Amelia was born for altitude, so it was a triumph of both her talents and her courage when she finally flew herself across the Atlantic two years later in ninety two successes like that opened new doors for her. When she got home from that trip, she had standing invitations to just about anywhere she liked. After all, who wouldn't

want to host such a trailblazing spirit. So the dinner parties where Amelia found herself were more and more lavish, and more and more exciting. But no matter how exciting they got, they still never quite met Amelia's high expectations. Take for example, one particular dinner she attended on April ninety three. It was about a swanky as it gets.

In those days. The newspapers love to report on what Amelia would wear to her high profile gatherings, and that night she went hatless but wore high heels, a long white gown, a short black coat, and white evening gloves, just the sort of thing high society papers would expect from a high society dinner. What no one expected, though, was that halfway through Amelia would turn to her hostess and invite her out into the night sky. On a whim,

she suggested a flight to Baltimore. Perhaps just as surprising, her hostess agreed it wasn't because it was a nice night, though honestly, the clouds were low, and it was spluttering rain. But the whole dinner party jumped up from the table and called ahead to the airport. Amelia Earhart was taking them into the sky. The airport scrambled to get ready. One newspaper said that the airstrip was just one gigantic mud puddle that night, lavishly streaked with water that hadn't

soaked in. But Amelia marched her high heels to the waiting plane and ushered the dinner party inside. Soon enough they were in the air. Some of the passengers remembered that Amelia didn't even take off her heels and gloves to fly. She was instantly at home. Now she was the hostess and the rest of the group were simply along for the ride. Amelia flew them along the Potomac River, buzzed the Capitol Building, and then turned northeast towards Baltimore.

She made an impression that night, but then she always seemed to do that everywhere she flew. This time, though, Amelia's hostess was so inspired that she asked for flying lessons, and Amelia agreed. Those lessons never came about, though that woman's husband felt that flying was just too dangerous, which is understandable. He was accustomed to worrying about danger being

the President of the United States. So while Eleanor Roosevelt never got her chance to learn from Amelia Earhart, it's clear they would have made quite a pair, the First Lady and the First Lady of Flight. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how Stuff Works.

I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious. Yeah,