Two girls fight each other on a Paris street in 1903, with socks filled with sand, to the delectation of the crowd.

Olive Thomas was a rising Hollywood star in silent films. She died in Paris in 1920, age 25, when she accidentally ingested mercury. The story goes that, after a night of drinking and nightclubbing, she went back to her hotel and, looking for something to help her sleep, misread the label on a bottle of mercury (she couldn’t read French). One might ask why there was a bottle of her mercury in her Paris hotel room. Of course, there were conspiracy theories and rumors, but none of them were ever substantiated. Her husband, Jack Pickford (Mary Pickford’s younger brother), was at first suspected but then cleared. Olive Thomas’s bizarre death was one of the first Hollywood scandals. 

Pot smoker from the propagandized 1936 anti-marijuana movie, Reefer Madness. Anybody connected with the making of this silly movie could never show their faces in Hollywood again.

Riding high in 1898.

1907 advertising lithograph for Falstaff Beer, made at the Lemp brewery in St. Louis, Missouri. The Lemp family mansion is now a restaurant. The creepy Lemp brewery still stands in South St. Louis (used as a haunted house attraction around Halloween). The Lemps were a wealthy St. Louis family known for, among other things, being among the first to generate their own electricity in the 1880s.