48 Rare Photos That Show How Strange And Different The Past Really Was

So, what happened to Sami the chimpanzee? During his first escape, Mr. Bojovic took Sami by the hand, put him in his car, and drove him back to the zoo. The chimp had made it to Students' Square. His second attempt at an escape didn't end that peacefully – the zookeepers had to use tranquilizer darts.

Sadly, Sami passed away in 1992, and he lived in Belgrade Zoo for a total of four years from 1988. In 1996, the Zoo erected a sculpture in honor of Sami, which still stands there to this day. Newspapers referred to Sami as a "dissident," as many Yugoslavians found his captures and detention at the Zoo poetically similar to their own lives under communism.

The 1948 photo of a man begging his wife not to divorce him is a real piece of history. It started making the rounds on Reddit in 2024, but the historian who uncovered this photo, Jeff Nichols, talked to Business Insider about it. The couple in the photograph is Steve and Anna Strack. Anna was the one who filed for divorce, citing "habitual drunkenness" as the reason.

In those times, spouses had to give the court a considerable reason for going through with the divorce. Yet, in Chicago, divorces were pretty common. According to Nichols's research, the apparently lax divorce laws were a regional joke, prompting people to make jokes such as: "Oh, people in Chicago just get divorced as a problem to have."

Anna Strack also talked with the Chicago Tribune about her divorce at the time, since the photo was printed in the publication. She told them that she would think over her decision. However, the 1950 census showed them as a divorced couple, and Anna lived with her parents and their 4-year-old son and worked as a packer at a gum factory.

Some say that the photograph of Frederick Douglass with his wife, Helen Pitts, at Niagara Falls was taken during their honeymoon. We can't tell exactly, but we know that their marriage was quite controversial back in the day. Helen was the second wife of Frederick Douglass, the first one being Anna Murray Douglass for 40 years.

After her passing, Douglass fell into a deep depression. Helen is said to have helped him regain his good spirits. However, Douglass's kids opposed the marriage, and Helen's family didn't like her marrying a Black man. The public didn't react favorably, either: some accused Douglass of "forgetting his cause" by marrying a white woman; others denounced the 21-year age gap between the spouses.

A piece of history that people deserve to know is about the Black women who served in the U.S. military during WWII. We might think that most of them were nurses, but there was an all-Black female unit stationed overseas. The 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion was created to deal with the postal worker shortage. They sorted millions of letters and packages that families sent to their loved ones on the war front. In 2022, the former members of the battalion received Congressional Gold Medals.

We all should be so lucky to live until 100 years old. Jeanne Calment was even luckier: she lived until 122. She was born in 1875 in France and passed away in 1997. A Russian mathematician, Nikolay Zak, suggested that Calment actually met her maker earlier and that her age record is actually fake.

According to Zak, Calment passed away in 1934, and the woman everyone thought was Jeanne was actually her daughter, Yvonne. That's why he posited that her grandson called her "maman" and lived with her supposed son-in-law. Zak argued that Yvonne chose to pretend to be her mother to avoid paying inheritance taxes and to have a roof over her head permanently.

However, many experts shut down ideas about Calment's falsified age. Although they admit that a person living until 122 is extremely unlikely from a biological standpoint, they note that perhaps too much had to be faked in Jeanne's case. "Any deception on Madame Calment's part would have required extraordinary prescience and the connivance of surviving relatives and we should banish such thoughts from our minds," gerontologist Tom Kirkwood wrote in his 1991 book, "Could she be a fraud?"

Have you learned anything new about history today, Pandas? Let us know which stories and photographs captured your attention and interest the most. And if you're in the mood for more photos from r/Historycord, check out our previous listicle right here or see these captivating photographs from "Undiscovered History"!