Given that the United States was born amid an anti-monarchical fervor, it’s fitting that the sole royal palace within its confines is located more than 4,700 miles from the nation’s capital. There, amid the high rises and palm trees of downtown Honolulu, stands Iolani Palace, the home of Hawaii’s 19th-century royal dynasty. 

King Kalākaua wrote Hawaii’s national anthem.

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A patron of the arts, the Merrie Monarch teamed with royal bandmaster Henry Berger in 1876 to compose “Hawai’i Pono’i,” a tribute to the kingdom’s founder, Kamehameha I.

After King David Kalākaua rose to power in 1874, he elected to tear down the deteriorating coral block building that housed his predecessors and erect an ostentatious new home in a style that reflected the grand palaces he had visited while touring Europe some years prior. The “Merrie Monarch” went through three architects to get the residence he craved, winding up with a concrete-facing brick structure marked by six towers and open-air verandas stretching around all sides. The interior featured the lavish Throne Room, State Dining Room, and Blue Room to entertain dignitaries, along with a massive koa wood staircase to the private chambers of the second floor. Additional luxuries like indoor plumbing and a telephone pushed the final bill into the neighborhood of $350,000 before the palace opened in 1879, and that was before electricity was installed in the late 1880s.

Unfortunately, this display of extravagance served Hawaii’s rulers for just over a decade. Kalākaua’s sister and successor, Lili’uokalani, was deposed in an 1893 coup orchestrated by American businessmen, and the palace became the offices of the provisional, territorial, and then state governments until 1969. Reopened to the public as a museum in 1978, Iolani Palace serves as a reminder of Hawaii’s days as a sovereign nation, as well as America’s complicated history with monarchies.

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If you’re one of the 54% of Americans who’d like to stop resetting the clock twice a year, it might be time to move to Arizona or Hawaii. The Grand Canyon and Aloha states don’t observe daylight saving time (except for the Navajo Nation in Arizona), meaning they don’t fall back in November or spring forward in March. Rather, they live in what’s surely a permanent state of bliss, never having to remember whether the latest clock change means they’re getting an hour less sleep the next night or an hour more; nor are they subject to drastic, overnight differences in what time the sun rises and sets.

Daylight saving time was implemented for farmers.

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This common misconception gets it completely wrong, as farmers and agricultural workers have largely been opposed to DST since its conception. The practice was originally implemented during World War I to save energy.

Though polls like the one cited above consistently show that Americans are tired of changing their clocks, making daylight saving time permanent is just as popular as ignoring it altogether — one poll showed 56% of respondents were in favor of the idea. The House passed a bill to do just that in July 2026, though the Sunshine Protection Act of 2025, as it’s called, has yet to move forward in the Senate. Long after Benjamin Franklin half-seriously proposed a form of it in 1784, DST was formally adopted in America as a wartime measure via the Standard Time Act of 1918. It was abolished in 1919, with Congress overriding a veto from Woodrow Wilson, but then became the law of the land on a federal level when Lyndon Johnson signed the Uniform Time Act on April 14, 1966. States retained the option of remaining on standard time — but only two were bold enough to do so.

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Earth is far from the perfect “blue marble” we like to picture. In reality, our planet is filled with deep trenches, towering mountains, and centrifugal bulges that make its mass uneven across the globe — and that unequal distribution can really mess with gravity. One famous example is the Hudson Bay region in northeastern Canada, where gravity reaches some of its weakest levels in the entire world. These levels aren’t extraordinarily low — residents weigh only one-tenth of an ounce less than they would elsewhere — but it’s enough for scientists to take notice and wonder why this particular area experiences gravity differently. 

Hudson Bay is the farthest south penguins live year-round.

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Hudson Bay is a vital habitat for one arctic species — but it’s not penguins. Polar bears live year-round near James Bay, a body of water connected to the southern Hudson Bay. The Hudson Bay’s yearly freeze-up allows polar bears to hunt seals on the bay itself.

The force of gravity is calculated using mass and distance. To put it simply, the mass of the Earth, combined with our proximity to its surface, is why we feel gravity the way we do. This is also why astronauts experience lower gravity as they move farther away from the Earth’s surface. Because we experience the Hudson Bay anomaly while still on Earth, that must mean the area somehow has less mass. It turns out there’s not only one, but two reasons for this. The first is a process in the Earth’s mantle (found 60 to 124 miles beneath the planet’s surface) called convection, in which super-hot magma moves continuously in a circular motion, sinking and rising back up again — and pulling tectonic plates with it. One of these sinking currents occurs in the Hudson Bay region, and could account for an estimated 55% to 75% of its “missing” gravity. 

The second reason takes us back 20,000 years to the last ice age, when much of North America was covered by a nearly 2-mile-thick glacier called the Laurentide Ice Sheet. Its massive bulk, especially around Hudson Bay where the glacier formed huge domes, compressed rock into the Earth’s mantle and created a giant indent with less mass. Scientists have confirmed that gravity is slowly increasing in the area as the Earth rebounds (at about half-an-inch per year) from this glacial trauma, but residents of the Hudson Bay region will still experience some gravity-induced weight loss for the next 5,000 years or so.

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Coincidentally, they both came into existence at roughly the same time, although their reasons for adopting the controversial punctuation differ as dramatically as their settings. The first, a village in southwestern England called Westward Ho!, sought to capitalize on the popularity of the identically named 1855 book by Charles Kingsley, who wrote lovingly of nearby Bideford. Founded as a vacation resort in the 1860s, the hamlet sprung up around the Westward Ho! Hotel, and remains a notable tourist destination thanks to its scenic coastline and famed Pebble Ridge.

German correspondence includes a salutation line that ends with an exclamation mark.

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Although the comma has become more commonplace, an old-fashioned greeting such as “Lieber Friedrich!” (Dear Friedrich!) can still be seen atop the similarly old-fashioned written letter in Germany.

The second place, a town in southern Quebec called Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha!, isn’t exactly a bustling tourist destination, although early explorers may have been happy to refresh themselves at nearby Lake Temiscouata. According to the Commission de Toponymie du Québec, the archaic French term “le haha” indicates an unexpected obstacle or a dead-end, likely referring to the lake’s sharp change of direction. That doesn’t explain the distinct punctuation in the name, though — no one’s quite sure how or why that started. But no matter; this unassuming community, established in 1860 as a Catholic mission, has garnered an extra boost of attention since being honored for its double exclamation marks by Guinness World Records in 2018. 

Honorable mention goes to the southwestern Ohio city of Hamilton, which became known as Hamilton! following a city council vote in May 1986. While the announcement drew plenty of pre-internet buzz, the United States Board on Geographic Names and mapmaker Rand McNally & Company refused to play along. Hamilton! officials nevertheless pressed forward with duly punctuated city seals, letterhead, signs, and the like for some time, although the federally unrecognized notation had disappeared from existence by the time a city clerk undertook a short-lived attempt to revive it in 2020.

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