Ernest wasn’t the only eccentric Hemingway. Leicester, the younger brother of the author of For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Sun Also Rises, was also a writer and used the proceeds from his biography, My Brother, Ernest Hemingway, to establish his own micronation. He did so on July 4, 1964, citing the obscure U.S. Guano Islands Act of 1856 to claim an 8-by-30-foot bamboo raft floating 8 miles off the coast of Jamaica, in international waters, as his own sovereign land. The Guano Islands Act grants U.S. citizens the right to claim, on behalf of the U.S., any unoccupied “island, rock, or key” where valuable guano (read: bird droppings used as fertilizer) can be found. Patriot that he was, Leicester ceded half of his humble territory to the U.S. and declared the other half the Republic of New Atlantis.

Ernest Hemingway had only one sibling.

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Though they were the only boys in the family, Leicester and Ernest Hemingway had four sisters: Mercelline, Ursula, Madelaine, and Carol. Ernest, who was born in 1899, was the second-oldest after Marcelline, while Leicester (born in 1915) was the youngest.

As is often the case with micronations, the founder of New Atlantis took it more seriously than anyone else. He drafted a constitution that was actually just the United States Constitution with “New Atlantis” replacing every instance of “United States,” created stamps, enlisted his wife to design a nice flag, and declared shark teeth and carob beans to be the country’s official currency, called “scruples.” Not long after Leicester Hemingway was voted the first president of New Atlantis in what we can only assume was a landslide, however, the country’s coffers ran empty (perhaps due to a lack of taxpayer revenue).  The country’s primary activity seems to have been issuing stamps — meant to finance marine protections in the area — but the Universal Postal Union never recognized the stamps, or the country. Within a few years of its founding, the raft became untethered during a storm, drifted out to sea, and was destroyed, consigning New Atlantis to the dustbin of history.

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Each June, stores roll out their Father’s Day best — sales on ties, watches, and barbecue grills. But when Father’s Day was first created, a much smaller token was given out to dads: roses. Flowers aren’t as heavily advertised for Father’s Day now as they are for mothers in May, yet the link between dads and the delicate blooms comes from the earliest American celebrations of the holiday.

Roses are the national flower of the U.S.

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Many flowers were in the running, but only one became the official bloom of the United States: the rose. President Ronald Reagan signed a proclamation certifying the rose as the national flower in 1986, over other suggestions such as marigolds, dogwoods, and columbines.

The first known Father’s Day is tied to the West Virginia mining community of Fairmont. On July 5, 1908, the town held a church service honoring the lives of fathers in their community, many of whom had perished the December before in what is widely considered the worst mining disaster in U.S. history. However, the church event was held just one time, and another city propelled the holiday into national view. 

In 1909, Sonora Smart Dodd launched her campaign to honor fathers from her home in Spokane, Washington. As the daughter of a Civil War veteran and widower who had raised six children, Dodd believed fathers deserved recognition for their roles. Within a year, she had drummed up community support, and on June 19, 1910, Washington became the first state to celebrate Father’s Day. Dodd’s first festivities included an exchange of roses; children gave red roses to their fathers and pinned color-coded buds to their shirts — red for living fathers and white roses in honor of the deceased. The activist even rode through the city, handing out flowers and gifts to fathers who couldn’t leave home. Over time, the tradition of giving roses to dads faded away, but the holiday stuck around. After years of rallying, Father’s Day became a federally recognized holiday in 1972. 

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We all remember the Marlboro Man: an able-bodied outdoorsman, usually a cowboy, who enjoyed a hard-earned puff from his cigarette amid a day of honest labor, his steely gaze beckoning us to "come to where the flavor is" in the land of Marlboro Country.

Except the real Marlboro Man never smoked — at least not the "original," an individual by the name of Bob Norris who featured in the brand's early TV commercials. A Colorado rancher who was offered the job after being seen in a photo with his friend John Wayne, Norris reluctantly became the face of an overwhelmingly successful advertising campaign by the Leo Burnett agency that made Marlboro the world’s top-selling cigarette brand by the 1970s. But while Norris epitomized the Marlboro Man’s image of rugged individuality, he ultimately proved too principled to last in the role; when his children asked why he was promoting a product they were forbidden to try, he reportedly hung up his Stetson after 12 years of cigarette pitch work.

Marlboros were once marketed as a women’s cigarette.

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The Philip Morris product was promoted for women beginning in the 1920s through taglines like “mild as May,” until the addition of a filter prompted a macho rebranding and the launch of the Marlboro Man in 1954.

Of course, Norris was an anomaly among his Marlboro brethren. While he lived to the ripe old age of 90, others who followed in his bootsteps learned the hard way what decades of smoking could yield, with several later publicly speaking out against the habit before dying from smoking-related illnesses. With the health risks all but impossible to ignore by the time a civil settlement was reached between the major tobacco companies and most U.S. states in 1998 (in which the companies paid out billions of dollars to compensate for taxpayer money spent on tobacco-related diseases), the Marlboro Man was sent riding into the sunset of Marlboro Country by the close of the 20th century.

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