Newer Than They Think / Settings

• The Irish pub owes its existence to early 19th-century licensing laws. Although inns existed in cities and large towns, most social drinking took place as "hostings" in a person's home, with music, dance, song and storytelling. This is borne out by the fact that the Irish language lacks proper terms for pub beyond teach óil ("house of drink") or teach tábhairne (tavern).
  • English doesn't really have a proper term for a pub, either; "pub" is short for "public house". (And historically, the term was used to mean "inn" or possibly "guesthouse." The term Shakespeare used for "a place where you go and buy drinks" was "tavern," which isn't used nowadays except as a cutesy element in the names of places like "Tavern on the Green.")
  • Taverns/pubs in general are thought not to really exist until the early modern age, when mass industrialisation and urbanisation took place; most places for drinking and/or lodging would in fact be private residences. In a society primarily based around rural subsistence farming, there wouldn't be enough people to justify a separate business.
  • In America, the word "pub" was viewed as an oddball term used by the English, like "lorry" or "lift", up until about 1980 or so, when beer began to break out of its working-class social ghetto, with things like craft beers and home brewing (only re-legalized in 1978, meaning that the lingering effects of Prohibition also lasted a lot longer than most people realize) gaining popularity. To attract a more upscale clientele, the less glamorous terms "bar" and "tavern" were passed over by newer establishments in favor of the more atmospheric and evocative "pub".
• Some TV shows set in the mid-20th century (like Quantum Leap) have had a problem recognizing that the World Trade Center towers were only built in the 1970s.
• Thanks to the Mayincatec trope, the popular notion is that the European discovery of the Americas led to the downfall of the ancient, millenary Aztec and Inca empires. But neither empire had been around very long. They both just happened to be the most recent victors in the long series of power struggles in their regions. The Aztecs arrived in central Mexico and founded Tenochtitlan in 1325. To put that into context, Oxford University was already over three centuries old at that time. The Aztecs only won their independence from Azcapotzalco and joined the Triple Alliance in 1430 — that is, less than a century before Cortés showed up. Around the same time, the relatively obscure Andes city-state of Cusco embarked on a expansionist campaign, and were still conquering territory around the time Columbus was planning his voyages. Meaning that the empire Pizarro encountered in the 1520s was only about 30 years old. In both cases, the empires fell in part because the fighting had been so recent that the groups defeated by the Aztec and Inca armies still wanted revenge and were persuaded to join the Spanish to fight them.
• The entire continent of Antarctica wasn't discovered until 1820. The idea of a vast Southern continent dates back to antiquity, but increasingly extreme expeditions South still turned up nothing but ice floes. James Cook's two 1770s expeditions into the Antarctic Circle seemed to confirm this, as they made it further South than ever, before turning back from the relentless ice a mere 75 miles from the still undiscovered continent, finding nothing. Popular scientific opinion ultimately accepted that it was all a myth for several more decades, and the long-held speculative name Terra Australis ("southern land") was eventually given to Australia in the 1810s, as it was deemed unlikely that we'd find a significant landmass any further South than there.... and then three separate expeditions over the course of 1820 suddenly confirmed the mysterious Europe-sized continent had existed all along. Which just goes to show.
  • Even then, no one actually set foot on Antarctica until the Norwegian expedition of 1895.
• The Campanile in St. Mark's Square in Venice dates from 1912. The city fathers didn't have much choice in the matter — the original, dating from 1514, collapsed in 1902.
  • Older paintings do show the original Campanile to be identical to the present reconstruction, though. So at least fictional depictions of the pre-20th century square are correct about the campanile.
• Las Vegas was founded in 1905. It didn't have legal gambling before 1931, and didn't become a major resort until after World War II. Its themed hotels and attractions weren't built until The '90s, when the city made a concerted (and misguided) effort to entice families to the city.
• Chicago was only incorporated in 1833, by which time places like New York and Philadelphia were already two centuries old.
• How many bridges were there on the Thames tideway when Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723) was alive and busy rebuilding London after the Great Fire of 1666 (and the river was tidal as far inland as Staines)? Just four: London Bridge (originally Roman), Kingston Bridge (originally Saxon, 21 miles upstream), Chertsey Bridge (12 miles further upstream, late medieval), and Staines Bridge (4 miles further upstream, Roman again). Apart from those, the only way across was by boat or by taking one's chances trying to ford at low tide. Then, in 1729, Putney Bridge was opened, followed by Westminster Bridge (1750), Walton Bridge (1750), Hampton Court Bridge (1753), Kew Bridge (1759), Blackfriars Bridge (1769), Battersea Bridge (1771), Richmond Bridge (1777), Vauxhall Bridge (1816), Waterloo Bridge (1817), Southwark Bridge (1819), Hammersmith Bridge (1827), Hungerford (railway) Bridge (1845), Richmond Railway Bridge (1846), Barnes Railway Bridge (1849), Staines Railway Bridge (1856), Chelsea Bridge (1857), Grosvenor (railway) Bridge, Battersea (1858), Lambeth Bridge (1862), Battersea Railway Bridge (1863), Kingston Railway Bridge (1863), Blackfriars Railway Bridge (1864), Cannon Street Railway Bridge (1866), Kew Railway Bridge (1869), Albert Bridge (1873), Wandsworth Bridge (1873), Fulham Railway Bridge (1889), Teddington Lock Footbridge (1889), Tower Bridge (1894), Richmond Lock Footbridge (1894), Chiswick Bridge (1933), Twickenham Bridge (1933), the M3 motorway bridge (1971), Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, Dartford (1991) and the Millennium (foot) Bridge (2002). Note that these are the years when a bridge first came into use on these sites — the current London Bridge dates back to 1973.
  • Neither of the current Hungerford Footbridges are the original, though the remains of the original (alongside the railway bridge, still in use) can be seen from the northernmost one.
  • There were no bridges across the Liffey in Dublin until 1816 even though it was one of the largest cities in Europe at the time (bigger than Lisbon, Berlin and Rome and not far off Vienna).
• Los Angeles was incorporated as a city in 1850, but was little more than a village until a few decades later when the railroads spurred a population boom. The urban area grew steadily after that, particularly after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, but it wasn't until the mid-20th century that it became one of the largest in the United States.
  • Most likely San Diego, which is currently California's #2 and as the oldest European settlement in California (1769) is Older Than They Think.
• Neither Germany nor Italy were unified entities until the 1870s. Before then, they consisted of various smaller states that happened to share closely related languages^note  the idea that all Italians or all Germans speak (or ought to speak) a single language with minor differences in dialect is itself a product of nationalist propaganda but were often different culturally, and would often war against each other. "Germany" and "Italy" were used in the same way as "Arabia" is sometimes used to refer to the Arab region today. You'd say something like "The recent events in Bavaria will have a huge impact on the rest of the Germanies. Prussia and Austria will likely get involved" etc. When the first world war started in 1914, Germany was only 43 years old, having been founded in 1871.
  • This was, however, slightly stronger for Italy (despite the modern united Italy pre-dating the modern united Germany by enough years to make it the 1860s), what with Germany having spent several centuries ostensibly united into a Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, and, even before that, the Kingdom of Germany as one of the constituent kingdoms of the Holy Roman Empire; Italy was another constituent kingdom, but is easier to make a counterpoint to the counterpoint to the two nations being Newer Than They Think, what with only North Italy being, in name, part of said kingdom.
    • Between 1815 and 1866 there was the German Confederation (Deutscher Bund), which had central deliberating bodies (the Bundestag and Bundesrat) and a common military organisation (including some fortresses that were garrisoned and administrated jointly) that would have come into force had it been attacked from the outside.
• Same for Greece. Before 1822, there were either Greek settlements scattered all over modern Greece (and, later, the entire Mediterranean), united by a common language, but never having more than a temporary alliance against common threats, or a single unit designated by foreign conquerors for the sake of more convenient ruling and taxing.
• The construction of Neuschwanstein Castle began in 1869. Although it is fairly well-known that Neuschwanstein Castle was built for (and left unfinished by) King Ludwig II of Bavaria, what is less well-known is that a large number of other castles, e.g. on the Rhine, were heavily reconstructed or even built anew in the 19th century.
• Cologne Cathedral, the biggest Gothic cathedral in Europe, was only finished in 1880. Before that it had been left unfinished for about 300 years until building was restarted in 1842.
  • Many other famous churches were restored in the 19th century, often receiving noticeable alterations. A number of churches had much lower towers until the 19th century, most notably Ulm Minster, which now has the highest church tower. Many of the gargoyles seen most often on postcards of Notre Dame de Paris were made completely new in the 19th century according to designs by Viollet-Le Duc.
  • St Vitus Cathedral in Prague Castle was founded in the 14th century, but it wasn't until the beginning of the 20th century that it was finished in its current form.
    • The ruins of St. Nicolai church in Hamburg look like those of a gothic church made of stone, but that church was actually only after its predecessor — a brick building with a baroque tower — was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1842.
• Both popular culture and Popular History often lead present-day Americans to believe that the idea of families living in the suburbs took off rapidly after World War II, with all white Americans suburbanized by about 1960. In fact, suburbanization proceeded at different speeds depending on the location. Downtown Detroit, for example, remained largely white well into the 1960s. In fact, the majority of whites didn't even make it to the suburbs until the late 1980s.
• People tend to assume that the existence of the Vatican City State as the world's smallest country (with its largest church as guidebooks like to point out) goes back centuries. It makes sense, since Rome's ancient and so is the Vatican. Actually though, the Lateran Treaty establishing the Vatican's present borders was signed by Mussolini in 1929; the name "Vatican City" was coined for the same treaty. The Pope was the temporal ruler of a (much larger) territory from the 8th century to its annexation by the Kingdom of Italy in 1870, generally referred to in historiography as the "Papal State", or on contemporary maps as the "States of the Church"; the core territory stretched across the middle of Italy, covering roughly the regions of Lazio, Umbria and Marche.^note The Italian annexation of the Papal State was a two-step process; during the unification in the early 1860s the nascent Italian state annexed Umbria and Marche, leaving a rump Papal State coterminous with the modern-day Lazio region and protected by Napoleon III. When he recalled his troops protecting the Papal State to fight the Prussians in 1870, the Italians seized the opportunity and marched on Rome. During the 59-year interim, five successive Popes holed themselves up in the Vatican and refused to recognize the Kingdom of Italy. Mussolini came to a deal with Pope Pius XI in hopes of securing support for his fascist regime by the still-powerful and influential Catholic Church, a legacy which remains controversial.^note In 1870, the Italian conquerors had offered to allow then-Pope Pius IX to remain sovereign over the Leonine City - a territory roughly double the size of the modern-day Vatican - but he refused.
  • The Pope has resided in the Vatican only since 1870, before which he lived on the Quirinal Hill, which is now home to the President of Italy.
• The idea of the dungeon as a prison was actually developed in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. Before, the dungeon was a cellar, or, even earlier, the lord's tower (Latin, dominium).
• Although the Ur-Example of the shopping mall is widely disputed, it is generally agreed upon that its current form began in the 1950s and 1960s. However, food courts didn't exist until 1974, and they were still sporadic until The '90s. Those that did exist largely consisted of a series of small local vendors. Prior to that, food vendors would usually be scattered throughout the mall, often with their own seating inside the storefront (so a McDonald's inside of a shopping mall would have been little different from a normal one, other than lacking a drive-through).
• The entire concept of going out to dinner is a 19th century invention (sometimes attributed to Del Monico's, New York, though this may only apply in the US). Before this period (by which time urban living was taking off and most people had disposable income they could never have dreamed of a century earlier), there were obviously places that sold food to be eaten outside of the home, but such places were regarded more as a necessity (for people in transit, or single people with no facility to cook) than a luxury (you certainly wouldn't be taking a date to one, not that dates were something the well-off did in this period anyway: going out alone with a man would be unthinkable for a respectable girl!). Any really good cooking was done by cooks employed in private homes. Social spaces like the tavern would be centered around booze (or, in some finer establishments, coffee). Some people attribute the idea to the results of The French Revolution, which left a lot of cooks without employers, and an urban population that provided a big market.
• If you think two centuries of US presidents have sat in the Oval Office, think again. The Oval Office is part of the West Wing, which was built in a 1902 renovation. Prior to that, the President's office was usually located in either the Yellow Oval Room or the Lincoln Bedroom (in fact, the Lincoln Bedroom gets its name from having been Abraham Lincoln's office). Furthermore, the Oval Office was first built in 1909, but destroyed in a fire a couple decades later. The current Oval Office was built in the 1930s, with a different design and location than the 1909 version.
  • Although the Resolute Desk was given to President Rutherford B. Hayes by Queen Victoria in 1880, it wasn't used by a president in the Oval Office until John F. Kennedy in 1961. It has only regularly been used as the presidential desk since Bill Clinton, as Presidents Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Bush (41) opted to use other desks.
• Among government agencies, the CIA only goes back as far as the late 1940s (the OSS only started up in 1942). The Pentagon opened in 1942, and was originally intended as a temporary structure. However, since the Potomac River is navigable, they decided to fortify it against naval artillery. This decision almost certainly saved some lives 59 years later.
• The current home of the US Supreme Court was also built in the 1930s, and in a Retraux style so that it would fit with government buildings built in the 1790s.
• While India is seen as an ancient civilization, a great part of its landscape, country and history is more recent than you would believe:
  • Despite being widely seen as one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the Taj Mahal actually wasn't completed until 1653. For perspective, the Jamestown Colony had already been standing for over 20 years when construction on the Taj Mahal started, and the palace was barely 200 years old when India became a British colony. That makes it a contemporary of the Palais de Versailles of Louis XIV.
  • Buddhism and Jainism are products of the Axial Age and as Gore Vidal noted in his novel Creation (1981) were rough contemporaries of Confucius and Socrates. The first major Indian Empire, the Mauryas, followed the invasion of Alexander. Delhi, India's oldest active city, is a "mere" thousand years old (far younger than Rome, Istanbul, Damascus, Alexandria, Athens, London and Paris). The three other major cities (Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai) are colonial settlements raised to cities, and are essentially the same age as New World cities.
  • For most of its history, Hinduism was not called that by its theologians and adherents. They would simply call it dharma (i.e. beliefs or religious duty). Indeed the conception of Hinduism as a separate religion only emerged upon contact with Muslim and British conquerors. The word Hinduism in its contemporary usage comes from circa 1800. Similarly a major number of Indian festivals practised across India come from the 19th Century as part of nationalism, derived in part from previous such events but now dated on the Gregorian Calendar and more specifically organized to unite a broad part of the community.
  • India's two oldest epics, The Mahabharata and The Ramayana, were first written down in the 4th Century CE during the Gupta Empire. The oral tradition and its influence on sculpture and temples dates it even further back in time, but its shelf-life as a written epic is far younger than that of Homer's epics (which existed in written form in the 5th and 4th Century BCE).
• Russia is the largest and most populous of all European nations but it is also the youngest.
  • Unlike other nations in West, South, Central and even Eastern Europe, Russia had little contact with Graeco-Roman civilization and its entrance to European history came from Vikings from the West, who as mercenaries/vassals for the Byzantine Empire and its vassal states like Bulgaria made Russia part of the Eastern Roman Empire's sphere of influence (and led to Russia's belated conversion to Christianity, specifically the Greek Orthodox faith).
  • The Cyrillic Alphabet used for the Russian language was invented by the Orthodox Bishop Saint Cyril of the Bulgarian Empire, making the Russian alphabet younger than the Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Old English, Norse leave alone the Chinese, Sanskrit, Persian and Mayan scripts and the Greek and Latin Alphabet from which the Romance languages derived.
    • As a minor example, what we call the Cyrillic script wasn't invented by Cyril but by a student of his at the earliest. What Cyril invented was the script currently known as Glagolitic - at least, that seems to be the general consensus since the 1850s.
  • Russian Literature is a good deal younger than other literary traditions of European nations. Indeed, modern Russian letters (its great poets, novelists, dramatists, short-story writers) are in fact contemporaries of American literature (who often feel that they are too young to have a literary tradition as great as Europe's. Aleksandr Pushkin who is considered the founder of Russian literature was a contemporary of Jane Austen, Lord Byron (a Pushkin favorite and influence), and James Fenimore Cooper:
    "The unusual thing about Russia is that it reached cultural maturity in the nineteenth century. Russia didn’t have the Middle Ages of Dante and Chaucer, the Renaissance of the Italians, or the Elizabethan age of the British. They weren’t even sure what language to write in. Pushkin more or less created the Russian literary language, and Pushkin was born in 1799. They were doing for the first time what other cultures had been doing for hundreds of years."
    — Richard Pevear
  • Russian nationalists may like to claim Novgorod, Vladimir and Kiev as predecessors (to the horror of Ukrainian nationalists, in the latter case), but the modern Russian state is really an evolution of the Grand Duchy of Muscovy which became independent of Vladimir-Suzdal in the 13th century. Russia's expansion and the start of its influence on European affairs are largely the child of Ivan IV, who reigned between 1530 and 1584. Even then, Russia would not extend to the Pacific Ocean until 1639, would not displace Poland as the most powerful state in eastern Europe until the 18th century, and would not control some parts of Siberia until the 19th.
  • Kaliningrad, a little Russian exclave located between Lithuania and Poland, only became a part of Russia after World War II. Before then, it was ruled by neither Russia, Lithuania, nor Poland, but by Germany. In fact, it had been a mostly German-speaking region since The High Middle Ages. If you look at a map of pre-WWII Germany, you will see it had this peculiar exclave adjoining the Baltic Sea and barely cut off from the rest of the country by Poland. That exclave is Kaliningrad (or rather, East Prussia). Before World War I, it was not an exclave and was connected to the rest of Imperial Germany, since Poland did not exist at the time. After WWII, the Soviets plucked the territory from the Nazis and expelled all ethnic Germans from the area, repopulating them mainly with Russians but also Ukrainians and Belarusians.
• Egypt is one of humanity's oldest civilizations, so old that it was ancient to the ancients. However, the modern capital of Egypt, the city of Cairo, was only established as such in 970 CE. It included a number of other settlements directly adjoining each other (including the cities/royal compounds of al-Fustat and al-Askar, which date from 641 and 750 CE, respectively), but the oldest of them, the former Roman fortress/village of Babylon, only dated from the 1st century BCE at the earliest. It's true that a number of Ancient Egyptian cities were built around what is now Cairo (most famously Memphis, the first capital of a united Egypt, dating from the 31st or 32nd century BCE), but all the pre-Roman settlements were long abandoned by the time that Babylon was built — let alone Cairo proper.
• The Frankenstein movie with Boris Karloff (and other movies made in 1931 with and without Karloff) is older than the country of Saudi Arabia.
• Although Walmart was founded in 1962, it was not truly a national chain until 1995, when they opened their first location in Vermont. Even as late as 1990, they barely covered half the country and were still predominantly a Southern chain. Likewise, they didn't start building "supercenters" (i.e., larger stores with complete grocery sections) until 1988, and did not really push to make all their stores supercenters until the Turn of the Millennium. Before then, most of their stores were only half to one-quarter the size they are now (although in some rural parts of the South, this is still the case due to Grandfather Clause) due to the lack of groceries, pharmacies, automotive, and other departments codified by the "supercenter" format. Also, any stores that had a restaurant in them likely had a cafeteria called Radio Grill or a scaled down McDonald's that only sold a handful of lunch items, not the Subway franchises with full menus that are nearly omnipresent in Walmarts today (the affiliation started in 2004). While the "supercenter" concept is now so commonplace with Walmart that the name is no longer used by the chain, the overall concept of a "supercenter" is Older Than They Think, having been started back in 1931 by Portland grocer Fred Meyer (which later expanded throughout the Western U.S. and is now a division of Kroger). Another company, Michigan chain Meijer, added general merchandise to its original grocery business in 1962 (the same year that both Walmart and Kmart were founded); Meijer locations still outnumber Walmarts by a fair margin in that state. Also, Walmart didn't expand outside the United States until 1995, when the first Canadian stores opened^note the first few Canadian stores were taken over from Woolco, a division of also now defunct five-and-dime chain F. W. Woolworth; the U.S. Woolco stores closed in 1983, but the name was still used in Canada until 1995. Coincidentally, Walmart took over a few Woolco stores in the South and Lower Midwest as well.
• Speaking of Walmart, sister chain Sam's Club and its main rival, Costco, were not founded until 1983. They were both playing Follow the Leader with Price Club, which itself was only founded in 1975 (it merged with Costco in 1993).
• Considering how long some hotel brands such as Holiday Inn, Hilton, Marriott, Howard Johnson's, etc. have been around, one would think that most other hotel chains are of similar vintage, but this is not the case. For instance: Baymont Inn (1973 as Budgetel; renamed in 1999), Drury Inn (1973), Super 8 (1974, but still largely limited to the Upper Midwest until The '90s), Hampton Inn (1984), AmericInn (1984), and Microtel (1989). Newer still are America's Best Value (1999) and Magnuson (2003), both of which grew almost entirely by rebranding other properties.
  • Also, Holiday Inn did not introduce Holiday Inn Express until 1991 (although they previously tried the same concept in the early 70s as "Holiday Inn Jr."). Quality Inn similarly did not introduce its more upscale brands Comfort Inn and Clarion^note originally Comfort Royale until 1982, nor its lower-end Sleep Inn^note had the Working Title of McSleep, but McDonald's threatened litigation brand until 1989. Finally, Marriott didn't introduce Fairfield Inn until 1987.
• Shops as we think of them, where you walk around and look at goods displayed on various shelves, are a very recent innovation. Before the 20th century, virtually all goods were kept behind the shop counter and the customer had to request them from the shopkeeper. In 1916, Memphis store owner Clarence Saunders, convinced that letting customers fetch their own groceries would be more efficient than having the clerks do it for them one at a time, came up with the radical idea of displaying all the goods in a large shop area, through which customers could browse freely.
• A building didn't exist on the present site of Buckingham Palace until 1703 and then it was, appropriately enough, the home of the Duke of Buckingham. In 1761, George III purchased it as a private residence for his wife, Queen Charlotte. Under George IV, the building was converted into a palace. It wasn't until the ascension of Queen Victoria in 1837 that Buckingham Palace became the official London residence of the British monarch — that's thirty-seven years after the White House became the official residence of the U.S. president. (Until then, the principal London residence of the British monarch was nearby St. James's Palace, which today is primarily used for ceremonial and diplomatic functions.) The façade of Buckingham Palace, including the famous balcony from which the royals wave at crowds, was first built in the 1840s and remodeled in 1913.
• Although Poland has existed as an independent country at various times throughout European history, the Poland of 1939 had only enjoyed about twenty years of independence before it was invaded by the Nazis.
  • When Hitler and Stalin divided up Poland, they were restoring a pre-World War I status quo which had stood for over a century. Furthermore, the Finland invaded by Stalin in 1939 had never been an independent state prior to 1917, barely a generation earlier.^note It had been part of Sweden until it was conquered by Russia in 1809. Incidentally, this helps to explain why Hitler and Stalin felt that they were entitled to territories from these nations — they saw them as illegitimate boundaries.
  • Polish territory itself greatly evolved throughout the centuries and the territories comprising the Kresy (the area of land the Soviets took over, and today comprising modern day Belarus and Ukraine) was historically land that had been ruled by a minority of Polish nobility (under the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth where only nobles comprised a nation). The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is confusing for which parts of its makeup includes Poland, and which includes Lithuania, Ukraine, Latvia, and other neighbouring lands.
  • Modern-day Poland's borders were drawn by the Soviet Union: its eastern territories were annexed away but, "to compensate" Poland and also to neuter Germany from another invasion of the East, the Soviets bestowed to the new nation territory from Germany's Eastern Provinces of Silesia and Pomerania. The native German population was expelled (as well as from Czechoslovakia and other nations which were given parts of Old German territory).
• While many retail chains have been around for a very long time and evolved with the times, a few more are newer than one would expect:
  • Macy's was largely exclusive to the East Coast for most of its history (barring a few scattered stores in the South and California, plus failed entries into Toledo and Kansas City) until The '90s, when it began acquiring a myriad of other department store chains in its merger with Federated Department Stores. It didn't become truly national until 2006, when it acquired the entire line of department stores from the May Company.
  • Old Navy was founded by parent company Gap in 1995. (It was known as "Gap Warehouse" early on.)
  • H&M was founded in Sweden in 1947, but did not enter the United States until 2000.
    • The H&M Group's other brands are younger still - COS was established in 2007, H&M Home began in 2009, & Other Stories, Arket and Afound were established in 2013, 2017 and 2018 respectively. Also, Weekday (established 2002), Cheap Monday (2004-2019) and Monki (established 2006) were all only acquired by H&M in 2008.
  • Forever 21 was founded in 1984, which already makes it young for a clothing chain, but it did not open stores outside California until the end of The '90s.
  • White House Black Market was founded in 1985.
  • Torrid, a plus-size clothing chain owned by Hot Topic, was founded in 2001.
  • Victoria's Secret was founded in 1977, but did not really become a shopping mall staple until The Limited bought them in the 1980s.
  • Bath & Body Works, also formerly a division of Limited, was founded in 1990.
  • FYE was founded in 1993, and was largely a specialty store with only a handful of locations until the parent company bought out a myriad of music stores in 2001 and merged all of them (Disc Jockey, Camelot Music, Record Town, The Wall, Peaches Records & Tapes, Wherehouse, etc.) under the FYE name.
• The Crimean Khanate, the last monarchy whose reigning dynasty claimed direct descent from Genghis Khan, was not dissolved until 1783, the same year Britain recognized the independence of the United States. Crimea also hosted the last known speakers of Gothic, an East Germanic language, which went extinct around the same time as the Russian conquest of Crimea, but had been extinct in the rest of Europe since the 10th century. (Fun fact: during WWII, Nazi Germany designated the peninsula to become Gau Gotenland ("Gothland Area"), justifying their expansion by claiming that the ethnic Germans who lived there were descended from the Goths. In reality, Germans began to settle Crimea after the Russian conquest, while the Goths probably converted to Islam and integrated with the local Tatars.)
• Churches didn't have seats until the 16th century; pews were introduced during the Protestant Reformation as a way to easily see who was present or absent, and to increase social pressure on churchgoers to not leave in the middle of sermons. The iconic Catholic confession booth was introduced during the following Counter-Reformation.
• Angel Falls, the tallest waterfall in the world, was completely unknown to all but the local natives in the Venezuelan jungle until US pilot Jimmie Angel flew over it in 1933.
• Despite being named after the ancient Belgae people, the word Belgium wasn't used before the French-inspired Brabant Revolution in 1789, and the modern kingdom was established in 1831. Prior to that, the area was known as the Southern, Austrian, or Spanish Netherlands.
• The resort city of Cancún, Mexico was established in 1974, at which time it had a population of 3 (as of 2019, it's now over 700,000).
• Not all major cities east of the Mississippi River were founded before The American Civil War. Birmingham, Alabama wasn't established until 1871, and Miami, Florida didn't exist before the 1890s, with incorporation taking place in 1896. To put it another way, the medium of Film is older than Miami!
• The blackhouses of Ireland, Scotland, and the Hebrides are often assumed to be of the remotest antiquity, but in reality, all of the surviving examples still recognizable as houses were built no earlier than the 19th century, and many of them were still roofed as late as the 1970s.
• ACDC Lane in Melbourne, Australia feels like it's been around since at least the late '80s, but it actually has only existed since 2004, when city officials chose to re-name the formerly-named Corporation Lane after the famous band.
• The Peruvian mountain city of Machu Picchu was founded c. 1450 and abandoned in 1572. It was almost completely unknown to the outside world, even in Peru, until American historian Hiram Bingham brought it to international attention in 1911.
• Similarly, the CIudad Perdida (Lost City) in Colombia was founded c. AD 800, but was abandoned in the 16th century, and forgotten until a group of treasure looters rediscovered it in 1972.
• Mt. Everest was formed 50 to 60 million years ago, meaning it didn't exist until after the dinosaurs went extinct.
  • Mt. Everest's Nepali name, Sagarmatha, was invented in the 1960s by the Nepalese government, and means "goddess of the sky". Before then, it had no local name apart from borrowing the English name, which the British Royal Geographical Survey introduced in 1857 in honor of surveyor George Everest.
• Sri Lanka has been an island only since 1480, when a storm broke Adam's Bridge, an isthmus connecting it to India.
• Considering their relative proximity, you would think that the Pyramids of Nubia are as old as those found in its northern neighbor, Egypt. They were actually built no earlier than the 8th century BCE, probably as a cultural import from Egypt, which Nubia ruled during the 8th and 7th centuries BCE. By this time, the Ancient Egyptian civilization had long left the golden age of the New Kingdom period and entered a decline, with occasional native rule being sandwiched between long periods of foreign subjugation. This, in turn, made the Nubian pyramids very far removed from the Egyptian pyramids, whose construction was ended with the Middle Kingdom. When the first Nubian pyramids were built, the Giza pyramids were already over 1700 years old, having been completed circa 2560BC.
• Amusement parks have several examples - The first boardwalks came in the late 1890s, the traditional ticket amusement park came in the early 20th century (although based on the already-existing Tivoli Gardens, which dates back around a century), the theme park was invented in 1955 by Walt Disney (also based on Tivoli Gardens), one-price-has-all boardwalks date to a California pier in 1959, one-price-has-all land parks date to Six Flags Over Texas in 1961, season passes date to 1979, when Kings Island introduced them, and single rider lines and virtual queues didn't exist until 1999, when Disney needed solutions to lower line traffic for their maintenance-filled Rocket Rods ride.
  • The Splash Mountain log flume ride, one of Disneyland's most famous attractions, first opened in 1989.
• Despite being viewed as classic autumn staple, corn mazes didn't exist until the 1980s and didn't become popular until the 1990s.
• The Great Wall of China was small and discontinuous, and had long fallen into ruin until the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), when it was greatly expanded and fortified. At the time of Marco Polo's travels (late 13th century) it had become so irrelevant that he does not even mention it. The section that tourists usually visit, just north of Beijing, was built during the 1560s.
  • The iconic status of the Wall is almost entirely the invention of Westerners. The very name "Great Wall of China" is not translated from Chinese, but was rather invented by British diplomat George Macartney, who passed by it north of Beijing in 1793. He assumed the wall was ancient and continuous (in reality, it has always been a patchwork, and it was only about 200 years old at the time, younger than Macartney's house in Britain), and other Western writers propagated the myth.
• Liberty Island, the location of the Statue of Liberty, has only been known by that name since 1956, when an Act of Congress changed its name from Bedloe's Island.
• Cardiff has been the capital of Wales only since 1955; historically, Wales had no capital.
• The Silent Night Chapel in Oberndorf, Austria looks like a restored 18th Century octagonal church, but construction began in 1924 and ended in 1937, essentially as a tourist attraction commemorating Oberndorf being the birthplace of the beloved Christmas carol in 1818, replacing the St. Nicholas Church where the song debuted, which had been demolished in 1913 due to flood damage. But, the chapel is not a replica of the original church, nor of any specific church. It's just a quaint monument that looks like a church that could've existed in 1818.
• Many names of specific regions in American states were cooked up in the last century or so for commercial purposes, especially attracting tourism. The area around Springfield, Massachusetts was only first dubbed the Pioneer Valley in the 1920s. Per Wikipedia, the area around Boise, Idaho adopted the Treasure Valley as a name in 1959 "to reflect the treasure chest of resources and opportunities that the region offered." The Emerald Coast in the Florida Panhandle has a name that emerged from a 1983 contest, with the winning entry coined by a teen who won $50 for it.
• Heathrow Airport was called London Airport until 1966, when it was renamed to avoid confusion with other airports in the London area.
• It's well-known that the Hollywood Sign originally said HOLLYWOODLAND, but the "LAND" was part of the sign during practically all of The Golden Age of Hollywood, not getting removed until 1949.
• There are no known outhouses, nor depictions of outhouses predating 1960 that feature a crescent moon symbol on the door.