While various wrestling promotions were enjoying a moderate degree of success in the early 1980s, the territory system of the NWA would soon be disrupted by the national expansion of WWF. Vincent K. McMahon (better known as Vince McMahon), son of Vincent J. McMahon, bought WWF from his father in 1982. He immediately withdrew the…
Author: Stefano Cammisa
The real history of the founding of Rome
Centuries before ruling over the entire Mediterranean region, Rome was just a small village located on a group of hills along the Tiber river in Lazio, Central Italy. The Romans had a series of myths surrounding the founding of the city, and traditionally dated the event on April 21, 753 BCE, although different dates were…
History of professional wrestling – Chapter 2: the territory era
In the 1930s and 1940s, there were several small wrestling (henceforth “wrestling” will always refer to professional wrestling) promotions all over the United States, competing with each other to get the best talent and win over the fans in different cities. Several promoters came together in 1948 to form a loose confederation called National Wrestling…
History of professional wrestling – Chapter 1: the origins
Wrestling as a competitive sport has ancient origins, with evidence of mock combat between men dating back to prehistory. The modern sport of wrestling developed during the 19th century in two forms, freestyle and Greco-Roman wrestling, now collectively known as amateur wrestling. Meanwhile, during the 1830s, showmen in France started to present wrestlers as superhuman…
History of professional wrestling, from carnivals to WrestleMania XL
Professional wrestling is a unique blend of sports and theater, athleticism and entertainment, in which larger than life characters face each other in staged and dramatized matches, under the pretense of actual competition, creating a form of suspension of disbelief similar to that employed with works of fiction. While now professional wrestling is a global…
The history of April Fools’ Day
All over the world, April 1 is a day in which pranks and hoaxes are common, a custom known as April Fools’ Day. While this celebration only originated in modern times in the Western world, similar customs can be found since ancient times, mostly in Europe. Maybe the oldest instance of a similar tradition is…
The Cistercian numerals: a peculiar numeral system from medieval Europe
Today the Arabic numerals (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) are the most widely used symbols for writing numbers, adopted by most countries around the world. These numbers derive from a system originally developed in India, and later introduced to Europe by Arabs starting in the 10th century. The Arabic numerals…
How to visit the extremely remote Pitcairn Islands
Deep in the southern Pacific Ocean, hundreds of kilometers from the nearest inhabited land, are the tiny Pitcairn Islands. This is a group of four volcanic islands called Pitcairn, Henderson, Ducie, and Oeno, which form a British Overseas Territory and have a total area of just 47 km2. Pitcairn Island is the only one that…
The tremendous scale of the 2011 Japan earthquake
On March 11, 2011, at 3:46 p.m. local time, a magnitude 9.1 earthquake occured off the northeastern coast of Honshu, the largest island of Japan. This was the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan, and one of the strongest ones in the world in the past few centuries. The shock and the tsunami…
The real history of Tortuga, the pirate island
The island of Tortuga appears in several books, movies, and other pieces of modern media in which pirates are featured, often depicted as a safe place for bandits and outlaws. This island really exists, it is located off the northwestern coast of Hispaniola in the Caribbean, and forms part of the country of Haiti. But…