It’s always interesting to see how American states led the way in various categories. Michigan can lay claim to being the first in automobile development and the car culture that is everywhere today. In that same vein, give California credit for being the first state to really go all-in on the freeway system that dominates American transportation nowadays. Colorado can lay claim to its pioneering marijuana legislation—and Washington, too. And, of course, no state can beat Delaware for being the first state to, well, become a state when it was first to ratify the Constitution!

But while there are plenty of notable and well-known state “firsts,” there are also a million strange ones. Recently, we looked over a series of strange and unexpected “firsts” on this very website, and that seemed to be a big hit with many of you. So, why not do it again? Below, you can read all about ten MORE strange, random, and even funny state “firsts” from American history.

Related: Ten Intriguing Facts about America’s First Murder Trial

10 California: Good Fortune!

There is one thing we know for sure: California can lay undoubted claim to the proud title of being the first state to invent and produce the fortune cookie. The question gets a bit thicker than that, though, when it comes to figuring out exactly where it happened within the Golden State.

Many historians believe that a man named Makoto Hagiwara created the very first modern fortune cookie when he was at the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park as early as 1914. After he came up with the idea and sketched out the plan, the cookies themselves were reportedly made by a local San Francisco bakery called Benkyodo.

But there’s drama! Down in Los Angeles, a man named David Jung claimed that he actually invented the fortune cookie in 1918 when he was the owner and operator of LA’s Hong Kong Noodle Company. He said that he was the one who came up with the concept and popularized it and that his San Francisco fortune foes simply took the cookie idea and then tried to retroactively claim they’d come up with it first.

For decades after that, it looked like there would be two competing fortune cookie origin myths. If you were from NorCal, you sided with Hagiwara, and if you were from SoCal, you sided with Jung. Perhaps that was the first great NorCal-SoCal debate that now gets carried out in sports rivalries and the like!

Fortune cookies are evidently some serious business, though. In 1983, the San Francisco Court of Historical Review took up the case to investigate. Their judgment came back in favor of Hagiwara, pointing to evidence that he was indeed first to market with the cookie. The city of Los Angeles cried foul, but it all sort of fizzled out from there.

Regardless, for the purposes of this list, California can undoubtedly lay claim to being the first state that made and dished out fortune cookies, even if the city of origin has been up for debate.^[1]

9 Washington, D.C.: TV Time

The oldest regularly broadcasting television station in American history belongs not to a state but to Washington, D.C.! Back on July 2, 1928, a television station known as W3XK began broadcasting from a studio in the nation’s capital. Its broadcast didn’t carry very far—the signal could barely get into the outskirts of Maryland’s then-small-town suburbs just outside of northern D.C.—but it didn’t matter. It was a history-making affair all the same!

While earlier radio broadcasting companies had fiddled around with television a bit, including the network we now know as NBC, W3XK was the very first television station to broadcast a regular schedule. And so its inventor and owner Charles Jenkins and his hometown of Washington, D.C., get the “first” nod on this one!

If you’re looking for an actual state, though, we might be able to give this one to Maryland, too. After a couple years of broadcasting within Washington, Jenkins eventually moved the W3XK television studios to a small town in Maryland called Wheaton. The station pioneered the broadcast of a 48-line picture there, and then in 1930, it also pioneered the move to a 60-line picture.

The Great Depression hit Jenkins and his Charles Jenkins Laboratories company hard, though, and by March 1932, his television firm was liquidated. A radio broadcasting company acquired all the assets and then went bankrupt a few months later. RCA eventually bought out everything from W3XK in the ensuing mad rush, but they turned full-time to radio, and television moved fully to the backburner for another couple of decades.^[2]

8 Hawaii: Bye Bye, Bags!

In May 2012, Hawaii became the first state in the U.S. to ban the use of plastic bags at grocery stores. The ban was taken on by leaders in various city councils around Hawaii for a few years before that. Maui officials, Kauai leaders, and others opted independently to ban the use and spread of single-use plastic grocery bags in establishments on their islands leading up to 2012.

Then, in late April 2012, the city council of Honolulu voted to put forth a ban on single-use plastic grocery bags all across Oahu. That motion carried through with ease at the council’s meeting that month, and on May 11, 2012, the plastic grocery bag ban was signed into law. All four of Hawaii’s County Councils fully followed suit, and the state thus underwent a complete plastic bag ban.

Now, it took a while for the ban to go into effect. In Honolulu’s case, the ban wasn’t officially enforced until 2015. In those three years, they intended to allow time for stores to get rid of their supply of plastic bags and major corporate grocery chains to redirect their plastic bag supply chains to other places. Plus, they wanted Hawaiians to get acclimated to shopping with reusable bags and give them time to adjust to the new normal with the ban on plastic single-use bags.

In turn, the anti-plastic pollution push quickly spread out from Hawaii to the rest of the country. Cities, municipalities, and states all over the nation ban plastic bags now. As of early 2024, eight states had plastic bag bans of various levels, along with many cities nationwide. But the Hawaiians did it first!^[3]

7 North Carolina: Airplane Passengers!

North Carolina can lay claim to being the “First in Flight” thanks to the Wright Brothers’ successful attempts at flying out on Kitty Hawk in the state’s Outer Banks region in December 1903. But did you know that North Carolina is also the first state to ever record a flight with an airplane passenger? And it didn’t happen in 1903 when the Wright Brothers first got out to Kitty Hawk! It actually happened a full five years later when they returned with the express purpose of figuring out if they could fly a plane with a full-weight adult human passenger going along for the ride!

At the time, the U.S. government (and specifically the Army) was very interested in the flight technology that the Wright brothers were developing. However, they were decidedly less interested in it unless the planes they were making could carry a passenger to go along with the pilot.

So, the Wright brothers became consumed with trying to figure out how to add weight to their machines while still allowing the airplanes to take off. After all, they’d been trying to make the planes as light as possible to fly in those early days. So having to add a lot of poundage in short order wasn’t the easiest thing in the world! For a while, they experimented with sandbags, but before too long, they needed the real thing.

That’s where a man named Charley Furnas comes into play. In the spring of 1908, he was a 28-year-old mechanic living and working in Dayton, Ohio. His job was as a machinist, and his working floor was only a couple blocks away from the Wright Cycle Company in Dayton. He had previously done odd jobs for the brothers as a younger man, too. And through the previous five years, he’d been pestering them to teach him how to fly.

Well, in early April 1908, he got his chance. Furnas turned up at Kitty Hawk, and the Wright brothers decided to put him on a plane. On May 14, Charley flew for about 800 feet (243 meters) as Wilbur’s passenger, becoming the first-ever airplane passenger in history. Later that day, he and Orville made it more than 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) in the plane together. Charley (and North Carolina) made history. But were there any in-flight drinks served?!^[4]

6 Connecticut: Are They in the Book?

After telephone technology began to take hold in the United States in the latter half of the 19th century, it took a little while before documentation caught on. Today, we all know about the phone book, of course. (Well, maybe the youngest readers among us don’t, with everything having gone digital…)

But back in the day, the phone book had to be a thing that was invented! And in November 1878, the state of Connecticut was the place where that happened. Late that month, a company then known as the Connecticut District Telephone Company released the world’s very first phone book in the city of New Haven. In the book were the names and addresses of 391 subscribers who paid $22 per year to be listed in that service. But weirdly, there were no phone numbers! So it was a phone book produced by a phone company… with no numbers in it at all.

Regardless, it was very much a precursor to the “yellow pages” that came out en masse decades later. In addition to the names listed of New Haven residents, there were a ton of advertisements printed at the back of the book. Phone book technology very quickly took a leap forward from there in several ways.

For one, future phone books actually contained the phone numbers of the people listed within. And a year later, an enterprising Massachusetts man got the idea to alphabetize the names in the phone book so it’d be easier to find the person for whom you were searching. What an idea! Regardless, Connecticut can firmly lay claim to being the state to produce the first phone book.^[5]

5 Arkansas: Senate History

The state of Arkansas can lay claim to a very bold and important distinction: they are the first state to ever send a woman to the U.S. Senate in a full-term election. See, before Arkansas residents voted for a woman to go into the Senate in 1932, women who had served in that federal governing body had been sent there as special appointments after the sudden deaths of their husbands in office.

For Hattie Caraway, that’s initially what happened, too. On November 6, 1931, U.S. Senator Thaddeus Caraway, who represented Arkansas, died in office. With no one else to fill his shoes, the feds turned to Hattie to fill the vacancy of his seat in the Senate until a full election could be called. Just like it was always done, right?

Well, Hattie filled the seat for a few months after being appointed by the governor of Arkansas, Harvey Parnell, to do so. In January 1932, a special election was held to determine who would fill the seat for the rest of Thaddeus’s term—and Hattie won that election. Then, almost exactly a year after Thaddeus’s death, on November 8, 1932, a full and regularly scheduled Senate election took place—and Hattie won that one as well!

In running through those electoral victories, Arkansas made history by voting in the first-ever woman elected to the U.S. Senate beyond special appointments and decrees from governors. By the way, Hattie herself also later made history as the first woman ever to preside over the U.S. Senate. Not bad!^[6]

4 Alaska: The Time Zone Shuffle

Alaska can officially be known as the first state in the Union to change time zones in the modern age. Time wasn’t working for them, so they just up and flipped their clocks to make things better. Just like that! See, right now, Alaska is officially covered by two time zones: the Alaska Time Zone, which covers the vast majority of the state, and the Hawaii-Aleutian Time Zone, which covers lots of Alaska’s far western reaches, including the Aleutian Islands (and, yes, Hawaii way far south of that).

That hasn’t always been the case, though. In fact, up until the 1980s, Alaska was covered by FOUR time zones, and doing business from region to region within that area made things very frustrating at times. On September 15, 1983, Secretary Elizabeth Dole signed a statewide change to cut the number of time zones that snaked through Alaska in half. It was no longer a four-time zone state, and just two weeks later, the change became official.

Today, more than 90% of Alaska residents, including all those who live in the state’s major cities like Juneau and Fairbanks, are on Alaska Standard Time. That’s only one hour behind Pacific Time and places like Los Angeles and Seattle. And it makes sense, right? Alaska participates in Daylight Savings, too, which links them with the rest of the nation in that way.

But wait! It gets crazier! In 2016, Alaska lawmakers seriously began considering the passage of a bill that would put Alaska into Pacific Time and completely eliminate the Alaska Time Zone. That bill would have also eliminated Daylight Savings Time in Alaska, which most states still follow, and would have set them apart in that way.

The 2016 proposals went nowhere, though, and currently, most Alaskans remain within the Alaska Time Zone. Still, Alaska was the first state to time travel, as it were, by cutting its time zone allotment in half forty years ago. And maybe they’ll be the first state to do that twice should any new bill like the 2016 proposal ever come to pass!^[7]

3 Illinois: Look UP!

There is some debate about what technically constitutes the “first skyscraper” and where it was built. Still, most historians and architects today have come to a consensus: It happened in Chicago, and it was the Home Insurance Building.

It is true that New York City buildings were being built high up into the sky in the late 19th century. The New York Equitable Life building constructed in 1870 was the first office building to use an elevator, for example. NYC’s Produce Exchange building also made noteworthy architectural advancements when it was built in 1884. However, the 1885 creation and construction of the Home Insurance Building in Chicago is widely regarded as the first skyscraper ever truly built.

That’s because the Home Insurance Building was the first building to use a then brand-new lattice of structural steel. It was woven into its innovative metal frame design, and the pioneering combination allowed the Home Insurance Building to stand extremely sturdy and extremely tall. Okay, so it wasn’t that tall—at least not by our modern standards. The building, designed by William Le Baron Jenney, only stood 138 feet (42 meters) tall at its highest point. And it only contained ten stories!

Compared to the skyscrapers of today, that’s absolutely nothing at all! But at the time, it was a pioneering achievement in architecture. And the building’s ingenious internal metal framing combined with traditional wrought iron meant it could withstand anything that came its way. Thus, Illinois gets to take home the trophy as the state with the first skyscraper. Sorry, New York!^[8]

2 Illinois: Repealing Hate

Illinois—a state so nice, we listed it twice! Not only does Illinois have the distinction of being the state that housed the very first skyscraper, but they were also the first state to get rid of its sodomy law. In turn, that meant Illinois was the first state in the Union to decriminalize homosexuality. That happened during the legislative session held by state lawmakers there in 1961.

Then, when the calendar turned to January 1, 1962, the law went into effect. Or we should say the sodomy law was repealed. And homosexuality suddenly became something that was no longer criminalized all across Illinois! Sadly, gay rights had a very long way to go even after that, but at least the wheels were finally in motion in Chicago and elsewhere in the Land of Lincoln.

Interestingly, even though Illinois may have led the way in repealing sodomy laws, it took other states a very long time to follow. Idaho initially repealed a bunch of “bedroom policing” laws, too, at the recommendation of the American Law Institute. However, upon learning that they’d actually repealed the sodomy laws and decriminalized homosexuality, conservative Idaho lawmakers immediately walked back their bill.

Other states didn’t get in on the act until way past then, in 1971, when Connecticut repealed its anti-sodomy laws. Then, nineteen other states followed up throughout the 1970s, including California, Hawaii, Maine, Nebraska, Vermont, South Dakota, and more. But Illinois was first!^[9]

1 Kentucky: All in for Beethoven

Beethoven’s name is known the world over when it comes to classical music. However, in the United States, he was mostly ignored during his lifetime. In fact, he was only first heard by American ears just ten years before his 1827 death! The state of Kentucky got the unlikely distinction of being first in the U.S., where a Beethoven concert was performed by a symphony orchestra.

You might think that would have happened in New York City, Washington D.C., or perhaps Philadelphia, or really, anywhere else more traditionally “cultured” than the relative backwoods of Kentucky. But don’t knock the Bluegrass State! They came through for Beethoven before anybody else in America did when a performance was held there in 1817.

The story of Beethoven being brought to Kentucky is itself an interesting one. The man behind the move to make Beethoven heard in Louisville was a fellow by the name of Anthony Philip Heinrich. Born in Bohemia, in present-day Czechoslovakia, in 1781, Heinrich visited the United States several times as a boy and young adult. He loved it so much that in 1817, he emigrated there full-time. But again, instead of settling in a big city, he chose to strike out for himself in a log cabin in tiny Bardstown, Kentucky. Strange, right?

Well, it gets stranger. Heinrich was an absolutely prolific composer of classical music, piano tunes, and vocal compositions. He composed music, and so much of it was of such a high quality that later in life, he came to be known as “the Beethoven of America.” So it makes sense that he was the driving force behind having a Beethoven symphony performed live in Kentucky. And he helped the state make history in that way!^[10]

The United States is the land of firsts. States all across the great country love to claim that they were the first place to do this or that. Aviation is a great example of this. North Carolina claims they were the “first in flight” because that’s where the Wright brothers successfully set off in their primitive plane way back at the very beginning of the 20th century. Yet Ohio also claims to be the “first in flight” because that is where the Wright brothers lived full time and owned the bicycle shop and other businesses in which they first tinkered with the idea for an airplane. And so on and so forth—every state lays claim to being the first at something (or many things).

But what about weird and wacky firsts? Not every state “first” is one to be proud of or one to lord over other states. Some are just plain random—and bizarre! In this list, we’ll take a look at ten state “firsts” that you almost certainly have never heard of before. They are funny, quirky, and original—and while these states may not use them to boast in promotional materials and tourism brochures, they are definitely memorable all the same!

Related: 10 Strange Facts About KFC And Its One and Only Colonel

10 Alabama: The First 911 Call

In 1968, the very first 911 call ever made was made in the small town of Haleyville, Alabama. Before 1968, “0” was actually the emergency number all across the United States. You’d call the operator, and the operator would patch you through to the police, fire department, or whatever you needed.

But by 1968, officials realized that they needed a standalone dispatch office and a specific number that people could call with emergencies in order to streamline the process. Trained dispatchers could take the calls, they could send out fire, police, and EMS, and the whole process could happen a good bit quicker than it had been going for a while. And in Haleyville, city officials wanted to be the first-ever spot in America to implement the new system. So, on February 16, 1968, that’s exactly what they did.

That morning, the Alabama speaker of the house picked up a red telephone and made the very first 911 call. Tom Bevill, a Congressman from the state, was on the other end of the line and waiting for the 911 dial-in from his fellow politician. The duo exchanged pleasantries for a few minutes, determining that the line was working and the dispatchers would be able to hear people loud and clear.

It had only been a couple weeks earlier that Congress had mandated 911 become the nationwide emergency phone number, so Haleyville’s turnaround to get it up and running was very quick. Soon after that, plenty of other municipalities followed suit. And today, well, the act of dialing 911 is ingrained in Americans’ heads pretty much from childhood. So the system worked!^[1]

9 Florida: The First Sunscreen

In 1944, the sunny sights in Miami, Florida, were a must-visit for intrepid tourists and a mainstay for beach-loving locals. World War II was soon to wind down, of course, and Americans were hopeful to one day get back to their lives in peacetime. With that came a rush of outdoor fun that began for stateside locals even before the war ended. And that’s where Benjamin Green comes in.

See, Green had been serving in the war as an airman, just like many of his fellow young men across the United States. But in his personal life, Green had some real medical knowledge; he was a pharmacist, and he knew quite a bit about the human body. He also loved to surf and spend time outside. And he was sick of getting sunburned!

The combination of all those facts made Green a natural to tinker with lotions and lathers until he came up with an appropriate product. That year, Green perfected and then marketed a lotion that would darken tans and leave skin bronzed without having the wearer get so brutally sunburned. Suntan lotion was born, and the idea that a lather could work as a sunscreen immediately took hold.

Miami residents started using Green’s invention, and they loved how it bronzed their skin but left them without the awful red burns caused by the sun’s most intense rays. In turn, Green’s business blew up. Today, you know the brand that came from his 1944 idea as Coppertone. And it all started in Miami!^[2]

8 Iowa: The First Computer

You may think of Silicon Valley in northern California as the tech hub to end all tech hubs, but way back in the day, that wasn’t the case. In fact, the first “tech” hub was… in Ames, Iowa! What? In 1937, a professor of physics at Iowa State University named John Vincent Atanasoff began to tinker with what ended up being the world’s first electronic computer.

Along with a physics graduate student named Clifford Berry, Atanasoff spent the next five years perfecting the massive, unwieldy device. Finally, by 1942, it was ready to be shown off for what it was: the world’s first-ever electronic computer! Appropriately named the Atanasoff-Berry Computer in honor of the two gentlemen, or the ABC Computer, it made history as the first device created to electronically compute, read, and write.

As with all old technologies like that, the ABC Computer wouldn’t have been recognizable to us today as a computer. It was as big as a desk, and it weighed more than 750 pounds (340 kg). But it had quite a few important functions that were consistently and successfully working by 1942: rotating drums for memory, a read/write system that recorded numbers, glowing vacuum tubes, separate memory and computing functions, electronic amplifiers used as on-off switches, circuits that specialized in addition and subtraction, and a now-standard binary system for arithmetic, counting, and more. Of course, technology surged far beyond the ABC Computer soon enough. But it all started way back when at Iowa State University!^[3]

7 New York: The First Brewery

The great state of New York can lay claim to what some will consider the most important item on this list: the first public brewery. And it was established long (long, LONG!) before you might suspect—all the way back in 1632! In those days, the Dutch were the ones who built up and controlled the city. This was long before the United States was an independent nation, of course, and back then, the Dutch called their colony “New Amsterdam.”

At the time, for the first decade or so of the Dutch running the show in what would later become New York, beer was mostly brewed at home. But that all changed in 1632 when an enterprising group decided to publicly brew beer and sell it to their neighbors for a profit. And with that, the massive and wildly profitable alcohol industry was born in the U.S.!

The commercial brewery itself was built early in 1632 on lower Manhattan’s appropriately named Brewery Street (which is now known as Stone Street). Grain, malt, and hops all grew in the vicinity of New Amsterdam, so from a logistical perspective, it was very easy for brewers to get what they needed to make beer. In just a few years, the idea proved so popular that beer-making grew to be New Amsterdam’s biggest industry.

Dutch brewers soon sprung up all over the city and started competing with each other to sell suds to the locals and get them all good and soused. It wasn’t quite the same as the craft beer competitions of the last few decades, but it was a wild land grab in the alcoholic beverage industry all the same. Cheers!^[4]

6 South Carolina: The First Opera

On February 8, 1735, an opera called Flora first premiered in a makeshift theater constructed in Charleston, South Carolina. It was a very popular opera in England for several years running, and theater producers were hopeful that its popularity would catch on in America, too. They were right.

Flora nearly instantly became a hit as what was known then as a “ballad opera,” and soon, Americans were demanding more from the very same genre. In that way, South Carolina then unwittingly made some history: They became the very first-ever state to house an opera. And they weren’t even a state yet! Obviously, all this happened before the American Revolution and the country’s fight for independence.

All this opera stuff might seem like small potatoes, but it was actually a very big deal for American theater. See, this “ballad opera” proved so popular in Charleston that future theater producers and playwrights altered how they told stories in order to attract American audiences. This meant that more than ever before, the songs performed in operas had to be central to moving the storyline of the entire play along.

In turn, that meant that American musicals became a very popular, long-lasting genre. And it should go without saying that today, musicals are still incredibly popular and sought-after. From Broadway shows and the rise in popularity of Hamilton, musical theater is everywhere. And we all have South Carolina and its pioneering performance of Flora to thank for that.^[5]

5 Maryland: The First Dental School

The state of Maryland holds the distinction of opening up the first-ever dental school in the United States nearly two full centuries ago. And in fact, it was the first-ever dental school opened anywhere in the world at the time! See, during America’s colonial era, dentistry was very much a hit-or-miss practice.

Some doctors picked up dentistry on the side and were reasonably good at it (you know, for the time period). Other people picked up the practice and mostly butchered their clients without really understanding what they were doing. The whole thing was unregulated and a mess, and it caused a lot of pain for a lot of people who were trying to find some relief from toothaches and jaw pain.

Enter the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery. First founded in 1840, it became the first-ever regulated dental school anywhere in the United States. It was so far ahead of its time that it was a pioneer worldwide as far as dental medicine was concerned. Practitioners who went to that school turned out to be more capable at dentistry than any fly-by-night self-taught dentist who had come before them.

As the school churned out more students who were better skilled and more adept at careful and actually successful dental procedures, the country’s oral health slowly but surely improved. Eventually, the college was absorbed by Maryland’s public university system, and today, it is known as the University of Maryland School of Dentistry.^[6]

4 Maine: The First City

The city of York, Maine, became the first-ever officially chartered city in the history of the New World when the English made that designation way back in 1641. The area was first settled long before that, in 1624, by Captain John Smith. He had explored the area as early as 1614 but didn’t put down any roots there for a decade. But in 1624, thinking that the York area would be a good site for a town, he opted to settle the area and start building.

At first, the city was known as Agamenticus. Then, in 1641, another explorer of the American continent named Sir Ferdinando Gorges came through the area and officially endowed the city with a charter. Under the name Gorgeana (nothing like naming a city for yourself, right?), Sir Gorges quite literally put the city on the map. And with that, the first official city in America was born.

Eleven years after Gorges’s move to charter things, the Massachusetts Bay Company took over the explorer’s property there. They revoked the Gorgeana charter and re-upped it with a new one of their own. In their designation, they gave the city the name which is still in use today: York.

The name was given in honor of Yorkshire, England—and it stuck! It grew slowly for a while from there. Then forty years later, in 1692, it was nearly completely destroyed in a raid by the local Abenaki Indians. But it persisted! Today, York is a popular tourist attraction for history buffs seeking an old-time colonial feel. It boasts a small but comfortable population of under 15,000 full-time residents.^[7]

3 Michigan: The First Paved Road

Henry Ford’s Model T cars were sweeping Detroit and the rest of Michigan by storm at the very beginning of the 20th century. Local government officials realized they needed to build out public works to take care of them. So, in 1909, the very first paved road was built and smoothed over in the United States along a mile of Woodward Avenue in the city of Detroit. It wasn’t a highway as we know the term today, but back then, it was a groundbreaking (literally) move, and fans of the process called it “the world’s first concrete highway.”

See, brick pavers were already a thing long before that. Many streets in Detroit had them, and in cities elsewhere around the country and in other places across the world, too. But pavement that was concrete and smooth was non-existent. Unfortunately, early car models really struggled to navigate over bricks that were often remarkably uneven within blocks of road. So pavement was quickly seen as a better solution, and Detroit jumped on board to get that process started.

Throughout the spring of 1909, construction crews labored hard, and on April 20 of that year, the set-up was complete. For a one-mile stretch between Six Mile Road and Seven Mile Road, Woodward Avenue became paved for car traffic. The whole thing cost about $1,400—with roughly $1,000 in state funds contributing to the budget.^[8]

2 Minnesota: The First Mall

Minnesota leads the way in malls in the modern age with the notorious and incredibly massive Mall of America. The thing is truly huge—bigger and wider and longer than many small towns, and with more people, employees, restaurants, and in-mall amusements to boot. So it should maybe make perfect sense that Minnesota is where mall culture first really exploded in the first few decades after the end of World War II.

Soldiers returned home in and then after 1945, and over the next decade, they all got busy starting families, working jobs, buying homes, and making money. That, in turn, pushed enterprising business executives to create massive and immersive shopping experiences where you could buy nearly everything you could possibly need in one place.

On October 8, 1956, that idea debuted in full in the form of Southdale Center. Set off in the Minneapolis suburb of Edina, Minnesota, Southdale Center was the world’s first-ever fully enclosed, climate-controlled shopping center. What we know today as the mall made its notorious debut there in Edina for all to visit and shop within its walls.

Of course, Minnesota winters are very harsh. So the fact that the mall was climate-controlled and totally enclosed meant that people could come there all year round and get whatever they needed. And show up, they did! They showed up in such high numbers that the idea of building a mall soon spread to every other major metropolis across the United States.^[9]

1 Arizona: The First Drive-Thru

The first-ever idea of a fast food drive-thru may have been thought about at various restaurants all across the nation, but Arizona catches the distinction of pioneering the practice. See, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, McDonald’s started thinking about how to better serve a driving-happy population in many markets. First, in Los Angeles and San Diego, franchisees started asking the corporate office about the possibility of putting in drive-thru windows so customers wouldn’t have to get out of their cars.

Executives liked the idea and tinkered with it some. Then, a franchisee in Oklahoma City came to them with the desire to put in the first drive-thru there. That McDonald’s had a perfect drive-up location and plenty of space for a line of cars. There was just one problem: the OKC restaurant badly needed to undergo renovations, so its drive-thru development was put on hold.

But the company still wanted to do the drive-thru idea ASAP. So into that space came a McDonald’s in Sierra Vista, Arizona. That restaurant was just down the road from the Fort Huachuca Army Base. At the time, the restaurant was seeing declining sales because of a then-new Army rule. The base had instituted a policy that soldiers had to stay in their vehicles while off-base when wearing fatigues or Army uniforms.

Because of that, they were not allowed to stop at McDonald’s, get out of their car, and pick up some food. The company realized that would be the perfect set-up to build out a drive-thru window, and so they did. Soon after that, other drive-thru windows popped up all over the United States. And now, it’s so commonplace that we think it’s weird when a McDonald’s doesn’t have a drive-thru window attached!^[10]

Each US state has its own flag. They fly over capitols, adorn courtrooms, and appear on everything from bumper stickers to coasters. They’ve become accepted parts of local culture. Few people stop and think about where the designs of these banners came from, but, in fact, each has a complex web of history, symbolism, and negotiation behind it.

The flags’ designs were far from set or certain in their early days—and were subject to just as many foibles, disputes, and mistakes as any other human endeavor. The process of getting a state flag was often far from stately.

10 Nebraska—Utter Laziness

Flag designs, like other areas of life, are subject to trends. A long-standing trend in US state flags is the tradition of putting the state seal on a blue field. Flag enthusiasts (vexillologists) tend to hate this trend, saying the “seal on a bedsheet” style is completely lazy and uncreative. For the laziest of the lazy, look no further than Nebraska.

This Midwestern state took a long time to even get around to adopting an official flag at all; the designation took place in 1963, though a design had been in common use in prior years. Flag-lovers love to hate it. A survey by the North American Vexillogical Association (NAVA) in 2001 voted it the second-worst flag in the US and Canada combined. Since the worst-ranked in that survey, Georgia’s state flag, has since been changed, Nebraska now holds the dubious distinction of having the most detested official banner.

Nebraskans don’t seem to bother about it much. In 2002, the legislature discussed creating a commission to redesign the banner; nothing came of it. In 2017, a state senator pointed out that the flag had flown upside down at the state capitol for ten days with no one noticing.^[1] He urged the legislature to redesign the flag into something state residents would actually care about, as the current design apparently inspired only apathy.

Unsurprisingly, the legislature did nothing. But their inaction proved his point!

9 Utah—Gradually Getting it Right

The tale behind Utah’s flag is of a constant struggle to reconcile the will of the people with the random mistakes of flagmakers. It only took a century to iron out all the wrinkles!

The Utah flag carries classic American imagery, featuring a bald eagle and the US flag. It is actually one of the few state flags to include the national flag in its design, a sign of the state’s gratitude for being accepted into the American union. The Mormons, who form the majority of the state’s population, were long ostracized, and their admission to the US was a big victory. For the same reason, the year of that admission (1896) appears prominently on the banner, along with the year of first settlement (1847). A shield, a local sego lily, and an inspirational beehive round out the design.^[2]

The flag was adopted in 1911, when Utah was still a newly minted state, but it didn’t take long for odd issues to emerge. The following year, a local group ordered a copy of the flag to be presented to the brand new battleship USS Utah. When the banner arrived, it was wrong: The maker had colorized the shield and added a gold ring in the center. Anxious to avoid embarrassment, Utah natives apparently decided that the law was easier to change than the flag. The legislature quickly resolved that the random quirks of the flagmaker were now the official version.

It didn’t stop there. In 1922, a flagmaker departed from the established design again, this time putting the 1847 date in the wrong spot. His erroneous design became a model for other manufacturers, and the mistake went uncorrected for 89 years. It was finally brought to legislators’ attention in 2011—and this time, they decided to make the flag fit the law. All Utah flags produced since 2011, at long last, conform to the officially approved design . . . at least until some future flagmaker’s flaws become official policy once more!

8 Ohio—The Swallowtail

Unique among American state flags, Ohio ignores the rectangular standard in favor of a swallowtail (or guidon)-shaped banner. Flag historians suggest the design is inspired by the guidons carried by Ohio cavalry units in the Civil and Spanish-American Wars—both conflicts being in living memory when the flag was approved in 1902. Despite this origin, the flag is officially called a burgee, a term usually reserved for maritime banners. This makes perfect sense for a state which has no oceanic coastline.

The red-and-white “O” that dominates the flag’s star field stands for the state’s name; it drew derisive comparisons to Japan’s rising sun flag in 1902, but Ohio has remained proud of it. Like many other state flags, the Ohio burgee pays tribute to the growing United States: The overall design is obviously inspired by the national flag, and the star layout refers to the number of states in the Union. Thirteen stars on the left represent the original states, and the four on the right represent the later additions (Ohio itself being the 17th state).

Ohio’s pride in its flag has resulted in some unusual circumstances. In 2002, the legislature approved an official salute to it, to be recited after the Pledge of Allegiance to the national flag. The burgee’s distinctive shape makes it a nightmare to fold; it required a local Boy Scout to come up with a systematic method for doing so as his his Eagle Scout service project.^[3] The 17-step process (fitting, for the 17th state) is still challenging but has found official approval. The Boy Scout saw his procedure signed into law by Ohio’s governor in 2005.

7 Louisiana—A Pious Error

All good flags strive for meaningful symbolism. Unfortunately, some symbols persist even after they gave been proven to have no basis in fact. Such is the case with Louisiana’s flag, which is centered around a beautiful, poignant, and erroneous image.

The coastal pelican has long been associated with the state, whose Gulf Coast and many waterways define it. When the state flag was designed in 1912, it took up a symbol of pelicans that has been in use since medieval times: “the pelican in her piety.” This shows a mother pelican vulning—biting at her breast in order to tear pieces off and feed them to her chicks. As a celebration of self-sacrifice, this emblem has been popular for centuries.

Sadly, the entire thing rests on a misunderstanding. Bird experts have known for some time that pelicans don’t actually do this. Pelicans will point their bills downward when feeding chicks, to better deliver fish to their young; this might look, from a distance, like the pelican was feeding parts of itself to the chicks. The brutal reality is that starving pelicans—like most other creatures—would save themselves and leave offspring to die.^[4]

One cannot judge Louisiana too harshly, though. It’s much more elegant to promote fanciful self-sacrifice than ugly self-preservation. Presumably, no one wants to see a state flag featuring an empty nest and pelican skeletons!

6 California—The Homespun Grizzly

Today, one tends to picture California as a place of posh and manicured culture, the glitzy land of Beverly Hills and Malibu. Yet the grizzly bear on its flag suggests something much wilder, something hearty and rough. The origin of the flag—bound up with the origin of the state itself—is definitely at the rough end of the spectrum.

In 1846, California was Mexican territory, but not for long. Weary wagon train emigrants and weather-beaten mountain men had been trickling in for some time, and they had grown tired of ineffectual Mexican rule. A band of these men gathered at the Sonoma home of the local Mexican authority, General Mariano Vallejo, on a June sunrise. A member of the group later called them “as rough-looking a set of men as one could imagine”; their buckskins and rags did not aim to impress. But their muskets and Bowie knives did.^[5]

The men gently placed a surprised Vallejo under arrest and proclaimed a new “Republic of California.” This added legitimacy to their actions. But they soon realized a new republic needed a new symbol.

The first California flag was as rough and hasty as its soldiers. A local woman found a spare rectangular piece of brown cloth lying around—this would become the foundation. One of the soldier’s wives tore off a red strip from her petticoat and sewed it to the bottom, making a stripe. Next, William Todd took over. Using a mixture of brick dust, oil, and paint, he sketched a crude star and an even cruder grizzly bear onto the banner. The star was in solidarity with Texas, another breakaway Mexican province. The grizzly was meant to evoke the intensity of the most ferocious animal in the West.

Unfortunately, Todd’s zeal exceeded his artistic ability. The bear, recalled General Vallejo, came out looking more like a pig. Nonetheless, the revolutionaries ran with it. Missing the hilarious chance to declare a Pig Republic, they raised the makeshift “bear flag” over Sonoma. It stayed the flag of the short-lived Republic of California, and in its honor, a grizzly remains on the state flag today.

At least now it actually looks like a bear.

5 Kansas—A Fierce Flag Feud

While some states’ residents really don’t seem to care about their flags—Nebraska springs to mind—others have natives who will get into passionate fights over flags. By 1911, Kansas was one of only a handful of states without an official flag, and citizens were clamoring for one. The fight over a design started hot and remained so. It would take over a decade for the disagreements to be resolved.

Several designs looked similar to the US national flag. However, same Kansans argued that such symbolism was no more than plagiarism and would compete unfairly with the national colors. Union army veterans of the Civil War, a powerful demographic at the time, insisted on respect and voted down red, white, and blue designs. The only one they would agree on was the one eventually adopted—and whose main benefit was being deliberately unlike the national flag.

It was quite different. The flag hung down from a horizontal brass bar. The design was kept simple: a blue field with the state seal set inside a golden sunflower.^[6]

Simple did not mean uncontroversial. The horizontal-hanging banner was adopted in 1925, and it almost immediately became besieged with fresh opposition. Some complained that the sunflower was an improper symbol, since many considered it an invasive weed. Others argued that the horizontal-hanging format was ungainly. It was difficult to march with and hard to hang in contexts set up for vertical flagpoles. For this latter reason, the Kansas banner had been rejected from state flag displays in Washington, DC.

In 1927, the state legislature bowed to the pressure and approved a design modification. The horizontal-hanging format was out. The visual elements would stay, however; essentially, the design was rotated 90 degrees. No great controversy over the flag has arisen since then. Sunflower-haters, at least, seem to have made their peace with it.

4 Colorado—Enthusiastic Forgetfulness

All of us have times when we get excited and go off half-cocked. One would like to think that those in charge of a state flag would spend a little more time checking their work, but that doesn’t always happen. At least not in the state of Colorado.

It all started when the Colorado legislature approved an official flag for the state in 1907—unsurprisingly, it consisted of the state seal on a blue field. The legislators promptly made a half-hearted announcement, had a single copy of the flag made, and stuffed it in a closet at the state capitol.

It’s little wonder that when, three years later, a group of patriotic Coloradan ladies got together to discuss ideas for a state flag, they had no idea that one already existed.^[7] Almost no one did. The group, a chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), were eager to fill this perceived gap in Colorado pride, writing that, “State loyalty is too precious to be lost.”

Arguably, the gap did exist. A state flag had been created, but without public knowledge, it couldn’t fulfill the purpose a flag is meant for. No public knowledge meant no increased sense of public identity, loyalty, or pride. The bright-eyed Colorado DAR aimed to achieve all of this and more.

They moved at a rapid pace, eventually ramming through an immensely popular version of the modern flag. However, in their enthusiasm, they forgot a few details, like specifying the shades of colors to be used or how big the iconic Colorado “C” should be. This led to multiple competing designs for half a century. Only in 1964 did the legislature finally settle on an exact design—one that all zealous Coloradans could call their own.

3 Maine—Navies Of The Northeast

While the Maine state flag is unremarkable—earning another seal-on-a-blue-bedsheet designation from NAVA—there is another Pine Tree State banner with more interest behind it. That’s the state naval ensign. This subject brings to light some hidden history and possibly some decades-old copycatting by Maine legislators.

The American rebels in the Revolutionary War didn’t float just one navy against the British; they floated 12. In addition to the united Continental Navy, 11 of the individual states commissioned their own navies to protect their coastlines. These were tiny and underpowered (what later eras would call “Mosquito Fleets”), but the mere fact of having them was a gesture of state pride and self-sufficiency. Each state navy had its own official ensign, as naval flags are called. These cousins of the state militias on land disappeared after the war, as did their ensigns—except one.

Massachusetts alone kept its ensign on the books. That naval mindset must have persisted in the population when Massachusetts produced offspring: Maine, which split off to form its own state in 1820. Something made Maine citizens hang onto the idea of a state naval ensign, even though it took them over a century to realize this half-remembered dream.

In 1939, Maine officially declared its own naval ensign—despite never having its own navy—becoming the second state in modern times to do so. With such a lack of competition and a chance to make something completely unique, the legislators . . . lost their nerve. Instead, they decided to duplicate Massachusetts!

In many ways, Maine seems to act toward Massachusetts like a rebellious teenager does toward a parent: desperate to go out and be independent but never quite able to escape the elder’s influence. Thus, while Massachusetts’s naval ensign features a green pine tree on a white field, Maine has: a green pine tree on a white field with an anchor attached.^[8] To take one last stab at originality, the Maine legislature pasted a state motto on the ensign: Dirigo, Latin for “I direct.” Just as adolescents proclaim their boundless knowledge and authority.

As of this writing, these two Northeastern locales remain the only states with separate naval ensigns. Should the need for state navies ever again arise, Massachusetts will surely be two steps ahead of the rest—and Maine will be following a single step behind.

2 Alaska—Realizing A Schoolboy’s Vision

There’s a reason most flag designs are created by committees or legislatures: Making the process truly open to the public might produce a bunch of crude, bizarre, or inappropriate designs. It’s certainly hard to imagine a local government asking its teenagers to participate in a serious competition to design a flag. It’s even harder to imagine one of the youngsters winning. But the Alaskan authorities apparently trusted their youths quite a lot in 1927, and it’s a good thing they did.

In the mid-1920s, Benny Benson was much like the Alaska he was born into—young and scruffy. Son of a native woman and a poor Swedish fisherman, at the age of three, Benson lost his home and his mother in the same year (to fire and pneumonia, respectively). The children were doled out to foster care; Benny and his brother ended up in an orphanage in the Aleutian Islands.

Alaska, for its part, was still a fledgling territory. Organized in the 1880s, its progress toward statehood had been glacial. Alaskans were only granted piecemeal autonomy. Governed by far-off and distracted officials in Washington, DC, and often passed over for economic and infrastructure investment, Alaskans felt themselves the neglected stepchildren of the Union. At the time, casual observers would not have imagined bright prospects for either Alaska or Benson.

While the other states on this list came up with flags to celebrate a firmly established identity, Alaska’s territorial authorities seized on a banner as a means to affirm and define the statehood they were trying to create. Alaskan adolescents would help. A flag design contest was announced, with all 13- to 18-year-olds invited to take part. Benny Benson, then a student at the orphanage school, was just old enough to make the cut. And he had a flash of inspiration.

First, he gave the design a deep blue background, symbolizing the eventual state flower, the forget-me-not, as well as the sky over Alaska.^[9] Keeping with the celestial theme, he used the well-known constellation the Big Dipper to evoke the larger formation of which it is a part: Ursa Major, the Great Bear. For Benson, this symbolized strength. Finally, a single large star in the upper right corner represented Alaska itself, the newest and most northerly addition to the American constellation.

Benson’s design met unanimous approval. It rocketed through the selection process, beating 141 other entries; within four months, the territory had a flag of its own. Within 11 years, it had a state poem and song, each inspired by the banner. And within 32 years, Alaska finally became the 49th state in the Union. Alaska’s statehood effort had been invigorated by the flag symbol—and Benny Benson went from a poor, no-account foster child to a sensation, a respected Alaskan goodwill ambassador for the rest of his life. He and his native state had both realized their potential.

1 Maryland—Reconciliation

Looking at Maryland’s flag, one could be forgiven for thinking it came straight from an automobile racetrack. Yet the reality is much more profound. This distinctive banner traces its origin through British heraldry all the way to America’s most blood-soaked years.

The US Civil War pitted Northern states against Southern states, making the country a “house divided,” as Abraham Lincoln called it. Smaller houses, too, were divided. Tempers ran hot along the border between North and South—nowhere more so than in those states which had the Southern institution of slavery but remained officially part of the United States. Maryland, one of these, was split right down the middle over the war, as were many of its families.

Marylanders fought on both sides during the war and went toe to toe with each other in battles at Front Royal and Gettysburg, among others. Fittingly, Maryland units on opposing sides carried distinct battle flags, both of which recalled the state’s colonial history. Unionist Marylanders carried the black-and-yellow coat of arms of the Calvert family, noble founders of the colony; Southern sympathizers bore the red-and-white Crossland banner, representing another branch of the family. Thus, even the flags symbolized blood ties severed by a blood feud.

The war ended, eventually. The United States would remain a whole country and Maryland a unified state. Yet Maryland had suffered the ravages of pitched battles, marching armies, and martial law, and its citizens had died by the thousands. Could such a reunion-by-force ever be truly healthy again? Or would they have to live as two peoples, the victor and the vanquished, one privileged and one subjugated?

As the flag shows, they could and did become one again. It took time; scars were slow to fade. But as decades passed, memories of a shared heritage and mutual respect for each side’s wartime sacrifices began to close the wounds. A combined flag, incorporating both of the wartime designs, first flew in the Maryland city of Baltimore in 1880, on the 150th anniversary of the founding of the city. By 1904, the state legislature adopted it as the official state flag.^[10]

The Old Line State’s banner is a definitively American flag, as its essence demonstrates a core American standard. Whatever lay in Marylanders’ pasts, all of them would remain equal under the law, preserving the path to that American ideal of a country where all have a voice. This banner serves as a vibrant reminder that reconciliation is always possible, even after the worst of divisions.

David Ellrod lives in Maryland with his wife, three daughters, and one very excitable dog.

Why are modern heads of state seemingly so impervious to old-school assassins? All the old presidents were constantly getting attacked. President Jackson famously, but unfortunately, even fought his assassins off with a cane.

Well the truth is attempts still happen. They just get less coverage than they used to. In fact, plots are often foiled before they take place — then downplayed or hushed up in the press.

10. Donald Trump

Showboating at North Dakota’s largest oil refinery in 2017, Trump was blissfully unaware that someone was planning to kill him. The president was in the state to talk about his tax plans. Ivanka was there too; he told the crowd she’d asked “Daddy, can I go with you?”

Meanwhile, a 42-year-old man was hijacking a forklift to flip his limousine. His plan was to drive the vehicle into Trump’s motorcade, disable the limo, and kill the president. In the end, however, he got the forklift stuck in a gated area. Although he abandoned the plan and dumped the forklift in a ditch, he was caught and arrested by police. 

But only because the area he was in was restricted for the visit. They had no idea he was planning to assassinate the president… until he told them. Later in court his attorney explained he had bipolar and ADHD. The uninterested judge sentenced him to 10 years in the state penitentiary.

9. Angela Merkel

On her visit to Prague, the seemingly harmless, grandmotherly German chancellor was the subject of furious protests. One placard showed Merkel with a Hitler mustache, while another linked the EU flag and the swastika. They felt the EU was invading, forcing Czech submission to NATO and its hawkish military orders.

One man took it upon himself to show the EU just how welcome its leaders were in the Republic. Driving a black 4×4, he maneuvered toward Merkel’s motorcade as it traveled from the airport to Sobotka’s government headquarters. But police intercepted and threatened to shoot him, despite him not being armed. Eventually he gave himself up. 

Defending their heavy-handedness later, the police claimed to have found “items” in his car that “could easily have been used as weapons.” What were they, you ask? Blocks of cement.

8. Theresa May

British prime minister Theresa May ruined a lot of people’s lives but it seems only one sought revenge. After his uncle was killed in a drone strike, a homeless 20-year-old Londoner approached militants online to get hold of some bombs. He told them he was planning to blow up Parliament, or to get May at home, at 10 Downing Street — both of which he’d scouted out beforehand. 

Unfortunately for him, these “Islamic State militants” were actually FBI, who referred him to their MI5 counterparts, who hooked him up with an undercover cop posing as an armorer in London. Oblivious, the would-be assassin kept them abreast of his plans and, once he’d got a (fake) bomb and a jacket filled with (fake) explosives, police surrounded and arrested the bereaved young tramp. He’d later admit he was glad it was over.

In court, he insisted the plan wasn’t genuine. He’d been set up and tricked by police, he said. He was always coming up with crazy schemes; he never followed through. One early idea had been to drop missiles from balloons at the edge of space. But the judge was unsympathetic and gave him 30 years.

7. Joe Biden

Old Joe Biden’s unpopular with young’uns. The senescent commander in chief has (obliviously) dodged several attempts on his life — all from the under-30s. In 2020, a 19-year-old was arrested in Delaware for driving a van containing guns and explosives within four miles of the president’s home. In addition to the weapons, the young man had $509,000 in cash, books about bomb-making, and a handwritten checklist ending with “execute”. Investigators later claimed to have found internet posts announcing his plan, including a meme on iFunny captioned “Should I kill Joe Biden?”

The following year, a 27-year-old tipped himself off to the Secret Service. “I’m going to come kill the president,” he told them over the phone, “I’m going to kill the Secret Service because I own this whole planet.” When they called him back to find out more, he defended his “right to free speech.” Then he asked them to pick him up and take him to the White House so he could “punch the president in the face, sit in his chair, and stay there until he dies.” They put him in jail instead.

Most recently of all, a 19-year-old was charged with “threatening to kill, kidnap or harm the president”, among other transgressions, when he drove a truck into a White House fence. He got 10 years in prison.

6. Justin Trudeau

After a 46-year-old man stormed the gates of Rideau Hall, the story was mysteriously downplayed. Although they detailed the weapons he had in the truck that he crashed through the gates (an unlicensed revolver, a prohibited semi-automatic rifle, and two shotguns), the media claimed he only wished to arrest, not kill, the Canadian prime minister. Later, they changed their mind and said he just wanted to talk.

In reality, however, the man was charged with threatening to kill or harm Justin Trudeau. A letter that may have contained this threat was never released to the public; only “selective summaries” were “provided to the media by anonymous officials.” The attempt also came just one day after the Dominion Day rally on Parliament Hill, where Canadians waved pictures of Trudeau in a gallows and demanded the prime minister be executed.

It’s thought the establishment was largely silent on the attempt (despite it being the first on any Canadian prime minister) because the assassin was in the armed forces. According to some, it would upset the narrative that soldiers all support their PM.

5. Queen Beatrix

Assassination attempts on royalty are fairly common too. On Queen’s Day in the Netherlands in 2009, a 38-year-old Dutchman crashed his car in a suicide attack on Queen Beatrix. Tragically, he plowed into the watching crowd instead, killing six bystanders and injuring ten others. He also hit a monument and sustained critical injuries. The man later died in hospital — but not before police (who, despite months planning security, had failed to protect anyone) extracted a confession from the brain dead assailant.

By contrast, for Elizabeth II’s VJ (Victory over Japan) Day celebrations in 2010, prime minister David Cameron didn’t entrust his queen’s protection to incompetent Metropolitan police. When he learned of a plot to assassinate her, he ordered a drone strike himself, killing the as yet innocent but suspected British citizens in Syria.

He did, however, leave the public’s protection to the police, who encouraged crowds to ignore credible claims of a pressure cooker bomb in the capital and line the roads for the cameras regardless.

4. Barack Obama

Remote assassination via the postal service would have been fitting for a president who proliferated drone strikes. But it was not to be.

In 2013, a 45-year-old Elvis impersonator sent him “a suspicious granular substance” identified as ricin along with a typewritten letter. “No one wanted to listen to me before,” it read, “There are still ‘Missing Pieces’ [a reference to the assassin’s own novel about black market body parts] …. To see a wrong and not expose it, is to become a silent partner to its continuance.” He signed the letter: “I am KC and I approve this message.” Copies of the letter, complete with ricin, were sent to the Republican senator Roger Wicker (for whom KC once performed) and Mississippi judge Sadie Holland. All were intercepted. 

The FBI claimed nobody died from contact with the letters, but this is hard to believe. Ricin, which is cheaply and easily extracted from castor beans and for which there is no antidote, is so deadly that as little as 500 micrograms (a dose roughly the size of a pin head) can kill. There’s also no specific test for exposure.

Another deadly package addressed to Obama was intercepted in 2018, this time a bomb. Others were also targeted, including George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and former CIA director John Brennan. The return address on them all was that of former chairwoman of the DNC Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who naturally denied involvement.

3. Fumio Kishida

Calling to mind the time George W. Bush had a hand grenade lobbed at him, Japan’s 101st prime minister was shocked to see an explosive device flying his way. He was about to give a speech at Wakayama when the pipe bomb exploded a meter from where he was standing. It probably would have hit him were it not for his guards blocking the attack with an unfurled ballistic suitcase. The 24-year-old attacker was swiftly arrested.

Surprisingly, though, Kishida kept to his schedule and, just six hours later, gave another speech to a crowd in Chiba. There weren’t even any bag checks or metal detectors.

Unlike the alienated relationship between government and the public in most developed countries, Japanese electoral campaigns require candidates to prove their trust in those they aspire to govern. In fact, the number of votes they get is said to be a measure of how many hands they shake.

2. Volodymyr Zelenskyy

Before early 2022, few outsiders had even heard of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, let alone painted his flag on their faces and prayed for God to protect him. By early March, however, people around the world were urgently told of the beleaguered president’s existence — as well as his heroic survival of three assassination attempts in a week (later corrected to 12).

The would-be assassins — Chechen special forces — were shocked before they were killed at Zelenskyy’s timely protection. Apparently, his bodyguards had been tipped off by Russian FSB agents opposed to Putin’s invasion. 

Kremlin-backed mercenaries with the “lunatic”, battle-hardened Wagner group were also dispatched to kill the president; they were thought to be the only ones crazy enough to pull it off. One of their plans was to get a laser target marker on Zelenskyy and call in an airstrike. The president has long since gone into hiding, delivering his speeches from in front of a green screen instead of on the ground in Ukraine.

1. Barack Obama (again)

In 2011, a lone gunman pulled up outside the White House, aimed his semi-automatic rifle, and unleashed a barrage of bullets. One smashed a second floor window by Obama’s formal living room, while another got lodged in a window frame and others hit the roof. 

There was no response. 

Although one Secret Service officer drew her gun and snipers scanned the lawn, the order came quick to stand down. “No shots have been fired,” said a supervisor over the radio. The sound of the gunshots was thought to have come from a vehicle backfiring nearby, or a shootout between neighboring gangs — all despite a witness tweeting that a driver in front of her cab had “STOPPED and fired 5 gun shots at the White House”.

It took the Secret Service four days to realize someone had tried to kill the president — or, rather, it took four days for a housekeeper to notice the debris and tell them about it. (Maybe they were too busy thinking about Colombian prostitutes?) In fact, the only reason the depressed 21-year-old got caught was his unnecessary haste in escaping. Crashing his car just seven blocks away, he left his gun inside when he fled. But he needn’t have worried at all. Even when police were finally alerted, they were looking for a couple of black men; the shooter was alone and hispanic.