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Satanic Tomatoes and Other Weird Details Not Taught in History Class

Khalid Elhassan July 4, 2020 33 min

South Lawn - Goat — Wilson's sheep. Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library and Museum

32. Generations of America’s Elites Had Their Nudie Pics Snapped in the Name of Science

From the 1940s to the 1970s, Yale, plus some other Ivy League schools such as Harvard, Vassar, and Brown, required their freshmen to pose naked for a photoshoot. The goal of the weird requirement was to furnish material for a massive study into how rickets developed, and that involved sticking pins to the backs of the subjects, male and female.

Generations of the country’s elite who went to the Ivy Leagues posed for the nudie pics. The archives included the naked photos of well-known figures ranging from George W. Bush to Hillary Clinton to Diane Sawyer to Meryl Streep. The photos were burned after news leaked and the study was denounced. However, it is possible that some might have escaped the flames, and are still circulating out there, to potentially end up on the internet someday.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.