A post about keeping you posted.

We know, we know. It's been awhile since we've posted on here, and you miss us. But a lot has been going on in the History's Hotties universe! A brief list of what has kept us otherwise occupied:

1) The ides of March.

2) A trip to Madame Tussaud's to find more hot men of the past for the blog. (Results: John D. Rockefeller had rather nice baby blue eyes.)

3) Creating a Twitter account! (Find and follow us on Twitter! In our infinite creativity, we have decided our user name will be Historyshotties.)

4) Talking about making a Tumblr to be updated with hilarious images and corresponding captions daily.

5) Learning about other awesome historical work being done by our peers. Please be sure to check out this blog on historical scandal by some good friends of ours! http://historicalscandals.wordpress.com

That is all for now. We promise, we will post again very soon!

Guest Piece: Napoleon- The Hottest (not so short) Military Dictator

This hilarious and totally accurate bio is by Andy Roblee. I agree with all of his assessments on Napoleon. Truly, a titanic history hottie. 

---------------------------

It is my pleasure to guest author a very special installment of History’s Hotties. It is special in a few different ways. First of all it is special because I am authoring it. Second of all it will be the first HH written by a member of the “bescrotumed community.” This is now the correct nomenclature. Third of all it is about one of Anglocentric history’s most misrepresented and unfairly portrayed sexual beings. Napoleon Bonaparte. 

Yo England and Russia! Y'ALL BE HATERSSS! 

Napoleon, as some know, was born in Corsica, an island ruled by France, but in every possible way Italian. Aww yeah, that’s a spicy meatball!!! Napoleon came from a family of provincial nobles, essentially nobodies. Through his own dynamite looks and pile driving ass he was able to earn a spot at the French military academy, where he excelled in all of his studies. His best subjects were physics and math, foreshadowing his future brilliance as an artillery officer. All those brains and a baby face with pouty lips? Even I’m getting a “nerd boner!”

 This is Kate putting in another hot picture of Napoleon, because hey, why not? 

After becoming a Brigadier General at the age of 26 and bringing the post-terror violence in France to an end, Napoleon then decided that the half dozen other countries at war with France should get their asses spanked. Again and again they tried to bring him down. Again and again he shook out his wild hair and penetrated hard and deep into the enemy lines.

 This belt was actually the world's first "fanny pack"

I’ll skip all the sweet details of how amazing Napoleon was, but I will take a second to clear up a long standing misconceptions perpetrated by the British/American cultural discourse on him. Napoleon was not short. He was 5’8”, actually tall for his time and place. The Coalition powers called him an ogre or “small” because he wasn’t royalty. He rose to greatness b virtue of his own merit and Italian sexual gravitas.

In 1804 the citizens of France let old “Boney” know just how fine they thought he was by voting in favor of his Emperorship in two separate plebiscites. That’s when natural beauty met the world of imperial fashion. The meeting of these two forces exploded all over the canvas, as you can see!

 Somebody grab me a towel...

In the end baby face Napoleon bit off more than he could chew and tried to invade Russia from the west. Everyone knows that you have to come from the other direction if you want to beat Russia (see: Mongols, Japan). He was exiled to Elba to serve as “Emperor” there. He tried to make a comeback and gave everyone a little trickle of fear in their pants before finally being sent off to little St Helena to die. In English speaking countries everywhere he is portrayed as a fat little angry man who wanted to control the entire world. In other places like France, Poland, and Italy, he is remembered correctly, as a liberator and a reformer with piercing blue eyes and sheer mammalian sexual energy.

Damn, youz a sexy chick, part two: Lizzie and Christina

First of all, "like" History's Hotties on Facebook. It's the least you could do to thank us for our efforts on behalf of your reading pleasure.

Secondly, I think Kate was on to something with her post about history's sensual women. In fact, suggestions to include women have been the most frequent ones I've heard from the surprising number of people who've taken a look at our blog. Granted, I am more interested in raw masculinity, so most of my posts will remain centered on that concept.

Okay, not that raw.

But. I can recognize a gorgeous woman just as easily as anyone else with high estrogen levels. We ladies know good looks and gumption when we see them. (How men claim themselves unable to understand which of their same-gendered peers are hot and which are not is beyond me. I'm actually not sure I believe them. As Kate once said (a few weeks ago, just before Valentine's Day), men are like "terrible puzzles from hell." They probably know full well which of their male friends are totally adorable and just refuse to admit it, to maintain that complicated mystique we ladies so stupidly find attractive.)

Anyway. I do tend to ramble. I apologize. (Only not really, because I like doing it.)

So, yeah. Lovely ladies. History's full of them. Kate's discussed some whose sensuality lay both in the physical arena and the I-am-going-to-employ-my-wiles-to-get-money arena. Gorgeous and impressively-manipulative women.

Because I'm a bit of an idealist, though, the women I find most attractive are those who were not only totally gorgeous, but who also put their minds and bodies to use for the aesthetic improvement of the world. (Rather than just the sexual improvement of rich men.) My favorite of these? Elizabeth Siddal and Christina Georgina Rossetti.

Now, if you know me at all, you know I'm a huge fan of the Pre-Raphaelites. And both of these women played crucial roles in that artistic movement. First, Lizzie Siddal.

Wearing all this needlessly heavy fabric tires me out!

Siddal is best known as the model and muse to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and model to many of the other Pre-Raphaelites (all of these young men probably took turns with her; her heart, however, belonged to Rossetti).

John Everett Millais' "Ophelia," for which he floated Siddal in a bathtub of cold water for many hours on end. She became very, very ill after this modeling session. But Millais was right to make Shakespeare sensual like this. It's stunning and, frankly, insanely creepy.

After many years of pining after Rossetti, Siddal ended up marrying good old DGR (despite his affairs with other models). She continued to produce poetry and paintings, though none quite reaching the caliber of her husband's.

Case in point: Siddal's self-portrait...

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "Prosperpine", for which Siddal modeled.

When she was 32, Siddal gave birth to a stillborn child. And then she herself died, from a likely-purposeful overdose of laudanum. DGR blamed himself for his wife's depression and what was almost certainly her suicide. So he sat by her coffin and painted this:

'Cause that's not weird at all...

Even in death, though, Elizabeth Siddal looked gorgeous and sensual. She had a full head of red, curly hair, which came up again and again in Pre-Raphaelite poetry and artwork for its Mary Magdalene-ness. One of DGR's poems, about a prostitute named Jenny ("Fond of a kiss and of a guniea"), was even based on Siddal and her hair. In Victorian England, hair was kind of a taboo, overtly-sexual aspect of a woman that wasn't discussed overmuch. That's the weird thing about the Pre-Raphaelites: their simultaneous love for this seedy underside of life and traditional religious values. Check out any of their poetry or artwork, and you'll see that both are glaringly present.

Anyway, on to Christina Georgina Rossetti, sister to Dante Gabriel. (Apparently their parents were fans of the three-name thing.)

She kinda looks like a Hester Prynne-type here, but check out that sensual glare!

Christina Rossetti, like her brother and sister-in-law, dabbled in various forms of artistic expression. She was far more successful when it came to poetry, though. Christina never married, but her poetry is rife with overwhelmingly romantic lines:

"For love is both and both are one in love"

"My heart is like a rainbow shell that paddles in a halcyon sea; my heart is gladder than all these because my love has come to me."

(Read "The Birthday" or "Monna Innominata" for some of the most vibrant, heartfelt love poems you'll ever encounter.)

And, ladies, as we know, romance is sensual. Sensuality is hot. Thus, CGR = hot.

I am deeply considering this hotness of which you speak.

In her famous work "Goblin Market," Christina Rossetti describes in fabulously colorful detail the corruption of one sister and her subsequent salvation by the other...in what many scholars believe is a passionate lesbian tryst. Seriously. Read the poem. It's difficult to miss.

Christina Rossetti was a dreamer, and put her faith above all else. If you look beyond that in her poetry, however (though it is impressive for its potency), it's impossible to miss her raw sensuality and desperate longing for passionate love. Her articulation of these sentiments truly are as hot as words can get.

Perfection Confection: A Series of Courtesans

So far, Danielle and I have focused on the dudes, and rightly so, as they're generally ignored in the field of 'hot people from history'. But I felt the need to introduce you to several rockin' babes, who mostly had looks going for them, but WHAT looks:

 Virginia Oldoini! Sweet! 

 Mathilde Kschessinska! Bangin'! 

Mata Hari! Like, Why Bother Trying Anymore? Huh? 

-----------------

All of these ladies used their bodacious bods, and, actually, pretty formidable brains, to get really, really rich. Like, astoundingly rich. Our first courtesan, Virginia, first married an Italian duke. When her husband was sent to the court of France, she immediately abandoned him for Napoleon III, on whom she used her womanly wiles to plead the case of Italian unification. 

"Doin' this for the boobs. Just sayin'." 

Virginia, known as 'de Castiglione', eventually got sick of Napoleon III, probably because he was hideous, and she pin balled back and forth between Italy and France during the 1860s-1970s, helping to make modern Europe through her work with Bismarck, Napoleon, and the Italian political nomenclature. Though how much of that was mental versus physical effort is uncertain. 

 Pure scandalous. SHE COULD BE NUDE UNDER THERE YOU'D NEVER KNOW MAN

Poor Virginia's story doesn't end very well. As she aged, she became obsessed with her fading youth. She covered her apartment in black, and draped all her mirrors. She began to go out only at night, and in a veil. Alas, all that got the men of Europe through this dry spell were copies of her most famous portrait: 

2 legs, 1 daguerreotype

----------------------

Our next courtesan has a connection to an earlier post of ours: Nicholas II. Mathilde KsseI'mnotgoingtokeepspellingthislastname was his first girlfriend. And this went well for her. Well enough for two palaces and a house in Nice. And lots of jewelry. Lots of it. 

I feel that I must take the time here to explain that those are whole diamonds on her necklace. And the bows, earrings, pin on the front are all diamonds and platinum. This is how the Romanovs rolled, and this was just the shit they bought their girlfriends. 

Mathilde would end up escaping the revolution that would kill her former boyfriend (and a few others- she got passed around to some uncles and cousins afterward), and she became a ballet teacher in France. She was also the primary teacher of Anna Pavlova, the first and most famous 'ethereal' ballerina, who made super-skinny hot. How'd she get famous? Mathilde was pregnant and couldn't do Swan Lake, so she had her student take her spot, figuring people would be uninterested in the flat and thin Pavlova. Tough luck, Mathilde.

But did Pavlova ever have the balls to wear her sex-jewels on stage like this? I think not.

----------------

Last but certainly not least is the incomparable Mata Hari. Basically, I wish I was her. Except for the gruesome death. And being slutty for a living. But let's explain some stuff before we get to that. 

I will readily admit that I probably spent a little too much time looking at this picture.

Mata Hari began life in the pretty unexotic location of Holland with the pretty unexotic name of Margarethe (unexotic to Hollandishers or something I guess). An early privileged life went to all kinds of hell when her parents divorced and her headmaster started hitting on her. No Dumbeldore, he. So she decided to answer some guy's ad for a wife. 

Bad ideas all around

 Well being married to that ugly and probably boring of a dude sucked, so after moving to Indonesia to be with him, two kids, and a lot of drunken beatings (the more you read this blog, the more they pop up- pretty popular back in the day-), Margarethe moved to France, and became in turn a circus performer, an artist's model, and, of course, an 'exotic dancer'.

Well those are probably some seriously expensive pasties.

'Mata Hari' was, as you might have guessed, successful. She slept with a lot of insanely wealthy people, including millionaire industrialists, dukes, military leaders, and the crown prince of Germany. This went great until WWI. The Netherlands were neutral, but her boyfriends weren't, and she was eventual booked for espionage (of which she was probably innocent), and executed by firing squad in England. A sad day indeed. 

Like most 'exotic dancers', not so pretty in close up and facing imminent death.

Nicholas II: First in My Book!

In a shout-out to Kate and the glories of Russian history, I've decided to write my next post on Nicholas II. I've decided not to use the word "tsar" or "czar" in this entry, because I really don't want to have to choose. And I'd prefer not to be judged by my Russia-brilliant counterpart, who probably knows which one is a better version of the word. (I do know that this word comes from "Caesar," but that's about it.)

Anyway. My interest in Russia stems from my complete obsession with the cartoon version of "Anastasia." One of my largest pet peeves (okay, top twenty) is when people rave about how wonderful Disney is, thinking of such a film. First of all. It's not a Disney movie! It was put out by 20th Century Fox! Secondly, they actually made a live-action version of what was essentially the same film back in 1956. That one had Ingrid Bergman and Yul Brynner. The latter was born in Russia, so this actually makes sense. Unlike other films in which Brynner starred, like "The King and I."

What Russian wouldn't want to live like a Siamese king?

Anyway. Neither "Anastasia" was a Disney movie. Perhaps even more tragic than the general public's confusion on this point was the news a couple of years back that the remains of the last two Romanovs had been found, thus proving that in fact all of Nicholas II's family had been killed at Yekaterinburg. Historians have known for years that Anastasia had been among those murdered, and that her sister Marie was the one more likely to have escaped. And now we know that's not true, either.
Where was the "boy, the boy who opened a wall!" when you needed him? (By the way, Dimitri is perhaps the most endearing male character from any film, ever. I dare you to disagree.)

Now that I've spent most of my post raving about children's films, let's just talk about Nicholas II. Obviously, things didn't end up so well for him. I'd rather not get into that, because I find the idea of mass executions extremely disturbing, especially when children are involved. In any case, Nicholas worked pretty hard to be a good leader. He and his wife Alexandra wanted to do right by their people, but, frankly, how do you effectively deal with the epic wasteland of nutrient-poor soil that is Russia? The onset of World War One didn't do much to help out Russia's last royal family, either. I think it's fair to say Nicholas just wasn't cut out to rule.

But man, did he look good doing it!

And what an outfit!

Nicholas, for all his faults, was a family man. He loved buying Faberge eggs. Who wouldn't love a man that does that? And he had absolutely GORGEOUS blue eyes. Unfortunately, these are not well-conveyed in ancient sepia images.

But we're going to look anyway.

Revolution? What? I'm busy looking beautiful and bemused.

So, yeah. Nicholas II. A good-looking man who failed in his birthright, and who will subsequently be forever etched in the popular memory. (Case in point: people don't talk as much about Nicholas I. Except maybe for connoiseurs of Russia like Kate.)

As I sign off, I'd just like to add that in gathering these images, I came across the words "Anastasia" and "Disney" thrown together a few too many times for my tastes. Educate your friends, all!

Franz Liszt: So Hot He Made the Pageboy Haircut Look Good

You might be familiar with this catchy and slightly annoying tune: Lisztomania, or How Quickly Did this Band Sell Out, Eh?

It's talking about this hunk a hunk of chiseled Adonis:

Ungh. Oh my god. Look at those lips. 

Liszt was basically famous for music and being hot, although it's hard to tell which talent (?) made him more famous. He was from Hungary and seems to have gotten all the genes that exist in Hungary for hotness, which were then later reserved for the exclusive use of the Gabor sisters. Both were child prodigies, Franz in music and sex, Zsa Zsa and sisters, just, well, in sex.

    

 History will vindicate them. 

Liszt was, like way too many guys from the early 1800s, an emotional weepy pussy whose main occupation, other than playing music and staring into the distance wistfully: 

To his credit, a devastating gaze

Was falling in love with inappropriate women, which in 19th century speak, means having sex with lots of chicks he wasn't planning on marrying. He sexed Europe up so much, he has two Wikipedia articles: Franz Liszt, and The People Franz Liszt Had Sex With. Liszt got involved with princesses, countesses, dairymaids, chambermaids (all kinds of maids, really), and the barnstorming feminist author George Sand: 

Like Everest: because it's there

Now some of you may think that Danielle and I just have weird taste, but Liszt is certifiably hot. He was so hot, people literally collected his hair, spit, broken piano strings, and cigar butts, then encrusted them in jeweled settings as keep sakes. You thought I was kidding, didn't you?

Europe cannot even handle this shit

Liszt remained a sex symbol way into his old age, which I'm not going to show here and ruin your day with. He eventually gave up his wandering ways, having spent most of his youth sponging off of rich people in Europe, and instead took up the earliest form of internet trolling, writing musical reviews in which he wrote things like this:  "I find little in the works of Beethoven, Berlioz, Wagner and others when they are led by a conductor who functions like a windmill."

He also called people Hitler all the time 

All the World's a Stage, and Christopher Marlowe's Plays are on it, too!

Because I feel badly for my cop-out of a choice yesterday, I have selected for today's post a truly historical man of scalding good looks. When I think of "hotness," I cannot help but long for more than just a pretty face. Being "handsome" may be a merely physical quality; being "hot," as far as I'm concerned (and I think Kate would agree with me here) requires a certain degree of confidence. Not only confidence, but a voracious passion for whatever it is that you do. (As we know, for Keith Moon, this gusto was aimed towards drugs. And probably sex and rock and roll. But to a lesser degree than drugs.)

Yeah, that's right. I'm slowly killing myself! But I don't care, 'cause I'm hot.

Fortunately, Christopher Marlowe, our case study for today, was both brilliant and beautiful. And not, as far as I know, on drugs.

I shall don this pimped-out 16th-century frock smugly.

So listen up, ladies (and confused/generous gentlemen also reading along): who was good old Chris M.? Why, he was a lovely man born somewhere around 1564 (thanks to the Elizabethans for keeping only church records, and vague ones at that), who was stabbed to death in 1593! Wikipedia claims that Marlowe was known for his mysterious death. I'm gonna argue that there's not much that's "mysterious" about being stabbed to death. But why quibble? Wikipedia is, after all, "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" (according to their subline on Google search).

Indeed.

In any case, Marlowe is probably most famous for his dramatic works, rather than for his death. Unfortunately for Marlowe, he was sharing the title of well-received Elizabethan tragedian with none other than William Shakespeare. Obviously, Shakespeare was slightly more prolific and commercially-successful than his good-looking counterpart. Imagine if things had gone differently! High school might look like this instead:

I think we missed out, kids.

Interestingly enough, Marlowe is often credited with having written some of Shakespeare's works. As to whether or not this is true, we'll probably never be certain. The idea will, however, give scholars of British literature something to consider for the next century. It's not like the UK is really giving them much else to think about.

Jk, JK. I'm sure they'll be all over your next book, "Harry and Ginny go to Whitecastle."

So, yeah. Christopher Marlowe. Wrote "The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus," which turned the German legend of Faust into a dramatic work. One scene involves personified versions of the seven deadly sins romping around with Faustus. Both hilarious and heart-breaking (I don't think gluttony and adultery really get along; harder to find extramarital affairs when you've got a turkey leg shoved in your mouth), this scene proves Marlowe's creative genius. Even if he was a government spy, magician, or homosexual (all three very unacceptable for Elizabethan gentlemen), as Wikipedia suggests, I think he deserves hotness points for his writing. And that smug little smile you saw in his portrait back there. Adorable.

And that's History's Hotties for today. Next...Eleanor Roosevelt!

Only not really.