I enjoyed reading about the history of the Monopoly board game, a history that turns out to be quite different than I had imagined.
The official history of Monopoly, as told by Hasbro, which owns the brand, states that the board game was invented in 1933 by an unemployed steam-radiator repairman and part-time dog walker from Philadelphia named Charles Darrow.
The game’s true origins, however, go unmentioned in the official literature. Three decades before Darrow’s patent, in 1903, a Maryland actress named Lizzie Magie created a proto-Monopoly as a tool for teaching the philosophy of Henry George, a nineteenth-century writer who had popularized the notion that no single person could claim to “own” land.
Watched a great documentary on Monopoly on Netflix the other day that hilit the same background data: Under the Boardwalk (http://www.monopolydocumentary.com | http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1250861)
Lots of other neat information therein, too 🙂