Let's all take turns listing some of the awesome things that happened in history that a lot of people know about, and historical facts that are interesting but little known or contrary to what most people know or believe. I'll start.
During the American Civil War, the King of Siam offered Abraham Lincoln a herd of war elephants as a gift. He politely declined to accept it.
During the first battle of the American Civil War, the Confederate's used a man named Wilmer McLean's as a command post. To get away from the war, McLean moved to Appomattox after the battle. When the Confederates decided to surrender at the end of the war, a messenger was sent to find a house suitable for Grant and Lee to meet for the surrender. The house the messenger found? Wilmer McLean's.
Chinese immigrants served in both the Union and Confederate militaries.
The Confederates wore butternut (which is brown) and scavenged Union blue more often than they wore grey.
Brazil has the largest population of japanese outside of Japan because when slavery was abolished the Japanese came to fill manual labor roles in agriculture. As employees, of course. not slaves.
Additionally there is a large italian population because as the japanese improved their standing over time and moved out of the roles of menial labor Italian immigrants came to replace them in the fields.
The word "NEWS" is actually an anagram for North, East, West, and South.
The Emancipation Proclamation did not free all the slaves in the US. It freed those in Confederate territory. It did not apply to slave-holding territories not part of the Confederacy at the time of the proclamation (Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, Tennessee, and some parts of Louisiana and Virginia [namely, what would become West Virginia]). The slaves in those areas were freed by separate actions. Slavery was not made illegal in all of the US until December 18th, 1865.
There was a fair amount of trench warfare during the American Civil War.
There are a lot of white people in South America. In some countries, such as Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, they are the majority. They also make up about half of Brazil.
The word "NEWS" is actually an anagram for North, East, West, and South.
Really? That's interesting.
"Gullible" is not actually in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Does that mean it's not a word?
Simo Hayha: baddest m#*+&*$!*+%@ to ever walk the planet.
(NSFW--on account of curse words).
Read that ages ago. It really needs to be applied to the whole of Finland in the Russo-Finnish war. They did not want to let the Russians walk all over them.
Simo Hayha: baddest m%*%#+$+%*!% to ever walk the planet.
(NSFW--on account of curse words).
That guy was like 18th level.
Yay! The return of random factoid history threads!
I'd have to check with my mother on who it was exactly, but somewhere up the family tree on the Italian side, everybody emigrated to Brazil. Luckily for me, my direct ancestor didn't get along with his stepmother, returned to Italy, and finally made his way to Massachusetts.
--Harriet Tubman was supposed to go with John Brown on his Harper's Ferry raid, but suffered one of her spells (she was prone to narcolpetic fits and seizures due to a childhood head trauma) and didn't make it.
Did you know Benito Mussolini was arrested by the Fascist (Italian) government and thrown in prison and had to be busted out by a Nazi commando team and reinstalled as head of the government?
I didn't until recently.
Do you know about fox-tossing? (Not for the squeamish)
Thanks to In Vino Veritas, who led me to discover this aristocratic pasttime.
Do you know about the Satanic verses?
Thanks to Salman Rushdie.
Christopher Columbus' first voyage left Spain the same day that was the deadline for all Jews to leave the country, he ordered his crew to sleep on board the night before in part because a significant portion of them were Jewish.
In the recounting of his log (the original hasn't survived) he awkwardly references the expulsion of the Jews as well.
Simo Hayha: baddest m*%~#&$!@#%# to ever walk the planet.
(NSFW--on account of curse words).
Can I feel proud about being Finnish now? XD
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- It is incorrectly noted that Thomas Edison invented push-ups in 1878. Nikolai Tesla had in fact patented the activity three years earlier, under the name "Tesla-cize."
- In Victorian England, a commoner was not allowed to look directly at the Queen, due to a belief at the time that the poor had the ability to steal thoughts. Science now believes that less than 4% of poor people are able to do this.
- In 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the slaves. Like everything he did, Lincoln freed the slaves while sleepwalking, and later had no memory of the event.
- Edmund Hilary, the first person to climb Mt. Everest, did so accidentally, while chasing a bird.
- The first commercial air flight took place in 1914. Everyone involved screamed the entire way.
- Before the Wright Brothers invented the airplane, anyone wanting to fly anywhere was required to eat 200 pounds of helium.
- Before the invention of scrambled eggs in 1912, the typical breakfast was either whole eggs still in the shell, or scrambled rocks.
- In 1948, at the request of a dying boy, baseball legend Babe Ruth at 75 hot dogs, then died of hot dog poisoning.
- William Shakespeare did not exist. His plays were masterminded in 1589 by Francis Bacon, who used a Ouiji board to enslave playwriting ghosts.
Did you know Benito Mussolini was arrested by the Fascist (Italian) government
He was formally impeached (by parlament even, i think), dimissed by the KING and legally charged with treason . The Nazis sold this as the "Badollio Betrayal".
Did you know that the "german" forces in Italy capitulated a good time before the rest of Nazi-Germany and acted as police-force until the allied-nations took over? The OSS/CIA didn´t believe the offer to be sincere, that why they didn´t capitulate even earlier.
PS: My grand-father jumped out of the HQ in Bozen in winter in a night-shift, with a MP and " larger amounts of ammo", to take it back from "true-believers-in-the-Endsieg-Nazis", that had managed to free themselves...by turning a stupid, young guard, while peeing. The execution-commando meant for my grand-pa got stuck en-route in Austria later, in late snow.
Can I feel proud about being Finnish now? XD
The Winter-wars were truly ugly. In ugliness, heroism and kill-ratio-wise they rank for me somewhere among the Thermopyles and Alamo... they took much longer, though.
On a side-note: paraphrased from a U.s. Brigadier-General ?, whose son? served with the Rangers in Somalia: They didn´t understand what everybody elses problem was with Somalia...they had a kill-ratio of 117:1.
Edmund Hilary, the first person to climb Mt. Everest, did so accidentally, while chasing a bird.
Because of this experience, he invented the word 'hilarious' which originally meant 'chasingly climbing'.
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The Welsh language is spoken in Wales, parts of England and Chubut province in Argentina.
There was a large concentration of Welsh people in the Applachian section of Southeast Ohio, such as Jackson County, Ohio and was nicknamed "Little Wales". The Welsh language was commonly spoken there for generations until the 1950s when its use began to subside.
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"Gullible" is not actually in the Oxford English Dictionary.Nor is it in the Collins Pocket Dictionary.
It is however in the Mcgraw-Hill international English dictionary.
Since someone had to respond...
In the dictionaryA popular test of gullibility is to tell a friend that the word gullible isn't in the dictionary; a gullible person might respond "Really?" and go to look it up.
The verb to gull and the noun cullibility (with a C) date back to Shakespeare and Swift, whereas gullibility is a relatively recent addition to the lexicon. It was considered a neologism as recently as the early 19th century. The OED gives gullible as a back-formation from gullibility, which is itself an alteration of cullibility.
Early editions of Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language, including those published in 1797 and 1804, do not contain "gullibility" or "gullible". An 1818 edition by Henry John Todd denounces "gullibility" as "a low expression, sometimes used for cullibility". Gullibility does not appear in Noah Webster's 1817 A dictionary of the English language, but it does appear in the 1830 edition of his American dictionary of the English language, where it is defined: "n. Credulity. (A low word)". Both gullibility and gullible appear in the 1900 New English Dictionary.
The tea act, which is most known for prompting the phrase "No taxation without representation" actually lowered the price of tea.
According to an article I read in awesome British rock mag, Mojo, The Kinks almost became victims of John Wayne Gacy. They were playing Chicago and needed a place to stay and guess who offered to put up the Davies brothers? They turned him down.
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The Welsh language is spoken in Wales, parts of England and Chubut province in Argentina.There was a large concentration of Welsh people in the Applachian section of Southeast Ohio, such as Jackson County, Ohio and was nicknamed "Little Wales". The Welsh language was commonly spoken there for generations until the 1950s when its use began to subside.
That's very cool.
A major cause in Iraq's disintegration after Hussein's defeat was the United State's absolute failure to keep Iraq's military structure intact, instead allowing the unpaid soldiers to totally disband. This led to a complete collapse in the country's internal enforcement structure and the subsequent looting which essentially destroyed the country's internal structure. We would spend the better part of a decade paying for that mistake.
I know. The german soldiers got Armbands..., which admitedly, i found strange, the first i heard it, Iraq drove the point home. Better weed out the "true-believers" and let the rest do their jobs, until the dust settles. Propably the Iraquis would have taken care of the bad-apples pretty quickly and forcefully themselves, had the Elite regiments been interned. Sadly, we´ll never see what impact the "arabian-spring" would have had on Saddam´s Iraq, i wonder.
Did you know Benito Mussolini was arrested by the Fascist (Italian) government and thrown in prison and had to be busted out by a Nazi commando team and reinstalled as head of the government?
I didn't until recently.
Read about it in a biography. They used gliders to drop the team in.
When Mussolini fell from power the second time, the Italians made sure he wasn't coming back by literally tearing him and his family to bits.
The Romanians did the same thing to Ceausescu and his family. Lords know, both he and his wife deserved it.
Ceausescu and his wife were the last people executed by the Romanian government. After they were shot, capital punishment was abolished in Romania.
The Welsh language is spoken in Wales, parts of England and Chubut province in Argentina.The English system of measures is no longer used in England.
Not officially, but if you watch British TV shows like Top Gear they still give speed and distance in miles and miles per hour. Metric may be the official measurement system, but the Imperial system lives on in British hearts.
The Irish were the first people in Europe to pass laws mandating religious tolerance. Unfortunately, Cromwell came, and that was the end of that.
Napoleon was also a champion of religious tolerance (he gave the Jews religious freedom), and, compared to other rulers of the day, actually rather liberal when it came to the rights of women. This did not endear him to the rest of Europe at all. If Napoleon had managed to conquer and keep Europe, it could actually have been a very good thing. Napoleon was much more liberal than his opponents (he may have been a tyrant, but so was everybody else in this period), and a unified Europe could have spared the world some of the worst wars in history.
Did you know Benito Mussolini was arrested by the Fascist (Italian) governmentHe was formally impeached (by parlament even, i think), dimissed by the KING and legally charged with treason . The Nazis sold this as the "Badollio Betrayal".
It was the Grand Council of Fascism. They moved that Victor Emmanuel III resume his powers, and then, yes, the king took him out.
Until, as Lazar points out, Nazis on gliders freed him.
Actually it was the Spanish Moors and other parts of Islamic-held Europe that beat them to that. Islam-held Spain in particular, became a sanctuary for European Jews, who were then persecuted again when Ferdinand and Isabella took that part of Spain back.The Irish were the first people in Europe to pass laws mandating religious tolerance. Unfortunately, Cromwell came, and that was the end of that.
I wouldn't be surprised by this. Historically, the Muslims were fairly tolerant when compared to Christians. It's only rather recently that this was reversed.
Some of the founding fathers of the US actually expressed respect for Islam. Thomas Jefferson even learned Arabic using a copy of the Quran.
A Muslim country (Morocco) was the first country to recognize the US as an independent state.
Did you know that there are more Muslim countries that ban the wearing of the burka than there are that mandate it? Why is this? The burka is actually a Middle Eastern custom, not an Islamic custom, and there are many Islamic countries outside the Middle East. In fact, of the four most populous Muslim countries, five have had women in the highest leadership positions.
The Irish were the first people in Europe to pass laws mandating religious tolerance. Unfortunately, Cromwell came, and that was the end of that.
Napoleon was also a champion of religious tolerance (he gave the Jews religious freedom), and, compared to other rulers of the day, actually rather liberal when it came to the rights of women. This did not endear him to the rest of Europe at all. If Napoleon had managed to conquer and keep Europe, it could actually have been a very good thing. Napoleon was much more liberal than his opponents (he may have been a tyrant, but so was everybody else in this period), and a unified Europe could have spared the world some of the worst wars in history.
Half the time I would honestly believe it if someone told me that everything Napoleon did was done to specifically piss everyone else off.
Half the time I would honestly believe it if someone told me that everything Napoleon did was done to specifically piss everyone else off.The Irish were the first people in Europe to pass laws mandating religious tolerance. Unfortunately, Cromwell came, and that was the end of that.
Napoleon was also a champion of religious tolerance (he gave the Jews religious freedom), and, compared to other rulers of the day, actually rather liberal when it came to the rights of women. This did not endear him to the rest of Europe at all. If Napoleon had managed to conquer and keep Europe, it could actually have been a very good thing. Napoleon was much more liberal than his opponents (he may have been a tyrant, but so was everybody else in this period), and a unified Europe could have spared the world some of the worst wars in history.
I dunno. Napoleon certainly had a lot of faults, but I think he'd have done a lot of good as the ruler of Europe if he hadn't been deposed.
I dunno. Napoleon certainly had a lot of faults, but I think he'd have done a lot of good as the ruler of Europe if he hadn't been deposed.Half the time I would honestly believe it if someone told me that everything Napoleon did was done to specifically piss everyone else off.The Irish were the first people in Europe to pass laws mandating religious tolerance. Unfortunately, Cromwell came, and that was the end of that.
Napoleon was also a champion of religious tolerance (he gave the Jews religious freedom), and, compared to other rulers of the day, actually rather liberal when it came to the rights of women. This did not endear him to the rest of Europe at all. If Napoleon had managed to conquer and keep Europe, it could actually have been a very good thing. Napoleon was much more liberal than his opponents (he may have been a tyrant, but so was everybody else in this period), and a unified Europe could have spared the world some of the worst wars in history.
Not saying that isn't the case -- simply that he enjoyed pissing people off while doing so. Not a bad trait to have sometimes.
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Do you know about fox-tossing? (Not for the squeamish)
Thanks to In Vino Veritas, who led me to discover this aristocratic pasttime.
Yeah, that was one that galloped into the annals of history and stayed there.
Gold was originally discovered in California on January 24, 1848. Mexico ceded California to the United States nine days later, partly because they didn't know, yet (although the military victories were more important at the time).
The Bear Flag Revolt had taken place a year and a half previous, in June and July 1846. The California Republic existed for a grand total of 26 days, in the hopes that the land would be annexed by the United States. At the time of the Bear Flag Revolt, the Californians didn't know that the United States had declared war on Mexico a month and a half earlier.
If anyone is wondering why California wanted to be annexed, it was in part because the Mexicans maintained a policy of accepting American immigrants to their vast northern territories which had very little infrastructure.
The state of "Wyoming" doesn't actually exist. Instead where it should be is the edge of the world.
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Half the time I would honestly believe it if someone told me that everything Napoleon did was done to specifically piss everyone else off.
That's a proud French tradition.
The French sent an army under Lt. General Rochambeau (and Compte de Grasse and Admiral Destouches) to fight the British alongside the colonials in the American Revolution, and I think everybody agrees they only did it to flip the bird to the Brits.
"We're going to send a dozen ships, six thousand men and 500,000 silver to support the colonials? Why?"
"Because it will piss off the British."
"Ah, oui! Tres bon!"
In fact, of the four most populous Muslim countries, five have had women in the highest leadership positions.Five out of four? That is most impressive. :)
Typo. Four out of five.
Half the time I would honestly believe it if someone told me that everything Napoleon did was done to specifically piss everyone else off.That's a proud French tradition.
The French sent an army under Lt. General Rochambeau (and Compte de Grasse and Admiral Destouches) to fight the British alongside the colonials in the American Revolution, and I think everybody agrees they only did it to flip the bird to the Brits.
"We're going to send a dozen ships, six thousand men and 500,000 silver to support the colonials? Why?"
"Because it will piss off the British."
"Ah, oui! Tres bon!"
Then we have Quebec. If it pisses off the Anglophones, they will do it. It's what I love about the French.
But the U.S. didn't want Texas for a variety of reasons,
This isn't history or a fact everyone doesn't know... ;D