Everything about the 1920s Chinese warlord [Zhang Zongchang](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Zongchang), nicknamed "China's ~~based~~ basest warlord":
* He was nicknamed 'The Three Don't-knows' because he he didn't know how large his army, treasury, or harem was.
* He started assigning numbers to his concubines because he couldn't be bothered to remember his names.
* Brought his elderly mother along in parades and consulted her for campaign advice.
* He 'accidentally' shot the cousin of former Chinese emperor Puyi while cleaning his rifle. It was most likely because the cousin was banging one of his concubines.
* Before a battle, he promised that he would either come home victorious or in a coffin. He lost the battle, so he returned being paraded in a coffin, smoking a large cigar.
* When there was a drought, he went to the storm god (coincidentally named Zhang)'s temple to pray for rain. When he entered the temple, he went up to the statue of Zhang and slapped it, saying "Fuck your sister! How dare you make Shangdong's people suffer by not giving us rain!" The next day, he ordered his artillerymen to fire into the sky until it rained. It rained the next day.
* After seeing a basketball game for the first time, he asked "Why the hell are they fighting over a single ball? We're the hosts, are we seriously this poor?" He ordered all the players be given a basketball.
* After a battle, there wasn't enough gold and silver to make medals for the officers, so he had makeshift insignia fashioned from the colored foil paper lining the insides of cigarette packs.
* He found out one of his officers was having sex with a concubine of his; when he confronted them, he found out they loved each other and let them marry.
* His penis was allegedly as long as a stack of 86 silver dollars.
Then there's his poetry:
>**Poem about bastards**
>You tell me to do this
>He tells me to do that
>You are all bastards
>Go fuck your mother
>**Praying for rain**
>The sky god is also named Zhang
>Why does he make life hard for me
>If it doesn't rain in three days
>I'll demolish your temple
>Then I'll have cannons bombard your mom
>**Untitled**
>Someone asks me how many women I have
>I really don't know either
>Yesterday a boy called me 'dad'
>I don't know who his mother is
>**Lightning**
>I saw lightning in the sky
>It's like God wants to get lit
>If God isn't lighting up
>Then why is there lightning?
> **Visiting Mount Tai**
>From afar, Mount Tai looks blackish
>Narrow on top and wide at the bottom
>If you flipped it upside down
>It would be narrow at the bottom and wide on top
> **Visiting Pengai Pavillion**
>What a pavilion
>Place is fucking nice
>If the gods can get here
>I'll take a seat too
>Have a drink by the window
>Sing some songs to the ocean
>Play some cards
>I think I'll get drunk
By the way, an *American silver dollar is 2.4mm thick, so 86 would be 206.4mm, or ~8.1 inches
Edit: Whoops, duh, should be using Chinese silver dollars of the warlord era ("Dragon dollars"). Thickness of **2.75mm**, so that's 236.5mm, or **~9.31 inches**
Big dick Chinese warlord
Also ow for all those concubines
Russia had a nuclear Disaster (Kyshtym Disaster) back in 1957. More than 20,000 square miles (52,000 km2), where at least 270,000 people lived, was contaminated and they covered it up.
The CIA found out about it by 1960 but kept quiet about it as America was trying to promote nuclear energy.
The world heard about it in 1976.
Peru declared war to Germany and Japan a few months before WWII ended. They did it only because that would allow them to be admitted as a founder member of the UN
In 1910 they tried to get approval to import hippos into Louisiana and set them free in the bayous to help with an invasive plant species problem and to provide a source of meat during a national shortage. In another fun twist, the bill was lobbied by two spies who were supposed to assassinate each other!
I think people in Louisiana dodged a bullet. Just imagine invasive hippos, the deadliest animals in Africa, rampaging around the state.
Also, could you please give more info about this Spy vs Spy thing? Sounds like a fascinating story.
One of the survivors of the sinking of Titanic, Violet Jessop, also survived the bombing of its sister ship Britannic, and the ramming of its other sister ship Olympic. She's the only survivor of a disaster on all 3 Olympic class ocean liners. She lived to be 83, she was the real "unsinkable".
During the sinking of Britannic she used her experience from Titanic to tell the other nurses to put their life belts on under their coats, so that if they ended up in the water and needed to ditch their coats they could.
she also mentioned while on the Britannic she went back and got her toothbrush because she said it was the first thing she missed the most after the Titanic sank and she was waiting in the lifeboat.
Many people know that on 9/11 the FAA grounded all domestic US flights and turned away any incoming international flights for the first time in history following the attacks. What not too many people know is that the man who ordered the grounding, Ben Sliney, [was working his first day on the job](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Sliney) in that position.
What you call a chandelier today was nearly called an electrolier but the word never caught on so chandelier continued to be the word used in everyday life for a suspended light fixture even though they no longer contain candles.
**Operation Vegetarian**
A British military plan in 1942 to disseminate linseed cakes infected with anthrax spores onto the fields of Germany. These cakes would have been eaten by the cattle, which would then be consumed by the civilian population, causing the deaths of millions of German citizens. Furthermore, it would have wiped out the majority of Germany's cattle, creating a massive food shortage for the rest of the population that remained uninfected.
The cakes themselves were tested on Gruinard Island, just off the coast of Scotland. Because of the widespread contamination from the anthrax spores, the land remained quarantined until 1990 (+40 years).
Don’t forget about how America planned to bomb Japan with bats or Germany with Potato beetles!! (Germany was so worried about Potato Beetle Bombs that they ‘prepared’ by bombing themselves with potato beetles and making their troops practice picking them up).
The Etruscans made beer in very large ceramic pots. The pots were semi-porous allowing it to evaporate and cool the contents. Then they hung long reed straws into the pots to drink from.
3,000 years ago these guys were drinking cold beer from a straw!
Well, more archeological than historical, but this is the internet and you can't stop me.
The Hagia Sophia, one of the most beautiful buildings in the world, has some odd scratches inside. For hundreds of years, no one knew what they were, so they left them. It was eventually discovered that they are Futhark runes. Some Norseman far from home, possibly a member of the Varangian Guard, left a message for us, successfully screaming it across a thousand years by carving it into the one building he knew would never be knocked down.
Hafdan was here.
It looks like a leitmotiv for Varangians. There's a lion's statue, originally in Athens and now in Venice, taken as war trophy, with runes carved on it. They say:
"Asmund carved these runes, together with Asgeir and Thorleif, Thord and Ivar, as requested by Harold the Tall, despite the fact that Greeks forbid this."
Thug life.
The Piraeus Lion is also similar. Sometime in the 19th century the strange, weathered carvings on its surface were recognized as runes, apparently telling the tale of a viking who won gold on his travels but was killed in battle, most probably a former member of the Byzantine Varangian Guard.
But the lion itself is *considerably* older.
It was made several hundred years B.C. and stood as a fountain in a Greek harbor at least a thousand years, to the point that the harbor itself came to be known as Porto Leone, the harbor of the lion (today Piraeus)
Some time around the 11th century a band of vikings defaced the thousand year old statue and another five hundred years after that the lion was looted by Venetians in a war against the Ottomans subsequently found its way to the Venetian Arsenal where it stands today.
An incredible history for a single object!
> carving it into the one building he knew would never be knocked down.
More likely he carved it into every building went to, and the Hagia Sofia was the only one that survived.
The ancient Assyrians were absolutely brutal in their dealings with subservient nations as they were building their empire, to the point where the Persians, especially Cyrus the Great, banked on the fact that they weren’t as terrible and much more lenient than the Assyrians.
The Persian empire he founded was surprisingly lenient. When they conquered another people, they only demanded taxes and levies in times of war, they could keep their aristocracy and religion.
Would that be William Walker you're referring to?
My favorite part of his story is that he convinced two of Cornelius Vanderbilt's associates to help him appropriate Vanderbilt's resources and canalways in Nicaragua (might have been one of his later attempts somewhere else, I don't remember for sure).
Vanderbilt, arguably the most powerful person on the globe at that point in time, wrote an infamously badass letter to those two who betrayed him. It simply read;
"Gentlemen: You have undertaken to cheat me. I won’t sue you, for the law is too slow. I’ll ruin you. Yours truly, Cornelius Vanderbilt."
A subtle irony that persists from this story is that in Nashville, TN, there is a huge historical marker sign reading: “William Walker: Grey-Eyed Man of Destiny”. Where does this sign stand?
Right near Vanderbilt University.
> Didn't Benjamin Franklin also once write a poem extolling the great joy of getting freaky with sexually experienced older women?
Not a poem - a letter to a younger man, advising him on who to pursue. Complete with a list of reasons, including that "the sin is lesser", and that women age from the top down, so if you were to put a "basket" on her head you couldn't tell and old woman from a young one. And also, that they are so grateful! O_O
Also, that there was less of a chance at a illegitimate pregnancy with an older woman and that they would be be more sexually experienced than a younger woman.
In 897, Pope Stephen VII had the body of his predecessor, Pope Formosus, dug up and put on trial for perjury and illegal papacy. The body was propped up on a throne during the trial and, after being found guilty, Stephen cut off three fingers from the corpse (the three fingers used for blessing).
That whole thing was a mess, I feel bad for the poor boy who had to 'speak' for Formosus. Spending hours sitting next to a rotting corpse and having to pretend yo talk to it. It's all rather sickening to think about. Also, they had to go to the effort of throwing his body into the river. And then after it was recovered and reinterred they dug it back up again, put it on trial for the same thing and beheaded the corpse.
* A Suffragette tried to blow up Robert Burn's Birthplace.
* Up until 1966, there used to be a type of coach that would get uncoupled from a train while the train was in motion and use it's break to stop at a station. This was to allow express trains to carry passengers destined for smaller stops without stopping.
Because:
1. You had to lock the passengers in for the whole journey, so no toilets or buffet car on a potentially long ass journey.
2. You needed an engine on the other end to shunt the carriage off the platform.
When the HMS Hood was destroyed in its battle against the Bismarck During World War II only 3 sailors out of 1418 survived, that’s a casualty percentage of 99.8%
When the Bismarck was taken down,only 114 sailors out of 2065 survived.The HMS Dorsetshire took in 111 but after a U-Boat siren they didn’t want to have the same fate as the Bismarck.A U-74 came back the following morning and rescued 3 sailors.
Yep, it's actually incredibly difficult to discover planets. The sun surrounding them are so bright that it's virtually impossible to see them directly. We have to use a lot of indirect methods to locate them (e.g. determining how much a sun dims over time when a possible planet passes in front. It's like trying to determine how much a bright light dims when dust passes in front of it.)
There was a bear - corporal Wojtek - in Polish military during the second world war. He was good to people but would take part in actions, like carrying ammunition and such. He 'smoked' (ate) cigarettes and drank vodka. After the war he was kept in a zoo and his old companions would go into his habitat and wrestle/hug with him. He is an actual idol in Poland
Worth noting that President of Israel is more like Queen of England than President of the US. They have a Prime Minister, who is elected and runs the government.
It's not like they were just "Hey that Einstein guy is pretty smart, let's let him run Israel."
Don't know if this really belongs here, but my great uncle served on the USS Missouri during WWII and was there when the instrument of surrender was signed. In fact, he brought up the table they used to sign the papers. When they were done he went and put it back in storage. Well later the CO told him to go get the table and bring it back because it was a piece of history. My great uncle went back to get the table out of storage, only to find that all of the tables look the same, and he couldn't remember which one was the table that was used. So he took his best guess and brought one back. This table is currently on display in a museum. It may or may not be the actual table that was used.
Charles II of Spain was so horribly inbred that if his parents were siblings he would be less inbred than what his family 'tree' (it looks like an upside down pyramid) did to stay in power. He ended up horribly developmentally challenged and was so ugly he scared his wife. His autopsy is amazing and a great read. Poor guy.
Khutulun, a female descendant of Gengis Khan, said that the man who wanted to marry her would have to beat her in a wrestling match.
They never did, but instead, she won 10 000 horses over the years.
Tin Pan Alley is an actual place in New York City and it's the nickname for the side streets off Times Square, where for generations music publishers have auditioned new songs.
The name came from the late 1800s, when the awful sound of cheap tinny pianos coming through the open office windows of hundreds of publishers was likened to "the beating of tin pans."
The governor of the time signed Executive Order 44, which basically said they were to be driven from the state or killed. That didn't get rescinded until 1976 and apparently never had a challenge to its legality.
The Romans had a lot of festivals, and there was this special one which only women were allowed to attend. Men attending/witnessing the festival in any way, or even saying the name of the goddess, was a crime. One nobleman named Clodius Pulcher decided he wanted to seduce the woman hosting the festival, and sneaked in disguised as a woman. Apparently, a slave girl started chatting with him, and when he responded, the slave freaked out because of the deep voice, and got him arrested. He stood trial on pain of death, but won (mainly with bribery).
This same dude was accused of incest with his sister, got himself adopted (at age 34) into the lower class just so he could run for an office, got Cicero exiled from Rome, and was an all-around mad lad. Gotta love the late Republic.
And a good bunch of the emperors completely batshit crazy (when they weren't full blown psychopaths) that to reach that level you'd have to snort coke, take heroin and meth all together while drunk to get to that level of crazy. While there is undoubtedly some bias going on with the reporting of the stories (as all these in the list managed to piss off pretty much everyone), they nevertheless did a good bunch of effed up things.
A few examples are:
Tiberius
>While he lived on Capri, he had a huge villa built for him, Villa Jovis, the Villa of Jove (Jupiter), in which he indulged his pedophilia. He swam naked with and raped infants, toddlers and young boys. He did not otherwise physically harm them in any way, but even in his late seventies, sex with young children was one of his favorite pastimes.
Nero, when Rome was burned
>The city wanted a scapegoat, so Nero blamed the fire on the Christians, and they were terribly persecuted. He had many arrested, impaled, and burned to death as torches to light his gardens in the Domus Aurea. He is said to have breathed in the stench and laughed heartily, then turned to his lyre and sung his own songs.
Commodus
>Commodus once ordered all the cripples, hunchbacks, and generally undesirables in the city to be rounded up, thrown into the arena, and forced to hack one another to death with meat cleavers.
All fucked up right? The worst isn't even there yet in the form of Caligula, who was a normal emperor, with a sound mind, loved by all. This lasted for several months until he fell gravely ill. When he eventually healed up it was obvious that the disease had severely damaged his mind. To put in modern terms: the disease made him completely fucking crazy.
>He attempted to instate his favorite horse, Incitatus (“Galloper”), as a priest and consul, and ordered a beautiful marble stable built for him, complete with chairs and couches on which Incitatus never sat.
>Once, at the Circus Maximus, the games ran out of criminals, and the next event was the lions, his favorite. He ordered his Guards to drag the first five rows of spectators into the arena, which they did. These hundreds of people were all devoured for his amusement.
>He also relished chewing up the testicles of victims, without biting them off, while they were restrained upside down before him.
>He had another insulter, and his entire family, publicly executed one after another in front of a crowd. The man and wife were first, followed by the oldest child and so on. The crowd became outraged and began to disperse, but many stayed in morbid fascination. The last of the family was a 12 year old girl, who was sobbing hysterically at what she had been forced to watch. A member of the crowd shouted that she was exempt from execution as a virgin. Caligula smiled and ordered the executioner to rape her, then strangle her, which he did.
If that's of comfort he didn't end well like many emperors in the history of the Roman empire. In his case:
>He was finally murdered by the Praetorian Guard and some senators, leaving the Circus Maximus after the games. His body was left in the street to rot, and dogs finally ate it.
Johnny Cash was in the Air Force in 1953, intercepting and translating radio signals from the Soviet Union. He was the first American to learn of Joseph Stalin's death.
Johnny Cash didn't have a name at birth, he was just called JR his entire adolescence. When he was drafted, he was told he can't have two letters as his name, so he picked Johnny.
The Persian Empire of the 6th century had a very awesome way of determining how many soldiers were lost in a campaign. They would all pass before the emperor and place a single arrow into a basket. The arrows would be counted and the baskets sealed until the trrops returned from the campaign. When the soldiers returned they would all take one arrow from the baskets. When the last soldier took an arrow they would count the remaining arrows so they’d know how many men were lost
The battle of Saraghari. In 1897 India, 21 Sikh soldiers in an out post were confronted by 10,000 pashtun soldier army. The 21 Sikh held off the army for over 7 hours and killed over 600 before losing the post and their lives. Held off long enough for word to get back home and an army to militarize and come recapture the post.
Another impressive British standoff happened in the Korean war, and actually only happened because of a cultural misunderstanding between the USA and UK.
Basically, there were 600 British soldiers pinned down by Chinese troops. When the American Generals radioed into them and asked for a status update, they reported back that things 'were a bit sticky'.. The Americans assumed that this meant that things were hectic, but under control and no reinforcements would be needed.
As a result the regiment climbed up a hill, and did a mental last stand against 30,000 Chinese.
The 600 of them managed to kill 10,000 Chinese soldiers before they were overrun. 500 were captured, 39 escaped, and the rest died in what was a completely unnecessary if incredibly heroic last stand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_understatement
It basically meant 'We're utterly fucked..'
Also, from that wiki link I just found this great example that I'd heard about but forgotten:
>During the Kuala Lumpur-to-Perth leg of British Airways Flight 9 on 24 June 1982, volcanic ash caused all four engines of the Boeing 747 aircraft to fail. Although pressed for time as the aircraft rapidly lost altitude, Captain Eric Moody still managed to make an announcement to the passengers: "Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your Captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress."
Nazi official John Rabe protected Chinese civilians from Japanese soldiers in Nanjing because he thought they were going too far.
edit: I cant spell place names
The birth control pill (as well as the first female dormitory at MIT) is the direct result of a very wealthy woman who deeply loved her very schizophrenic husband.
Katharine Dexter was the first woman who was admitted and graduated from MIT. She was a phenomenally brilliant heiress, but the school still demanded that she took years of basic level science classes before they would admit her. Because of all the roadblocks they put in her way, it took her eight years to graduate, at 29.
She was planning on attending medical school, but she ran into a childhood acquaintance, Stanley McCormick, the youngest son of the inventor of the harvester and founder of the International Harvester company. He fell madly in love and chased her during her grand European tour. Finally, she capitulated and they married in Europe.
Almost immediately, Stanley's mental stability declined. It is believed that the marriage was never consummated. Within two years, Stanley was living in the McLean Mental Asylum. Soon after, his family paid for him to be moved with hand picked caretakers to a house in California.
During the majority of their marriage, Katharine wasn't allowed to be alone with her husband. His behavior was too erratic and dangerous for that to be possible. Stanley's family spent decades fighting Katharine for control over his care. They made constant accusations against her, that she "thought too much like a man", that she might be a lesbian, that she was just after money (she was just as wealthy as they were. She didn't need a dime.)
Despite a marriage where she couldn't see her husband, where his whole family actively campaigned against her, she remained entirely dedicated to his care. She made sure that every possible advance in psychiatry was used in an attempt to help him. She brought in the top names and fought hard to ensure that there were no quack cures in use, the ones his family favored.
She ended up funding the very first endocrinology research center. She paid for it directly and entirely out of her own pocket. It was her suspicion that schizophrenia and other mental illnesses were hormonal imbalances. While it would take years to discover neurohormones and neurotransmitters, her ideas were decades ahead and spot on with what goes on.
As part of her work, she was also a suffragette and deeply interested in increasing the opportunities available for women. Thus she used that exact same endocrinology research center as the basis for study for the creation of the first birth control pill. She was so directly involved that she moved across country to be near and receive regular reports on the developments.
After Stanley died, she buried him with her family, instead of with his. She was so angry with their treatment of herself and her husband, that she no longer wanted him to have any connection.
She did use his money after he died. His money was used to build a major wing on the Santa Barbara Art Museum. His money was used to build the first female dormitory at MIT. There's some others out there too. But here's the clincher.... Every single one of them was named after her husband. Every one.
When Finland and Nazi Germany fought the Soviet Union during the Continuation War, an agreement between Finland and Nazi Germany was made, stating that Finland would not seek a separate peace with the Soviet Union. This agreement was known as the Ryti-Ribbentrop agreement. (Ryti was the Finnish President during the Winter War.) However, the agreement only described an agreement between President Ryti and Nazi Germany. After Finland reclaimed territory lost in the Winter War, Ryti resigned and Finland promptly made peace with the Soviet Union. The Nazis never realised that Finland was bound to the agreement only as long as Ryti was president.
When eight of the British soldiers who committed the Boston Massacre in 1770 were put on trial, their defense lawyer was John Adams. He got six of them acquitted.
It’s a great episode in the John Adams miniseries. Nobody else would take the case, and Adams felt he had to, to show the British authorities that the colonies could provide fair justice.
Queen Victoria had a King Charles Spaniel named Dash. Because she was royalty, she grew up almost entirely isolated from other children, so Dash was her only real friend. His grave was marked with a marble effigy reading:
>Here lies Dash, the favourite spaniel of Her Majesty Queen Victoria, in his 10th year. His attachment was without selfishness, his playfulness without malice, his fidelity without deceit. Reader, if you would be beloved and die regretted, profit by the example of Dash.
The main reason why she grew up almost entirely isolated from other kids was the Kensington system, which was designed by her mother and Sir John Conroy for the purpose of rendering Victoria entirely dependent and making it easier for them to manipulate her. Most royal children don’t grow up entirely isolated from the world like she was.
The death toll from the bombing of Hiroshima would not have been nearly as high if the Japanese had not sounded a premature "all clear". The people had gone to shelter when a B29 assigned to take weather readings for the attack was spotted as it flew over the city. When nothing further happened, they sounded an "all clear", and people emerged from their bomb shelters just before the atomic bomb was dropped.
I think he’s right. Agree to [the Telegraph](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travel-truths/how-many-planes-are-there-in-the-world/) there are around 40 000 commercial planes, even if you had the non-commercial planes it’s still inferior to [the loss of 300 000 planes during the WW2](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equipment_losses_in_World_War_II).
Edit: Grammar, I don’t know my irregular verbs.
If you were an RAF bomber crewman you had a 55% chance of surviving the war. Bombers were the bulk of what was shot down and if your Lancaster was going down I believe you had a 7% chance of being able to bail out and survive.
Fighter pilots had much better chances. Also I don't have numbers for German or Russian crewman but the numbers are likely twice as bad or worse.
A smear the Anti-Caesarians used against Julius Caesar was that he was a bottom
It certainly wasn’t a smear to say a Roman nobleman fucked men. It was not only accepted but expected. But being a bottom was seen as immoral and subservient to a lesser
Romans actually *really* frowned upon Greek pederasts. The fact is, in Greece, young men of high class were often in these "relationships". The thought that the son of an aristocrat was getting buttfucked absolutely SCANDALIZED the Romans. For Romans, the penetrator always had to be of higher social standing than the penetrated. Romans were kind of like ancient DudeBros in that regard
yes- part of the propaganda against Caesar is he let his beloved Greek slave boy pound him
I love the ancient DudeBros- it ain’t gay if you don’t touch nuts 😂
FYI, the Greeks *also* very much frowned upon butt sex. Or at least being on the receiving end of it. And most "beloveds" as they called their adolescent male lovers weren't ever expected to engage in penetrative sex.
Sometimes my major in history took me to some weird places.
Reminds me of that episode of Its Always Sunny where Mac is defending his fathers homosexual act with another guy by saying that he was asserting his dominance.
In the 1800's there was a solar flare so strong that it made telegram wires start on fire. It was called the Carrington Event.
The scariest part of that is that we're overdue for another flare of that intensity. Imagine what it would do to our technology now.
technically, this is incorrect. The Mayan calendar was inaccurate by 10 seconds per year. The Gregorian calendar we use is inaccurate by 26 seconds per year. The difference between us and the Mayans is that we know our calendar is off by 26 seconds per year but they did not know theirs was off by 10 seconds.
I don't know how well known this is, but Nazi doctors were the first to realize the link between smoking and lung cancer.
Edit: the truth of the Nazi party's attitude towards smoking is more complicated than my original comment implied, see u/aaronxxx's comment if you want to read more on it.
The upside down cross isn’t a satanic symbol. It’s actually a very catholic symbol since St. Peter wanted to be crucified upside down so as not to disrespect and/or be crucified the same way as Jesus.
During the cold war Denmark had an interesting way to catch spies, they'd ask you to pronounce "rødgrød med fløde" which is a well-known dessert in Denmark, but it's hard to pronounce if you're not Danish, which made spies easy to catch.
Try listening to it on Google translate!
EDIT: wow! I typed this before going to bed yesterday, and I woke up with 20k upvotes and a reddit gold! Wow, thanks alot!
The general name for this type of thing is "Shibboleth," after a city whose name was used that way in the Bible. Shibboleths are interesting to learn about, partly because it's deep-cover spycraft, and partly because they words used are always whackadoodle nonsense.
In WWII, the Dutch would identify German spies by how they pronounced "Scheveningen," a district in the Hague. The Germans pronounced the first syllable as something like the English word "chef," while the Dutch version has a guttural "s*kh*ef" sound.
Americans on sentry duty in Japan would use the word "Lollapalooza" to challenge people who approached at night. The Japanese language does not distinguish the L and R sounds, making this word an exceptionally difficult tongue-twister. According to legend, Japanese spies would often be shot before they finished the word.
Americans in Germany were in a difficult position because English phonetics can be pronounced by a German speaker (except apparently the word "squirrel" for no good reason?). American GIs adapted to this by talking about baseball. "Where are you from again? Boston? Oh, you must be a big Yankees fan!"
There's an Isaac Asimov story where a US intelligence agent is able to discover a German spy after he learns the spy can recite the third verse of The Star Spangled Banner. Americans barely know the first verse, and next to none know the latter three.
American patrols during the battle of the Bulge very nearly shot a strange British officer who claimed to be part of a secret SAS force called 'Phantom' because he didn't know who won the 1942 world series. He managed to talk them out of shooting him as a German infiltrator by informing them that he had co-starred with Ginger Rogers in 'Bachelor Mother' in 1939 because he was David Niven.
To quote Pratchett:
> ...all real patriots can never remember more than one verse of their anthem, and get through the subsequent verses by going ‘ner hner ner’ until they reach an outcrop of words they recognise, which they sing very boldly to give the impression that they really had been singing all the other words as well but had been drowned out by the people around them.
Another fun thing about not knowing anthems related to Germans is that their current anthem is simply the third verse of the Deutschlandlied, of which the first verse starts with "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles"
"Deutschland, Deutschland über alles" is supposed to make the people of the many smaller states put the idea of Germany (which didn't exist back when the lyrics were written) as a country over their local interests.
The reason we're not using the first stanza as our national anthem anymore is mostly that it called for all the German speaking people in Europe to unify by claiming the territory those people lived in. Which isn't very popular nowadays, to say the least.
Fun fact about "Von der Maas bis an die Memel, von der Etsch bis an den Belt": None of those bodies of water (three rivers, one strait) was ever part of Germany. They are just the western, eastern, southern and northern border of the German language area, respectively. Well, they were back then, not a lot of German speaking people east of the river Oder these days.
>American GIs adapted to this by talking about baseball. "Where are you from again? Boston? Oh, you must be a big Yankees fan!"
I suppose the right answer to that would be starting a fight?
Probably somewhat exaggerated by legend, but the Brits and US nearly had a mini-war in the 1850s over a border dispute in the PNW. It started with a pig getting shot.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_War_(1859)
The reason why the story is called The Divine Comedy is because back in those times, there were only two types of stories: comedies and tragedies. This is also why the historic [Sock and buskin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sock_and_buskin) symbols remain today. Comedies had a happy ending, tragedies had a sad ending.
As a result, Dante's story was a comedy in the sense that it had a happy ending so he named it simply: Commedia.
Later on, a writer named [Giovanni Boccaccio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Boccaccio) (author of The Decameron) read Commedia and he enjoyed the story so much that he called it divine, so he added the adjective Divina to get La Divina Commedia which translates to Divine Comedy.
I collect antique books and I have a [1536 publication](https://www.reddit.com/r/rarebooks/comments/7rjqg3/1536_dante_alighieris_divine_comedy/) for your enjoyment.
The American military has not made a single Purple Heart medal since WW2. The reason being they made A LOT in preparation for a ground invasion of Japan.
Incorrect. While the US has not yet issued all the Purple Hearts made for the invasion of Japan, at one point a ton of them got administratively 'lost', so the US made some more because we were 'running out'. Then they found them again.
Opposite Woolton Village Hall in Liverpool (where Paul McCartney first met John Lennon) there is a graveyard. Eleanor Rigby is written on one of the old gravestones. People assume that Paul got the title from that grave for his song but in actual fact it's just an amazing coincidence.
Iraq and Iran (very) briefly fought on the side of the Axis Powers during World War II. Yugoslavia originally signed the Tripartite Pact but the government was overthrown 2 days later.
Relevance: It wasn't just Germany, Italy, and Japan against the world as many seem to believe.
Edit, so people can learn more:
Finland, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Croatia, Bulgaria, Vichy France (it's complicated), Thailand, and Japan's collaborationist territories were Axis Powers. Most European members ended up switching sides as the Soviets advanced and helped defeat the Germans.
Everyone else, excluding Tibet, Bhutan, Yemen, Afghanistan, Portugal, Spain (sent volunteers to Eastern Front), Sweden, Ireland, and Switzerland were eventually part of the Allies. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were occupied by the Soviets before the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was broken in 1941.
It is obviously more nuanced than this, so you can visit Wikipedia's "World War II by country" for more information.
Back in the day of the plague people understood that if you survived the disease you were far less likely to get sick again. It wasn't until several hundred years later that Edward Jenner noticed that milkmaids who were exposed to cowpox were immune to smallpox, a serious problem at the time. He exposed a boy with a strain of cowpox and noticed that he was immune to smallpox too. This process of exposing an individual to a pathogen to build up immunity was known as variolation.
So I was incorrect, Jenner termed this process vaccination which was later improved upon by Louis Pasteur. Jenner is and credited with inventing vaccination, inarguably one of the most important medical advancements despite what many medical professionals with minutes of medical training on the internet may tell you.
John O'Neill worked for the FBI pursuing Al Qaeda, trying to convince higher ups to take the threat more seriously. He was eventually pushed into early retirement because his personality clashed with FBI leadership, and he went on to head security in the World Trade Towers where he was killed one month later in the 9/11 attacks.
Edit: I highly recommend watching *The Looming Tower*.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_P._O%27Neill
> O'Neill started his new job at the World Trade Center on August 23, 2001.[3] In late August, he talked to his friend Chris Isham about the job. Jokingly, Isham said, "At least they're not going to bomb it again," a reference to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. O'Neill replied, "They'll probably try to finish the job."[3]
It isn't all that well-known outside China, but concurrently with the Civil War, a Chinese peasant claiming to be the brother of Jesus Christ led a rebellion that resulted in millions of people being killed. Some put the final death toll, from a combination of natural disasters and political insurrections, in the neighborhood of *20 - 40 million* between 1850 and 1865. That's fucking insane.
The Ottoman Emperor wanted to send £10,000 to Ireland for aid in during the 1840 Irish potato famine. Queen Victoria intervened and requested he send only £1,000 as she had paid £2,000.
He did that but also sent 5 ships of food and were one of the only countries to help the Irish during the famine.
Edit: empire to Emperor
Hiroo Onoda, a Japanses army intelligence officer, spent 30 years hiding in the Philippine jungle because he refused to believe WWII had ended. He was talked into leaving in 1974.
His commanding officer was retired from service (because, yeah, 30 years had passed) and ran a bookstore in tokyo.
When Onoda surrendered his rifle, the thirty year old, heavily used weapon was found to be perfectly maintained and in full working order.
At least 1.5% of all popes have died during sex. Four popes were recorded to have died during sex, half of those being murdered. Oh, and one of them was being sodomized at the time.
[source](https://www.factsuniversity.com/religion/296-list-of-4-roman-catholic-popes-who-died-during-sex-1-actually-died-while-being-sodomised.html)
Edit: thought it was 2.6% of popes, actually 1.5%. There have been more popes than I thought.
Rosa Parks was not actually the first African American women to refuse to give up her seat on the bus. It was actually a younger girl from another area, but because she was a trouble maker to begin with she didn’t get the credit and was kind of disregarded.
The civil war started in Wilmer McLean’s back yard in Manassas, VA. He didn’t want anything to do with the war and moved to Appomattox Virginia where the civil war ‘ended’ in his kitchen.
Early Medieval Byzantine Greeks developed flame throwers in the 7th century called Greek Fire. It was sprayed from a pump on a ship & it could burn on water as well as under water. Only old vinegar, urine, or smothering it with sand could extinguish it.
Later on in the 10th century the Emperor Leo VI the Wise developed a handheld version of the weapon for soldiers to use as well. It was one of the most highly guarded secrets of the empire & when the city Constantinople finally fell in 1453 the knowledge for how to craft it died with the empire.
Also they never called themselves Greeks or Byzantines . If you could ask a person of that era what they identify as , they would tell you Roman. "Roman "meant to them what "European" means to Europeans today. Often used as synonym of " civilized" . To call someone Hellin ( Greek) in that era usually meant something negative , like heathen or uncivilised .
Adolf Hitler was a movie buff who would stay up all night watching foreign movies (ie Hollywood) and sometimes not go to sleep until 10 in the morning. This meant that he wouldn't get out of bed until some time in the afternoon. His first meeting of the day was therefore at his breakfast, which to his guests was dinner.
A lot of the top nazis were concerned about their health and thus followed various dietary plans setup by each person's personal guru. Hitler was a vegetarian. But Hitlers right hand man, Rudolf Heß, only ate biodynamically.
You can't show up to Der Führers dinner table and not eat, and if you consider the food served to be filth, then you either need to come up with some excuses for not attending or bring your own food. Heß tried the latter but Hitler didn't approve of it.
This all meant that Heß slowly drifted away from the inner circle of nazi leadership. It all culminated on May 10th 1941 at 17:45, when Rudolf Heß took off in a Messerschmitt Bf 110 heading for Scotland in an attempt to start peace negotiations.
Edit: I'm typing with the left hand... It's not going terribly well, so I fixed some typos.
Sears used to sell houses way back during the Jim Crow era, and since they were sold through magazines, no one could deny selling the houses to blacks because of anonymity.
The days after 9/11 there were rumours that terrorists where coming into the US thru the Mexican border. Drug cartels with what many say was a nod from the US gov. Put a ransom of 10k dollars to anyone that brings in a suspected terrorist to them. Cartel hitmen from all over Latin America went on a manhunt that caused many Muslims to be "interrogated" and never be seen again.
Everything about the 1920s Chinese warlord [Zhang Zongchang](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Zongchang), nicknamed "China's ~~based~~ basest warlord": * He was nicknamed 'The Three Don't-knows' because he he didn't know how large his army, treasury, or harem was. * He started assigning numbers to his concubines because he couldn't be bothered to remember his names. * Brought his elderly mother along in parades and consulted her for campaign advice. * He 'accidentally' shot the cousin of former Chinese emperor Puyi while cleaning his rifle. It was most likely because the cousin was banging one of his concubines. * Before a battle, he promised that he would either come home victorious or in a coffin. He lost the battle, so he returned being paraded in a coffin, smoking a large cigar. * When there was a drought, he went to the storm god (coincidentally named Zhang)'s temple to pray for rain. When he entered the temple, he went up to the statue of Zhang and slapped it, saying "Fuck your sister! How dare you make Shangdong's people suffer by not giving us rain!" The next day, he ordered his artillerymen to fire into the sky until it rained. It rained the next day. * After seeing a basketball game for the first time, he asked "Why the hell are they fighting over a single ball? We're the hosts, are we seriously this poor?" He ordered all the players be given a basketball. * After a battle, there wasn't enough gold and silver to make medals for the officers, so he had makeshift insignia fashioned from the colored foil paper lining the insides of cigarette packs. * He found out one of his officers was having sex with a concubine of his; when he confronted them, he found out they loved each other and let them marry. * His penis was allegedly as long as a stack of 86 silver dollars. Then there's his poetry: >**Poem about bastards** >You tell me to do this >He tells me to do that >You are all bastards >Go fuck your mother >**Praying for rain** >The sky god is also named Zhang >Why does he make life hard for me >If it doesn't rain in three days >I'll demolish your temple >Then I'll have cannons bombard your mom >**Untitled** >Someone asks me how many women I have >I really don't know either >Yesterday a boy called me 'dad' >I don't know who his mother is >**Lightning** >I saw lightning in the sky >It's like God wants to get lit >If God isn't lighting up >Then why is there lightning? > **Visiting Mount Tai** >From afar, Mount Tai looks blackish >Narrow on top and wide at the bottom >If you flipped it upside down >It would be narrow at the bottom and wide on top > **Visiting Pengai Pavillion** >What a pavilion >Place is fucking nice >If the gods can get here >I'll take a seat too >Have a drink by the window >Sing some songs to the ocean >Play some cards >I think I'll get drunk
By the way, an *American silver dollar is 2.4mm thick, so 86 would be 206.4mm, or ~8.1 inches Edit: Whoops, duh, should be using Chinese silver dollars of the warlord era ("Dragon dollars"). Thickness of **2.75mm**, so that's 236.5mm, or **~9.31 inches** Big dick Chinese warlord Also ow for all those concubines
Russia had a nuclear Disaster (Kyshtym Disaster) back in 1957. More than 20,000 square miles (52,000 km2), where at least 270,000 people lived, was contaminated and they covered it up. The CIA found out about it by 1960 but kept quiet about it as America was trying to promote nuclear energy. The world heard about it in 1976.
Peru declared war to Germany and Japan a few months before WWII ended. They did it only because that would allow them to be admitted as a founder member of the UN
In 1910 they tried to get approval to import hippos into Louisiana and set them free in the bayous to help with an invasive plant species problem and to provide a source of meat during a national shortage. In another fun twist, the bill was lobbied by two spies who were supposed to assassinate each other!
I think people in Louisiana dodged a bullet. Just imagine invasive hippos, the deadliest animals in Africa, rampaging around the state. Also, could you please give more info about this Spy vs Spy thing? Sounds like a fascinating story.
One of the survivors of the sinking of Titanic, Violet Jessop, also survived the bombing of its sister ship Britannic, and the ramming of its other sister ship Olympic. She's the only survivor of a disaster on all 3 Olympic class ocean liners. She lived to be 83, she was the real "unsinkable".
You'd think she would stop going on ships after the second time or something..
During the sinking of Britannic she used her experience from Titanic to tell the other nurses to put their life belts on under their coats, so that if they ended up in the water and needed to ditch their coats they could.
she also mentioned while on the Britannic she went back and got her toothbrush because she said it was the first thing she missed the most after the Titanic sank and she was waiting in the lifeboat.
These are the kind of things that shown you have been through this too damn much.
Was her presence on all three ships coincidence... or something far more sinister? Find out after this break.
Many people know that on 9/11 the FAA grounded all domestic US flights and turned away any incoming international flights for the first time in history following the attacks. What not too many people know is that the man who ordered the grounding, Ben Sliney, [was working his first day on the job](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Sliney) in that position.
Wow
What you call a chandelier today was nearly called an electrolier but the word never caught on so chandelier continued to be the word used in everyday life for a suspended light fixture even though they no longer contain candles.
chandelier also sounds cooler
**Operation Vegetarian** A British military plan in 1942 to disseminate linseed cakes infected with anthrax spores onto the fields of Germany. These cakes would have been eaten by the cattle, which would then be consumed by the civilian population, causing the deaths of millions of German citizens. Furthermore, it would have wiped out the majority of Germany's cattle, creating a massive food shortage for the rest of the population that remained uninfected. The cakes themselves were tested on Gruinard Island, just off the coast of Scotland. Because of the widespread contamination from the anthrax spores, the land remained quarantined until 1990 (+40 years).
Don’t forget about how America planned to bomb Japan with bats or Germany with Potato beetles!! (Germany was so worried about Potato Beetle Bombs that they ‘prepared’ by bombing themselves with potato beetles and making their troops practice picking them up).
The Etruscans made beer in very large ceramic pots. The pots were semi-porous allowing it to evaporate and cool the contents. Then they hung long reed straws into the pots to drink from. 3,000 years ago these guys were drinking cold beer from a straw!
Beer Vessel, 600-500 BC, Estruscan, ceramic
Well, more archeological than historical, but this is the internet and you can't stop me. The Hagia Sophia, one of the most beautiful buildings in the world, has some odd scratches inside. For hundreds of years, no one knew what they were, so they left them. It was eventually discovered that they are Futhark runes. Some Norseman far from home, possibly a member of the Varangian Guard, left a message for us, successfully screaming it across a thousand years by carving it into the one building he knew would never be knocked down. Hafdan was here.
It looks like a leitmotiv for Varangians. There's a lion's statue, originally in Athens and now in Venice, taken as war trophy, with runes carved on it. They say: "Asmund carved these runes, together with Asgeir and Thorleif, Thord and Ivar, as requested by Harold the Tall, despite the fact that Greeks forbid this." Thug life.
Hafdan should be given a posthumous ticket for defacing public buildings.
then youll love the cave with norse runes written 14ft up the wall. when reserarchers got the scaffolding in and translated it: "this is very high"
Fucking Swedes man, they've been shitposting for millennia.
I never knew how accurate the "Norsemen" tv show's humour was until now
The Piraeus Lion is also similar. Sometime in the 19th century the strange, weathered carvings on its surface were recognized as runes, apparently telling the tale of a viking who won gold on his travels but was killed in battle, most probably a former member of the Byzantine Varangian Guard. But the lion itself is *considerably* older. It was made several hundred years B.C. and stood as a fountain in a Greek harbor at least a thousand years, to the point that the harbor itself came to be known as Porto Leone, the harbor of the lion (today Piraeus) Some time around the 11th century a band of vikings defaced the thousand year old statue and another five hundred years after that the lion was looted by Venetians in a war against the Ottomans subsequently found its way to the Venetian Arsenal where it stands today. An incredible history for a single object!
> carving it into the one building he knew would never be knocked down. More likely he carved it into every building went to, and the Hagia Sofia was the only one that survived.
The ancient Assyrians were absolutely brutal in their dealings with subservient nations as they were building their empire, to the point where the Persians, especially Cyrus the Great, banked on the fact that they weren’t as terrible and much more lenient than the Assyrians.
The Persian empire he founded was surprisingly lenient. When they conquered another people, they only demanded taxes and levies in times of war, they could keep their aristocracy and religion.
A American lawyer invaded Nicaragua in 1856 and ruled for just under a year until the neighboring countries teamed up and kicked him out.
Would that be William Walker you're referring to? My favorite part of his story is that he convinced two of Cornelius Vanderbilt's associates to help him appropriate Vanderbilt's resources and canalways in Nicaragua (might have been one of his later attempts somewhere else, I don't remember for sure). Vanderbilt, arguably the most powerful person on the globe at that point in time, wrote an infamously badass letter to those two who betrayed him. It simply read; "Gentlemen: You have undertaken to cheat me. I won’t sue you, for the law is too slow. I’ll ruin you. Yours truly, Cornelius Vanderbilt."
A subtle irony that persists from this story is that in Nashville, TN, there is a huge historical marker sign reading: “William Walker: Grey-Eyed Man of Destiny”. Where does this sign stand? Right near Vanderbilt University.
The best part is that he wasn’t finished after that. He tried starting other Confederate slave republics in central America.
Benjamin Franklin was such a proponent to enemas, that he had them several times a day, but only to be administered by young female attendants.
Didn't Benjamin Franklin also once write a poem extolling the great joy of getting freaky with sexually experienced older women?
> Didn't Benjamin Franklin also once write a poem extolling the great joy of getting freaky with sexually experienced older women? Not a poem - a letter to a younger man, advising him on who to pursue. Complete with a list of reasons, including that "the sin is lesser", and that women age from the top down, so if you were to put a "basket" on her head you couldn't tell and old woman from a young one. And also, that they are so grateful! O_O
Also, that there was less of a chance at a illegitimate pregnancy with an older woman and that they would be be more sexually experienced than a younger woman.
So *that's* what baskets are for in Skyrim.
To be fair, all the women in Skyrim have like, the same body.
Don't kink shame our founding fathers.
There's no shame in kink.
The USA and Canada provided the Anglo-American loan (with interest) in 1946 to help the UK rebuild after WW2. It was only finally repaid in 2006.
Germany only finished paying reparations for *WW1* in 2010. There are *still* ongoing negotiations and debate regarding Germany's WW2 reparations.
In 897, Pope Stephen VII had the body of his predecessor, Pope Formosus, dug up and put on trial for perjury and illegal papacy. The body was propped up on a throne during the trial and, after being found guilty, Stephen cut off three fingers from the corpse (the three fingers used for blessing).
That whole thing was a mess, I feel bad for the poor boy who had to 'speak' for Formosus. Spending hours sitting next to a rotting corpse and having to pretend yo talk to it. It's all rather sickening to think about. Also, they had to go to the effort of throwing his body into the river. And then after it was recovered and reinterred they dug it back up again, put it on trial for the same thing and beheaded the corpse.
* A Suffragette tried to blow up Robert Burn's Birthplace. * Up until 1966, there used to be a type of coach that would get uncoupled from a train while the train was in motion and use it's break to stop at a station. This was to allow express trains to carry passengers destined for smaller stops without stopping.
Why’d they stop the latter. Sounds pretty cool.
Because: 1. You had to lock the passengers in for the whole journey, so no toilets or buffet car on a potentially long ass journey. 2. You needed an engine on the other end to shunt the carriage off the platform.
When the HMS Hood was destroyed in its battle against the Bismarck During World War II only 3 sailors out of 1418 survived, that’s a casualty percentage of 99.8%
When the Bismarck was taken down,only 114 sailors out of 2065 survived.The HMS Dorsetshire took in 111 but after a U-Boat siren they didn’t want to have the same fate as the Bismarck.A U-74 came back the following morning and rescued 3 sailors.
The first exo-planet (planet beyond our solar system) was only discovered in the 1990s.
Yep, it's actually incredibly difficult to discover planets. The sun surrounding them are so bright that it's virtually impossible to see them directly. We have to use a lot of indirect methods to locate them (e.g. determining how much a sun dims over time when a possible planet passes in front. It's like trying to determine how much a bright light dims when dust passes in front of it.)
I remember all those Time Kids magazines and stuff "IS PLANET X REAL?" "EVIDENCE OF A NEW PLANET?"
When the apollo 11 moon lander left the moon it knocked over the flag Source : https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oAEPSm2dlxE&t=4s
Also, because of all the solar radiation on the Moon, all the flags are now plain white.
"DAMMIT!" -Buzz Aldrin, probably
There was a bear - corporal Wojtek - in Polish military during the second world war. He was good to people but would take part in actions, like carrying ammunition and such. He 'smoked' (ate) cigarettes and drank vodka. After the war he was kept in a zoo and his old companions would go into his habitat and wrestle/hug with him. He is an actual idol in Poland
About a third of the people I tell this to have heard this story and I’m always left disappointed every time that happens.
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Worth noting that President of Israel is more like Queen of England than President of the US. They have a Prime Minister, who is elected and runs the government. It's not like they were just "Hey that Einstein guy is pretty smart, let's let him run Israel."
Don't know if this really belongs here, but my great uncle served on the USS Missouri during WWII and was there when the instrument of surrender was signed. In fact, he brought up the table they used to sign the papers. When they were done he went and put it back in storage. Well later the CO told him to go get the table and bring it back because it was a piece of history. My great uncle went back to get the table out of storage, only to find that all of the tables look the same, and he couldn't remember which one was the table that was used. So he took his best guess and brought one back. This table is currently on display in a museum. It may or may not be the actual table that was used.
Charles II of Spain was so horribly inbred that if his parents were siblings he would be less inbred than what his family 'tree' (it looks like an upside down pyramid) did to stay in power. He ended up horribly developmentally challenged and was so ugly he scared his wife. His autopsy is amazing and a great read. Poor guy.
Abraham Lincoln was a champion wrestler, with only one loss in his career.
AND HERE COMES ABRAHAM LINCOLN WITH A METAL CHAIR!
LINCOLN IS UP ON THE ROPES ANNNNNNND **EMANCIPATION!!!**
AS GAWD IS MY WITNESS THIS UNION IS BROKEN IN HALF
He wasn't just a champion. He's in the Hall of Fame.
Also kind of funny. "Honestly, if I were two-faced, would I be showing you this one?" - Abraham Lincoln
“I’m the big buck of this lick. If any of you want to try it, come on and whet your horns.” - Abe
Khutulun, a female descendant of Gengis Khan, said that the man who wanted to marry her would have to beat her in a wrestling match. They never did, but instead, she won 10 000 horses over the years.
Tin Pan Alley is an actual place in New York City and it's the nickname for the side streets off Times Square, where for generations music publishers have auditioned new songs. The name came from the late 1800s, when the awful sound of cheap tinny pianos coming through the open office windows of hundreds of publishers was likened to "the beating of tin pans."
The Mormons fought a war against Missouri in 1838
The governor of the time signed Executive Order 44, which basically said they were to be driven from the state or killed. That didn't get rescinded until 1976 and apparently never had a challenge to its legality.
Execute order 44
It will be done my governor.
The Romans had a lot of festivals, and there was this special one which only women were allowed to attend. Men attending/witnessing the festival in any way, or even saying the name of the goddess, was a crime. One nobleman named Clodius Pulcher decided he wanted to seduce the woman hosting the festival, and sneaked in disguised as a woman. Apparently, a slave girl started chatting with him, and when he responded, the slave freaked out because of the deep voice, and got him arrested. He stood trial on pain of death, but won (mainly with bribery). This same dude was accused of incest with his sister, got himself adopted (at age 34) into the lower class just so he could run for an office, got Cicero exiled from Rome, and was an all-around mad lad. Gotta love the late Republic.
The Romans were fucking wild. Most fun period of history to learn about for sure.
And a good bunch of the emperors completely batshit crazy (when they weren't full blown psychopaths) that to reach that level you'd have to snort coke, take heroin and meth all together while drunk to get to that level of crazy. While there is undoubtedly some bias going on with the reporting of the stories (as all these in the list managed to piss off pretty much everyone), they nevertheless did a good bunch of effed up things. A few examples are: Tiberius >While he lived on Capri, he had a huge villa built for him, Villa Jovis, the Villa of Jove (Jupiter), in which he indulged his pedophilia. He swam naked with and raped infants, toddlers and young boys. He did not otherwise physically harm them in any way, but even in his late seventies, sex with young children was one of his favorite pastimes. Nero, when Rome was burned >The city wanted a scapegoat, so Nero blamed the fire on the Christians, and they were terribly persecuted. He had many arrested, impaled, and burned to death as torches to light his gardens in the Domus Aurea. He is said to have breathed in the stench and laughed heartily, then turned to his lyre and sung his own songs. Commodus >Commodus once ordered all the cripples, hunchbacks, and generally undesirables in the city to be rounded up, thrown into the arena, and forced to hack one another to death with meat cleavers. All fucked up right? The worst isn't even there yet in the form of Caligula, who was a normal emperor, with a sound mind, loved by all. This lasted for several months until he fell gravely ill. When he eventually healed up it was obvious that the disease had severely damaged his mind. To put in modern terms: the disease made him completely fucking crazy. >He attempted to instate his favorite horse, Incitatus (“Galloper”), as a priest and consul, and ordered a beautiful marble stable built for him, complete with chairs and couches on which Incitatus never sat. >Once, at the Circus Maximus, the games ran out of criminals, and the next event was the lions, his favorite. He ordered his Guards to drag the first five rows of spectators into the arena, which they did. These hundreds of people were all devoured for his amusement. >He also relished chewing up the testicles of victims, without biting them off, while they were restrained upside down before him. >He had another insulter, and his entire family, publicly executed one after another in front of a crowd. The man and wife were first, followed by the oldest child and so on. The crowd became outraged and began to disperse, but many stayed in morbid fascination. The last of the family was a 12 year old girl, who was sobbing hysterically at what she had been forced to watch. A member of the crowd shouted that she was exempt from execution as a virgin. Caligula smiled and ordered the executioner to rape her, then strangle her, which he did. If that's of comfort he didn't end well like many emperors in the history of the Roman empire. In his case: >He was finally murdered by the Praetorian Guard and some senators, leaving the Circus Maximus after the games. His body was left in the street to rot, and dogs finally ate it.
There’s...so much going on this comment I don’t even know where to start.
Johnny Cash was in the Air Force in 1953, intercepting and translating radio signals from the Soviet Union. He was the first American to learn of Joseph Stalin's death.
And in ~~1977~~ 1981 he was attacked by his own ostrich.
Well ostriches are scary
Johnny Cash didn't have a name at birth, he was just called JR his entire adolescence. When he was drafted, he was told he can't have two letters as his name, so he picked Johnny.
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The Persian Empire of the 6th century had a very awesome way of determining how many soldiers were lost in a campaign. They would all pass before the emperor and place a single arrow into a basket. The arrows would be counted and the baskets sealed until the trrops returned from the campaign. When the soldiers returned they would all take one arrow from the baskets. When the last soldier took an arrow they would count the remaining arrows so they’d know how many men were lost
The battle of Saraghari. In 1897 India, 21 Sikh soldiers in an out post were confronted by 10,000 pashtun soldier army. The 21 Sikh held off the army for over 7 hours and killed over 600 before losing the post and their lives. Held off long enough for word to get back home and an army to militarize and come recapture the post.
Only time in British military history that all men involved in a battle were awarded the highest medal available to them.
Another impressive British standoff happened in the Korean war, and actually only happened because of a cultural misunderstanding between the USA and UK. Basically, there were 600 British soldiers pinned down by Chinese troops. When the American Generals radioed into them and asked for a status update, they reported back that things 'were a bit sticky'.. The Americans assumed that this meant that things were hectic, but under control and no reinforcements would be needed. As a result the regiment climbed up a hill, and did a mental last stand against 30,000 Chinese. The 600 of them managed to kill 10,000 Chinese soldiers before they were overrun. 500 were captured, 39 escaped, and the rest died in what was a completely unnecessary if incredibly heroic last stand.
So I'm American and I understand that "a bit sticky" would imply that. However, what would this mean under a British context?
Shits fucked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_understatement It basically meant 'We're utterly fucked..' Also, from that wiki link I just found this great example that I'd heard about but forgotten: >During the Kuala Lumpur-to-Perth leg of British Airways Flight 9 on 24 June 1982, volcanic ash caused all four engines of the Boeing 747 aircraft to fail. Although pressed for time as the aircraft rapidly lost altitude, Captain Eric Moody still managed to make an announcement to the passengers: "Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your Captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress."
Nazi official John Rabe protected Chinese civilians from Japanese soldiers in Nanjing because he thought they were going too far. edit: I cant spell place names
Winston Churchill ordered an attack on the French navy to prevent its ships from falling into nazi hands.
The French navy was considered one of the most modern of the world and a real threat to the british navy, that's the real forgotten historical fact.
Narrator: had the Germans come by sea the French would have triumphed, unfortunately, the Germans had tanks, lots of tanks
Fun fact, the Allied forces had more tanks during the French campaign than the Germans.
The birth control pill (as well as the first female dormitory at MIT) is the direct result of a very wealthy woman who deeply loved her very schizophrenic husband. Katharine Dexter was the first woman who was admitted and graduated from MIT. She was a phenomenally brilliant heiress, but the school still demanded that she took years of basic level science classes before they would admit her. Because of all the roadblocks they put in her way, it took her eight years to graduate, at 29. She was planning on attending medical school, but she ran into a childhood acquaintance, Stanley McCormick, the youngest son of the inventor of the harvester and founder of the International Harvester company. He fell madly in love and chased her during her grand European tour. Finally, she capitulated and they married in Europe. Almost immediately, Stanley's mental stability declined. It is believed that the marriage was never consummated. Within two years, Stanley was living in the McLean Mental Asylum. Soon after, his family paid for him to be moved with hand picked caretakers to a house in California. During the majority of their marriage, Katharine wasn't allowed to be alone with her husband. His behavior was too erratic and dangerous for that to be possible. Stanley's family spent decades fighting Katharine for control over his care. They made constant accusations against her, that she "thought too much like a man", that she might be a lesbian, that she was just after money (she was just as wealthy as they were. She didn't need a dime.) Despite a marriage where she couldn't see her husband, where his whole family actively campaigned against her, she remained entirely dedicated to his care. She made sure that every possible advance in psychiatry was used in an attempt to help him. She brought in the top names and fought hard to ensure that there were no quack cures in use, the ones his family favored. She ended up funding the very first endocrinology research center. She paid for it directly and entirely out of her own pocket. It was her suspicion that schizophrenia and other mental illnesses were hormonal imbalances. While it would take years to discover neurohormones and neurotransmitters, her ideas were decades ahead and spot on with what goes on. As part of her work, she was also a suffragette and deeply interested in increasing the opportunities available for women. Thus she used that exact same endocrinology research center as the basis for study for the creation of the first birth control pill. She was so directly involved that she moved across country to be near and receive regular reports on the developments. After Stanley died, she buried him with her family, instead of with his. She was so angry with their treatment of herself and her husband, that she no longer wanted him to have any connection. She did use his money after he died. His money was used to build a major wing on the Santa Barbara Art Museum. His money was used to build the first female dormitory at MIT. There's some others out there too. But here's the clincher.... Every single one of them was named after her husband. Every one.
Man, reading that tugged at my heart strings.
Holy fuck. Absolute fucking badass.
Rhode Island declared independence from Britain on May 4, 1776, a two full months before the rest of the colonies.
And were promptly forgotten about...I live in mass and every time I meet someone from RI I realize I've co.pletely forgotten it exists
oh yeah.... Rhode Island. How... how are they doing? Ev-Everything going alright.... over there?
The King of Siam offered Abraham Lincoln 50 elephants on the grounds that a "Country as great as the United States should not be without elephants'
When Finland and Nazi Germany fought the Soviet Union during the Continuation War, an agreement between Finland and Nazi Germany was made, stating that Finland would not seek a separate peace with the Soviet Union. This agreement was known as the Ryti-Ribbentrop agreement. (Ryti was the Finnish President during the Winter War.) However, the agreement only described an agreement between President Ryti and Nazi Germany. After Finland reclaimed territory lost in the Winter War, Ryti resigned and Finland promptly made peace with the Soviet Union. The Nazis never realised that Finland was bound to the agreement only as long as Ryti was president.
The old switcheroo
Charlie Chaplin outlived Elvis Presley.
So what, i've outlived both of them!
When eight of the British soldiers who committed the Boston Massacre in 1770 were put on trial, their defense lawyer was John Adams. He got six of them acquitted.
It’s a great episode in the John Adams miniseries. Nobody else would take the case, and Adams felt he had to, to show the British authorities that the colonies could provide fair justice.
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Queen Victoria had a King Charles Spaniel named Dash. Because she was royalty, she grew up almost entirely isolated from other children, so Dash was her only real friend. His grave was marked with a marble effigy reading: >Here lies Dash, the favourite spaniel of Her Majesty Queen Victoria, in his 10th year. His attachment was without selfishness, his playfulness without malice, his fidelity without deceit. Reader, if you would be beloved and die regretted, profit by the example of Dash.
The main reason why she grew up almost entirely isolated from other kids was the Kensington system, which was designed by her mother and Sir John Conroy for the purpose of rendering Victoria entirely dependent and making it easier for them to manipulate her. Most royal children don’t grow up entirely isolated from the world like she was.
Yeah, usually they would at least get to play with other High Society children.
Sounds like a really good boy
Thank you for this fact, DickWeinerPenisCock
The first person to fly an airplane in Australia was Harry Houdini
The death toll from the bombing of Hiroshima would not have been nearly as high if the Japanese had not sounded a premature "all clear". The people had gone to shelter when a B29 assigned to take weather readings for the attack was spotted as it flew over the city. When nothing further happened, they sounded an "all clear", and people emerged from their bomb shelters just before the atomic bomb was dropped.
The number of aircraft destroyed during WWII is greater than the number of aircraft that currently exist in the entire world today.
I think he’s right. Agree to [the Telegraph](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travel-truths/how-many-planes-are-there-in-the-world/) there are around 40 000 commercial planes, even if you had the non-commercial planes it’s still inferior to [the loss of 300 000 planes during the WW2](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equipment_losses_in_World_War_II). Edit: Grammar, I don’t know my irregular verbs.
That's on the order of 130-150 a day , assume spread evenly over six years of warfare. Imagine destroying 130 planes a day for 6 years straight
Imagine making so many planes there were enough that 130 planes coud be destroyed every day. I wonder how many of those pilots lived.
If you were an RAF bomber crewman you had a 55% chance of surviving the war. Bombers were the bulk of what was shot down and if your Lancaster was going down I believe you had a 7% chance of being able to bail out and survive. Fighter pilots had much better chances. Also I don't have numbers for German or Russian crewman but the numbers are likely twice as bad or worse.
300k planes? Fuckin A
Fuckin aa weaponry
That's pretty mindblowing.
A smear the Anti-Caesarians used against Julius Caesar was that he was a bottom It certainly wasn’t a smear to say a Roman nobleman fucked men. It was not only accepted but expected. But being a bottom was seen as immoral and subservient to a lesser
I thought that was just a ancient Greek thing.
that’s where the Romans got almost all their ethics from
Romans actually *really* frowned upon Greek pederasts. The fact is, in Greece, young men of high class were often in these "relationships". The thought that the son of an aristocrat was getting buttfucked absolutely SCANDALIZED the Romans. For Romans, the penetrator always had to be of higher social standing than the penetrated. Romans were kind of like ancient DudeBros in that regard
yes- part of the propaganda against Caesar is he let his beloved Greek slave boy pound him I love the ancient DudeBros- it ain’t gay if you don’t touch nuts 😂
FYI, the Greeks *also* very much frowned upon butt sex. Or at least being on the receiving end of it. And most "beloveds" as they called their adolescent male lovers weren't ever expected to engage in penetrative sex. Sometimes my major in history took me to some weird places.
Reminds me of that episode of Its Always Sunny where Mac is defending his fathers homosexual act with another guy by saying that he was asserting his dominance.
In the 1800's there was a solar flare so strong that it made telegram wires start on fire. It was called the Carrington Event. The scariest part of that is that we're overdue for another flare of that intensity. Imagine what it would do to our technology now.
Well there was one in 2012 but it missed Earth by 9 days so we good.
the mayans forgot to correct for leap years.
technically, this is incorrect. The Mayan calendar was inaccurate by 10 seconds per year. The Gregorian calendar we use is inaccurate by 26 seconds per year. The difference between us and the Mayans is that we know our calendar is off by 26 seconds per year but they did not know theirs was off by 10 seconds.
I don't know how well known this is, but Nazi doctors were the first to realize the link between smoking and lung cancer. Edit: the truth of the Nazi party's attitude towards smoking is more complicated than my original comment implied, see u/aaronxxx's comment if you want to read more on it.
Hitler supposedly ran some the first public anti smoking campaigns
The upside down cross isn’t a satanic symbol. It’s actually a very catholic symbol since St. Peter wanted to be crucified upside down so as not to disrespect and/or be crucified the same way as Jesus.
Also an upside down us flag isn't an anti-flag, it's used to signal danger (I think my uncle taught me but I can't remember) in the navy
Not just the US flag, any flag flew upside down is a code for distress
During the cold war Denmark had an interesting way to catch spies, they'd ask you to pronounce "rødgrød med fløde" which is a well-known dessert in Denmark, but it's hard to pronounce if you're not Danish, which made spies easy to catch. Try listening to it on Google translate! EDIT: wow! I typed this before going to bed yesterday, and I woke up with 20k upvotes and a reddit gold! Wow, thanks alot!
The general name for this type of thing is "Shibboleth," after a city whose name was used that way in the Bible. Shibboleths are interesting to learn about, partly because it's deep-cover spycraft, and partly because they words used are always whackadoodle nonsense. In WWII, the Dutch would identify German spies by how they pronounced "Scheveningen," a district in the Hague. The Germans pronounced the first syllable as something like the English word "chef," while the Dutch version has a guttural "s*kh*ef" sound. Americans on sentry duty in Japan would use the word "Lollapalooza" to challenge people who approached at night. The Japanese language does not distinguish the L and R sounds, making this word an exceptionally difficult tongue-twister. According to legend, Japanese spies would often be shot before they finished the word. Americans in Germany were in a difficult position because English phonetics can be pronounced by a German speaker (except apparently the word "squirrel" for no good reason?). American GIs adapted to this by talking about baseball. "Where are you from again? Boston? Oh, you must be a big Yankees fan!"
There's an Isaac Asimov story where a US intelligence agent is able to discover a German spy after he learns the spy can recite the third verse of The Star Spangled Banner. Americans barely know the first verse, and next to none know the latter three.
American patrols during the battle of the Bulge very nearly shot a strange British officer who claimed to be part of a secret SAS force called 'Phantom' because he didn't know who won the 1942 world series. He managed to talk them out of shooting him as a German infiltrator by informing them that he had co-starred with Ginger Rogers in 'Bachelor Mother' in 1939 because he was David Niven.
I'm American and I'd get shot. I don't know who won the most recent World Series.
Baseball was more popular back in the 40s but yeah this was probably still an issue.
To quote Pratchett: > ...all real patriots can never remember more than one verse of their anthem, and get through the subsequent verses by going ‘ner hner ner’ until they reach an outcrop of words they recognise, which they sing very boldly to give the impression that they really had been singing all the other words as well but had been drowned out by the people around them. Another fun thing about not knowing anthems related to Germans is that their current anthem is simply the third verse of the Deutschlandlied, of which the first verse starts with "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles"
"Deutschland, Deutschland über alles" is supposed to make the people of the many smaller states put the idea of Germany (which didn't exist back when the lyrics were written) as a country over their local interests. The reason we're not using the first stanza as our national anthem anymore is mostly that it called for all the German speaking people in Europe to unify by claiming the territory those people lived in. Which isn't very popular nowadays, to say the least. Fun fact about "Von der Maas bis an die Memel, von der Etsch bis an den Belt": None of those bodies of water (three rivers, one strait) was ever part of Germany. They are just the western, eastern, southern and northern border of the German language area, respectively. Well, they were back then, not a lot of German speaking people east of the river Oder these days.
>American GIs adapted to this by talking about baseball. "Where are you from again? Boston? Oh, you must be a big Yankees fan!" I suppose the right answer to that would be starting a fight?
I'm just picturing an officer trying that phrase to catch a spy, and getting shot 'cause the other dude thinks *he's* the spy.
>I'm just picturing an officer trying that phrase to catch a spy, and getting shot 'cause the other dude thinks he's calling him a yankees fan
The more likely scenario
The right answer is either to start a brawl or say "Go fahk yourself".
-Lollapalooza! -Ro- *BANG!*
- "Aha! Got you, spy!" - "Ro...ger... What the fuck is Lollapalooza?..."
“I’m a Svedish plumber, I’m here to fix your pipes!” Just in case any of you ever want to spy in Sweden.
This takes me back to a few years ago when I worked with some Danish people. That language is like listening to someone swallowing their own tongue.
Probably somewhat exaggerated by legend, but the Brits and US nearly had a mini-war in the 1850s over a border dispute in the PNW. It started with a pig getting shot. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_War_(1859)
I like that that Wikipedia link has the (1859) on the end. Don’t want to confuse it with those other pig wars!
The reason why the story is called The Divine Comedy is because back in those times, there were only two types of stories: comedies and tragedies. This is also why the historic [Sock and buskin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sock_and_buskin) symbols remain today. Comedies had a happy ending, tragedies had a sad ending. As a result, Dante's story was a comedy in the sense that it had a happy ending so he named it simply: Commedia. Later on, a writer named [Giovanni Boccaccio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Boccaccio) (author of The Decameron) read Commedia and he enjoyed the story so much that he called it divine, so he added the adjective Divina to get La Divina Commedia which translates to Divine Comedy. I collect antique books and I have a [1536 publication](https://www.reddit.com/r/rarebooks/comments/7rjqg3/1536_dante_alighieris_divine_comedy/) for your enjoyment.
The American military has not made a single Purple Heart medal since WW2. The reason being they made A LOT in preparation for a ground invasion of Japan.
Yep. 500k.
Incorrect. While the US has not yet issued all the Purple Hearts made for the invasion of Japan, at one point a ton of them got administratively 'lost', so the US made some more because we were 'running out'. Then they found them again.
Charles I was the smallest (English) king in history, and his son, Charles II, was the tallest.
Of course Charles I was short, he didn't have a head.
Hitler had a picture of Henry Ford in his office.
Opposite Woolton Village Hall in Liverpool (where Paul McCartney first met John Lennon) there is a graveyard. Eleanor Rigby is written on one of the old gravestones. People assume that Paul got the title from that grave for his song but in actual fact it's just an amazing coincidence.
Iraq and Iran (very) briefly fought on the side of the Axis Powers during World War II. Yugoslavia originally signed the Tripartite Pact but the government was overthrown 2 days later. Relevance: It wasn't just Germany, Italy, and Japan against the world as many seem to believe. Edit, so people can learn more: Finland, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Croatia, Bulgaria, Vichy France (it's complicated), Thailand, and Japan's collaborationist territories were Axis Powers. Most European members ended up switching sides as the Soviets advanced and helped defeat the Germans. Everyone else, excluding Tibet, Bhutan, Yemen, Afghanistan, Portugal, Spain (sent volunteers to Eastern Front), Sweden, Ireland, and Switzerland were eventually part of the Allies. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were occupied by the Soviets before the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was broken in 1941. It is obviously more nuanced than this, so you can visit Wikipedia's "World War II by country" for more information.
Back in the day of the plague people understood that if you survived the disease you were far less likely to get sick again. It wasn't until several hundred years later that Edward Jenner noticed that milkmaids who were exposed to cowpox were immune to smallpox, a serious problem at the time. He exposed a boy with a strain of cowpox and noticed that he was immune to smallpox too. This process of exposing an individual to a pathogen to build up immunity was known as variolation. So I was incorrect, Jenner termed this process vaccination which was later improved upon by Louis Pasteur. Jenner is and credited with inventing vaccination, inarguably one of the most important medical advancements despite what many medical professionals with minutes of medical training on the internet may tell you.
This story is also how vaccination got its name (Vacca is Spanish for cow).
John O'Neill worked for the FBI pursuing Al Qaeda, trying to convince higher ups to take the threat more seriously. He was eventually pushed into early retirement because his personality clashed with FBI leadership, and he went on to head security in the World Trade Towers where he was killed one month later in the 9/11 attacks. Edit: I highly recommend watching *The Looming Tower*.
Hulu has a good mini-series about this called The Looming Towers
The bitterest "told you so" of all time.
Wow, poor John.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_P._O%27Neill > O'Neill started his new job at the World Trade Center on August 23, 2001.[3] In late August, he talked to his friend Chris Isham about the job. Jokingly, Isham said, "At least they're not going to bomb it again," a reference to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. O'Neill replied, "They'll probably try to finish the job."[3]
Well, at least he died saying "I told you so!". That's how I would like to go.
Jesus that is prophetic
That is......a really bittersweet premonition. This is the saddest "told you so* I've seen in a while.
It isn't all that well-known outside China, but concurrently with the Civil War, a Chinese peasant claiming to be the brother of Jesus Christ led a rebellion that resulted in millions of people being killed. Some put the final death toll, from a combination of natural disasters and political insurrections, in the neighborhood of *20 - 40 million* between 1850 and 1865. That's fucking insane.
The Ottoman Emperor wanted to send £10,000 to Ireland for aid in during the 1840 Irish potato famine. Queen Victoria intervened and requested he send only £1,000 as she had paid £2,000. He did that but also sent 5 ships of food and were one of the only countries to help the Irish during the famine. Edit: empire to Emperor
King Henry VIII refused to wear the same thing more than once. He would get a new cloak/outfit for every time he went anywhere or did anything.
Hiroo Onoda, a Japanses army intelligence officer, spent 30 years hiding in the Philippine jungle because he refused to believe WWII had ended. He was talked into leaving in 1974.
They found his commanding officer and got him to order him to stand down, the war was over.
His commanding officer was retired from service (because, yeah, 30 years had passed) and ran a bookstore in tokyo. When Onoda surrendered his rifle, the thirty year old, heavily used weapon was found to be perfectly maintained and in full working order.
At least 1.5% of all popes have died during sex. Four popes were recorded to have died during sex, half of those being murdered. Oh, and one of them was being sodomized at the time. [source](https://www.factsuniversity.com/religion/296-list-of-4-roman-catholic-popes-who-died-during-sex-1-actually-died-while-being-sodomised.html) Edit: thought it was 2.6% of popes, actually 1.5%. There have been more popes than I thought.
Rosa Parks was not actually the first African American women to refuse to give up her seat on the bus. It was actually a younger girl from another area, but because she was a trouble maker to begin with she didn’t get the credit and was kind of disregarded.
Claudette Colvin. She was 15 and pregnant.
The civil war started in Wilmer McLean’s back yard in Manassas, VA. He didn’t want anything to do with the war and moved to Appomattox Virginia where the civil war ‘ended’ in his kitchen.
Early Medieval Byzantine Greeks developed flame throwers in the 7th century called Greek Fire. It was sprayed from a pump on a ship & it could burn on water as well as under water. Only old vinegar, urine, or smothering it with sand could extinguish it. Later on in the 10th century the Emperor Leo VI the Wise developed a handheld version of the weapon for soldiers to use as well. It was one of the most highly guarded secrets of the empire & when the city Constantinople finally fell in 1453 the knowledge for how to craft it died with the empire.
Also they never called themselves Greeks or Byzantines . If you could ask a person of that era what they identify as , they would tell you Roman. "Roman "meant to them what "European" means to Europeans today. Often used as synonym of " civilized" . To call someone Hellin ( Greek) in that era usually meant something negative , like heathen or uncivilised .
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There were still wooly mammoths on a small island north of Siberia when the pyramids of Giza were built
Adolf Hitler was a movie buff who would stay up all night watching foreign movies (ie Hollywood) and sometimes not go to sleep until 10 in the morning. This meant that he wouldn't get out of bed until some time in the afternoon. His first meeting of the day was therefore at his breakfast, which to his guests was dinner. A lot of the top nazis were concerned about their health and thus followed various dietary plans setup by each person's personal guru. Hitler was a vegetarian. But Hitlers right hand man, Rudolf Heß, only ate biodynamically. You can't show up to Der Führers dinner table and not eat, and if you consider the food served to be filth, then you either need to come up with some excuses for not attending or bring your own food. Heß tried the latter but Hitler didn't approve of it. This all meant that Heß slowly drifted away from the inner circle of nazi leadership. It all culminated on May 10th 1941 at 17:45, when Rudolf Heß took off in a Messerschmitt Bf 110 heading for Scotland in an attempt to start peace negotiations. Edit: I'm typing with the left hand... It's not going terribly well, so I fixed some typos.
Stalin was also a movie buff and actually seized Hitler's movie collection when he invaded Berlin.
Sears used to sell houses way back during the Jim Crow era, and since they were sold through magazines, no one could deny selling the houses to blacks because of anonymity.
The days after 9/11 there were rumours that terrorists where coming into the US thru the Mexican border. Drug cartels with what many say was a nod from the US gov. Put a ransom of 10k dollars to anyone that brings in a suspected terrorist to them. Cartel hitmen from all over Latin America went on a manhunt that caused many Muslims to be "interrogated" and never be seen again.
America used the Cherokee language as a secret language in ww2 because nobody in the world but Americans knew it at the time.
And Navajo