History
Discover facts about history. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
History
Columbus thought Earth was shaped like a pear
Columbus didn't prove the Earth was round; the Greeks did that 2,000 years earlier. But towards the end of his life, his math got so incredibly terrible he…
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OMG first appeared in a 1917 letter
Teenagers aggressively texting in the 2000s owe their entire slang vocabulary to an incredibly dusty British admiral. In 1917, Lord Fisher wrote a frantic…
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George Washington really grew hemp
The father of the United States was running a massive weed farm. Okay, it was industrial hemp for making rope and canvas, but Washington was obsessed with it.…
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When samurai tested swords on strangers
Feudal Japan was a terrifying place to go for an evening walk. Samurai had a legally permitted practice called "tsujigiri" (crossroads killing). When a…
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A single switch prevented a nuclear disaster in 1961
Oops, we almost evaporated the eastern seaboard, our bad. In 1961, a B-52 bomber broke apart in mid-air over Goldsboro, North Carolina, dropping two massive…
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Jefferson and Adams died on the same day
Talk about taking an absolute petty rivalry to the literal grave. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were the two driving forces behind American independence,…
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Mozart wrote a song called Leck mich im Arsch
We treat classical composers like sophisticated demigods, but they were essentially creating 18th-century shitposts. In 1782, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed…
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Why Columbus was sent home in chains
When you are so exceptionally brutal that 15th-century Spain thinks you've gone too far, you belong in jail. While serving as governor of Hispaniola, Columbus…
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Queen Victoria reportedly handed out cocaine gum
The era of extreme moral prudishness was heavily fueled by unregulated narcotics. Queen Victoria loved Mariani wine, a beverage heavily spiked with cocaine.…
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Why Romans thought trousers were barbaric
If you wore trousers in ancient Rome, you were basically asking to be canceled. Romans viewed pants as the ultimate symbol of uncultured, unmanly foreign…
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Henry Ford reportedly saved Edison's last breath
Creepy billionaire behavior is not a modern invention. When inventor Thomas Edison was dying in 1931, his good friend Henry Ford supposedly asked Edison's son…
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The Bulgarian ruler who drank from an emperor's skull
Recycling your enemies is the ultimate flex. In 811 AD, Khan Krum of Bulgaria ambushed the Byzantine army and killed Emperor Nikephoros I. Rather than bury…
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For centuries, winter wasn't on the calendar
Ancient chronological tracking casually skipped the coldest months, leaving sixty days completely unnamed and unaccounted for. Authorities simply waited for…
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Daylight saving time began as a joke
Benjamin Franklin originally proposed shifting clocks purely to mock citizens for wasting daylight hours. Instead of recognizing the sarcasm, authorities…
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The year ten days vanished from the calendar
When transitioning to the Gregorian format in 1582, officials simply skipped from October fourth straight to the fifteenth. Anyone hoping to celebrate an…
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When mummies traveled as ordinary train cargo
During the peak of Egyptomania, ancient preserved royals were regularly shipped across continents in standard freight cars like they were just overly dry…
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When Prague politicians were thrown out windows
The city of Prague holds a ridiculous record for settling political disputes by simply tossing council members out of high windows. This specific act became…
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The Declaration of Independence was signed in August
Despite the massive annual celebrations in July, the actual signatures on the American independence document were not primarily applied until August second.…
Discover moreRudolf Nureyev singlehandedly shattered Soviet cultural prestige when he dramatically evaded his KGB handlers at Le Bourget airport in Paris, seeking immediate asylum and…
During the Cold War, ballet was actually considered serious geopolitical ammunition, and the Soviet Union truly believed their classical dancers proved the…
Discover moreEmperor Babur aggressively terraformed the dusty plains of Agra into the geometrically flawless Ram Bagh pleasure gardens, using sophisticated Persian water hydraulics to…
When Emperor Babur arrived in India, he was absolutely appalled by the blistering heat and the dust, basically leaving a one-star Yelp review of the local…
Discover moreOtto Schmidt miraculously transformed the catastrophic sinking of the SS Chelyuskin icebreaker into a spectacular geopolitical triumph, using dramatic airborne rescues to…
Leave it to Stalin’s relentless propaganda machine to spin a catastrophic maritime disaster into a dazzling display of socialist superiority. When the SS…
Discover moreAshurbanipal projected absolute divine authority by publicly slaughtering captive Asiatic lions inside heavily guarded Nineveh arenas, commissioning hyper-realistic palace…
Why bother fighting a costly foreign war when you can just violently slaughter captive zoo animals to prove a geopolitical point? King Ashurbanipal of Assyria…
Discover moreMing emperors intentionally burned their world-class Treasure Fleet and enacted the draconian Haijin policy making it an absolute capital offense to build ships with more than…
Imagine having the most advanced navy on Earth and deciding to burn it for border security. After the legendary, massive voyages of Admiral Zheng He, paranoia…
Discover moreHighly trained Incan accountants known as quipucamayocs managed an entire continent-spanning empire without a written language by tying intricate knots into colored alpaca wool…
Running an empire of ten million people without a single written word sounds mathematically impossible until you look at the quipu. The Incas used a highly…
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