What ridiculous history fact is your favorite?
What ridiculous history fact is your favorite?
112 comments
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The oldest recorded words from any woman living in (what is today) Scotland are someone telling the empress of Rome, to her face, that they fuck better than her
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That checks out for Scotland.
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I had to look that up, it's just too good to pass.
(Cassius Dio, contemporary historian) tells us that the empress teased her companion (the wife of Argentocoxos, a Caledonian chief) by saying that Caledonian women indulge in a sexual free-for-all, sharing their beds with different men while making no attempt to conceal their adultery. To a respectable aristocratic lady like Julia, such brazen promiscuity would indeed have seemed worthy of comment. We then see the wife of Argentocoxos swiftly responding with what Dio calls ‘a witty remark’ of her own:
“We fulfil the demands of nature in a much better way than do you Roman women; for we consort openly with the best men, whereas you let yourselves be debauched in secret by the vilest.”
A bit further below, however
The consensus view among present-day historians is that he simply invented the speech quoted above.
Sauce - https://senchus.wordpress.com/2019/08/14/julia-and-the-caledonian-women/
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We have proof that kids have never paid attention in school. For example, in Novgorod around 1250 A.D. a six year old boy named Onfim (later called Anthemius of Novgorod) was supposedly practicing his writing and basic arithmetic. Much of what archeologists have found were doodles of him being a heroic knight
who hunted down his teacher, who was a horrible monster . These were buried in a waste pile, where they were rediscovered by archeologists. They are a treasured part of Slavic history and there is now a statue of him in his hometown.-
These don't look too dissimilar to things I'd doodle when I was 6. Interesting how kids always kinda draw the same.
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It's fascinating the stages children through in drawing. It says a lot about how the young mind develops. The "head with arms and legs" stage seems universal, and amusing.
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I bet this was the medieval version of Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes
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Teacher has threw it on the trash. 😂
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Imagine how his teacher feels. The little shit doodles all through his class, and who do we build a statue of? The kid‽
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A dude had heard about some other kind of god, and so he randomly looked up at the sky and basically said "if you let me win this battle, I will convert my entire country"....
...and he won, and so Roman Catholicism was born cause he said so.
Later, some dude was like "screw your catholicism, I don't like my wife any more, I'll go make my own church with hookers and blow and divorce my wife," and so the Church of England was made cause he said so.
I may have oversimplified these stories but pretty sure that's about it.
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Your version makes more sense 😃
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I doubted the blow, but it could be true; turns out the Columbian Exchange started around 50 years before the Church of England broke from Catholicism
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Oxford University Is older than the Aztec civilization.
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And, probably from the same Reddit thread, there were a pocket of woolly mammoths still doing woolly mammoth things when the pyramids were put up. In the same spirit the Sahara hadn't fully stopped being habitable (as it was during the late ice age) yet, and that had an impact on Egyptian history.
The Near East really did get rolling pretty quickly once the warm period began, which is funny because there were areas that were arable all along. In a fair world we'd all be speaking an Australian language or something.
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There was an infamous conman in my country by the name Sülün Osman. He has managed to con people by claiming to sell the Galata Bridge itself. After he was caught, his defense was "As long as there exists idiots that believe I can sell the bridge, I will keep selling this bridge."
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The most interesting thing is that he wasn’t the only one. A guy who called himself Victor Lustig did the same thing with the Eiffel Tower.
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He even tried it a second time
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Dinosaurs existed on the other side of the galaxy!
As in, it was so long ago that Earth has done half of a great cycle since then.
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Was finding the number odd (expecting a longer orbit) but looks like the solar system has already orbited the center of the milky way 18 to 20 times. Imagine that much change in earth in 20 years.
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That North and South Korea maintain a fax line between their countries... which they use almost exclusively to send threats and insults to each other.
Also related to North Korea, the hilarious fact that Dennis Rodman, former NBA player, is so well liked by the Kim family that he's basically a diplomat to North Korea, or at least the one they turn to when things really start going badly.
Proof: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/12/20/north-and-south-korea-exchange-faxes-threatening-to-attack-each-other/ https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/north-korea-sends-fax-threatening-strike-south-korea-without-notice-flna2d11781034 https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-KRTB-4721
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Another fun fact about North Korea: They have their own Linux Distro by the name Red Star OS, which has its 3.0 version leaked to the Internet, while the newest known version is 4.0.
My observations while trying out the leaked 3.0 are:
*It is a fedora derivative,its package manager made me think it's something close to CentOS 6.3.
*It's visuals are really similar to Mac OS. Perhaps the state official behind this project really liked Mac?
*Every piece of software installed has its credits removed, they have help prompts that refer to them being made in some sort of university.
*It leaves strange markings to created files. I couldn't understand what they do exactly, but I assume it could be used to track the computer that made the files.
*Their browser does not support https, and does not have English support at all.
*Packages intended for developers aren't installed by default, doesn't have a remote repository but instead was intended to be installed with a physical media drive.
*Just for fun, I tried to request the Linux kernel's source code that the developers behind used, as it's licensed by GPL. I was unsuccessful; which means this is the first time a state sponsored software is violating GPL.
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"Mad" Jack Churchill, who fought in the Second World War with a longbow, a basket-hilted Scottish broadsword, and a set of bagpipes.
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The first manned hot air balloon was mistaken for an eldritch monster by rural French citizens who didn't understand it and was "beaten to death" by a French mob after it descended to the ground.
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I'm skeptical. Can I bother you for a source?
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Wasn't he also on death row? He was offered a pardon, if he survived.
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Yes, they did that for all those experiments back then.
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(He even "decreed" the construction of a bridge or tunnel between San Francisco and Oakland on the other side of the bay, predicting the existence of the Bay Bridge and Transbay Tube!)
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And the city just humored him.
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Hey, that dude was in West of Loathing. Now I know he was a real dude.
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Benjamin Franklin got the flow of electricity wrong.
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Yep. It was 50/50 given that he only knew it was moving from between two points somehow. Tough luck, Benny. (Specifically, he was the one that figured out charge is conserved)
Now we all have to deal with circuit diagrams that don't match what's actually happening inside the components, which confuses at least me when I have to think about electrochemical reactions, semiconductors and/or induction.
Edit: He actually didn't have complete circuits at that time, it was all static experiments where charges were moved manually. Fixed.
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I find it fascinating that electricity is fast enough that this is a thing. You would never get this wrong with water, and if you did things wouldn’t work right, but electricity is basically instant.
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Interestingly, electron flow is only a few mm/minute, on average. The field propagation travels at around 2/3 the speed of light (200,000,000m/s).
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One of Sir Issac Newton's famous phrases is
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants”
This sounds very nobal and humbling. However, its meaning totally changes with a few facts. It was written in an open letter to Robert Hooke. Hooke was apparently quite short, and EXTREMELY sensitive about this. Newton was basically dissing Hooke. Nobody will be standing on your shoulders, shortie!
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End of the bronze age. Have a set of letters between citystate rulers, one writing that help is urgently needed as seaborne invaders have been spotted nearby and his military is off with the hittite empire.
The response back, in modern slang amounts to "lol ur fucked."
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Sounds amazing. Could you provide a link or at least enough names that I can google it?
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Appears to be referencing this story:
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Its from the book 1176 BC by Eric H Cline.
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The fact that they dug up Oliver Cromwell's body for a posthumous execution. It's just insane on so many levels
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Did they not just dig it up so they could put his head on a spike for all to see?
Ask anyone from Ireland or Scotland at that time if it was justified and your head would be on a feckin spike for even questioning it 😂
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No it was by trial and meant as punishment. Quite common even, but I first heard of it in relation to Cromwell c.s.
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The fact they passed on legit information on d day, is still mind blowing. They relied on delays on the German side to make the information out of date by the time it would arrive. The German radio operator not being on station to receive it just made it funnier.
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There was a roman emperor named Pupienus which is pronounced poopy anus
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What is all this insolence? You will find yourself in gladiator school vewy quickly with wotten behavior like that.
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Well, at least that brisket was good enough for jehovah.
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"Well it's a joke name sir!"
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Biggus Dickus
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Probably the one about tin cans and can openers. IIRC, can opener was invented decades after the tin
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To be fair that makes a lot more sense than it happening the other way around
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For a few years you just had to find a sharp rock
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How did they open cans before then?
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Originally tin cans were large things meant for military campaigns, so they used a chisel or similar large stabby thing.
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I actually don't know. Presumably with a knife
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There are lots of great answers here so I want to post something entirely silly and much much more recent:
About 8-9 years ago someone on Reddit transcribed and revised the entirety of Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven to instead be about an Emu.
For the life of me I have never been able to find it again.
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Oh great. First, the Emus won a war against Australia, greatly boosting their egos. And later on, they started censoring their mention online.
In other news... there seems to be a bird in my backyard that keeps taping on my backdoor window.
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Upvoted bc i want someone to find and share it.
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Good luck. It wasn't a post, it was a top level comment and I have a dim memory of it only being slightly related to the post topic.
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There's a lot to choose from, but it's early so I'll bring up the three separate historically significant Defenestrations of Prague. Defenestration is the act of tossing someone out of a window.
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I mean once it's happened twice it must become a cultural thing so the third one is inevitable
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True!
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One started the 48 years war! I remember that from highschool. What were the other two?
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TBH I kinda forgot the rest of it, since the fact there were three and they had such an unusual theme was the interesting part. Pre-modern history can seem a bit repetitive to me, it's one group of aristocrats trying to knock off another group ad infinitum. I prefer to read about technology, culture and common life, where it's known.
Looks like the first one was proto-protestant rebels, and sparked a religious war. The second was a coup against a Hungarian king who was getting too powerful for the defenestrator's tastes, and featured the defenestration of already dead bodies, 'cause why not.
More people have been thrown from windows in Prague since the third one you were thinking of, but none of them has really caught on as an event. It was sometimes Russian assassins, or course.
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The US newspaper billionaire William Randolph Hearst owned enough of congress that he started a war with Spain.
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"You provide the pictures and I'll provide the war"
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The Emu War
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The Alberta Rat Wars
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Uh oh I’ve not heard about those!
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Tell ya what, you go fight a herd of dinosaurs and see who wins
Everyone thinks it's funny until they face off on an emu
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looking forward to the movie!
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In 1938, Orson Welles adapted H.G. Wells's "The War of the Worlds" for the radio, apparently causing mass hysteria and a major part of the continental United States to believe that a martian invasion had occurred.
"A few policemen trickled in, then a few more. Soon, the room was full of policemen and a massive struggle was going on between the police, page boys, and CBS executives, who were trying to prevent the cops from busting in and stopping the show. It was a show to witness."[26]
During the sign-off theme, the phone began ringing. Houseman picked it up and the furious caller announced he was mayor of a Midwestern town, where mobs were in the streets. Houseman hung up quickly, "[f]or we were off the air now and the studio door had burst open."[4]: 404
How many deaths had we heard of? (Implying they knew of thousands.) What did we know of the fatal stampede in a Jersey hall? (Implying it was one of many.) What traffic deaths? (The ditches must be choked with corpses.) The suicides? (Haven't you heard about the one on Riverside Drive?)
This was a year after he adapted Shakespeare's Julius Caesar to be set in Nazi Germany.
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Wasn't that just one newspaper reporting it which was more or less just an advert for the play?
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No. In fact, I quoted the first-hand accounts of the people in charge of the broadcast.
Yes, there may have been less of a panic than as advertised, but it wasn't a gross (or intentional) distortion. The drama was also only broadcast once.
The offices of the city of Trenton, New Jersey, a location within the dramatization, had its communications paralyzed for 3 hours due to the calls made to ask the city well.
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That one of the US presidents died from eating too many cherries.
https://www.grunge.com/630116/how-cherries-are-tied-to-president-zachary-taylors-death/
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and the movie just came out.
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Germany could have disavowed the Zimmerman Telegram and avoided or postponed the U.S. entering The Great War, but they fucking owned that shit.
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Rasputin having such a massive cock that Boney M had to made a song about it.
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But the ladies begged, "Don't you try to do it, please!"
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Oh, that rasputin song. Guy was in a situation where he had to make himself appear more manly.
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Risky click but worth it.
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.... Whyyyyy?!
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W H A T
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This is a great thread
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