I’m a big history buff, and it bothers me when people say history is boring. Here are some things I’ve learned that should lay to rest the idea that history is a dull subject. Please feel free to contribute your own fun historical facts.
The dying wish of Queen Anne in 1714 was that the English throne be filled by the winner of a kickboxing tournament. This was how George, only 52nd in line to the throne, was named king.
“Cinnamon” means “Europeans Love This Stuff” in an obscure Indian dialect.
Ancient Eygptians had computers. They required 10,000 slaves to generate power, however, and the graphics were barely good enough to play Tetris.
Julius Caesar’s last words were not “Et tu Brute” but “Ow! Shit!”
Napolean never lost a game of Chinese Checkers.
Nathan Hale was actually hanged because he always pointed at people’s chest, said “You have a stain” and when they looked down, he flicked them in the nose.
The North American fur trade in the 1600s and 1700s started because of a fad for beaverfur condoms in France.
The creators of Superman originally intended him to be Japanese.
The Three Stooges were based on the Roman first triumvirate. Caesar: Moe, Pompey: Larry and Marcus Crassus: Curly. In fact, the “pick two fingers–poke 'em in the eyes” gag was something Caesar regularly inflicted upon Crassus.
The Who’s rock opera Tommy was based on a little known operetta by Mozart entitled “Eine Kleine Pinballmachineisch.”
Benjamin Franklin’s intern, Skippy, was the person who actually went out in the storm that fateful night. Ben’s actual words: “I’m not goin’ out in that shit!”
The Turks and Caicos Islands in the Caribbean were actually ceded from the UK to Canada by Winston Churchill’s government in 1943, in return for aid during the Second World War. Unfortunately, the paperwork that would confirm the deal was lost when its courier plane was shot down over the Atlantic, and the deal was never ratified by the Canadian parliament. A faction of the islanders, however, claims Canadian citizenship to this day.
In the 15th century, King Edward V of England ordered the ampersand to be placed after Z in the English alphabet. A faction of clerics wanted to place it after the letter A instead. Rioting broke out, the King was deposed, and the ampersand was never included in the alphabet at all.
The metric system was just one of a number of competing measurement systems invented in Revolutionary France. It initially lost out to other systems until it was refounded to use a unit of length based on the circumference of the Earth. Previously, it had been based around a set of standard cabbages that defined both mass and taste.
Mein Kampf originated as a graphic novel in which Aryan Man was a bad guy, but when artist/writer Hitler couldn’t find a publisher he snapped and became Aryan man.
More than a century before the fabled “Philadelphia Experiment” there was the equally mysterious “HMS Shark’s Vomit” experiment in which a British clipper ship became invisible in Boston harbor, but numerous tepees and Buffalo hides in the Dakotas recorded a strange craft with huge sails suspended above the Black Mountains with people on it screaming “Blimey! This ain’t Boston! Them’s red Indians!”
An autopsy and court records reveal that there were in fact at least six "Helen Keller"s over the years, each one a well trained Scottish actress and daughter to the last who took on the guise of an Alabama blind girl as a performance art maneuver. The first person to discover this secret was Patty Duke, who subsequently went mad from guilt and betrayal.
It’s well known that Mary Todd Lincoln was with her husband the night he was shot at Ford’s Theater. It’s less well known that she apologized to the audience, then sat down and insisted on watching the rest of the play before he was removed. At curtain call she screamed out “One more time! One more time!” and the entire play was repeated, at which point she turned and said “Holy Shit! Somebody shot Abe… oh, I remember. So what plays are on next week?”
Eyewitnesses swear that Gavril Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the Grand Duchess Sophie only in self defense. The royal couple had in fact been stalking him for months, “track and shoot a peasant” being a fad at the time and Princip being worth 4000 points.
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is a palindrome, but only in the original Middle English.
The apocryphal Gospel of Jesus’s brother, The Virgin Marvin, was not rediscovered until a Stuckeys was built on the site of an ancient cave used by Essenes in what is now Toronto in 1973 (leading to a whole other set of questions), but seemed to have a huge following in the first century. It is believed that many members of Marvin’s cult, who lived underground and practiced celibacy, continued to impart their ways to new generations and that in many ways The Trekkies are a modern day survival.
The dungeons of the Tower of London and the space under Victoria Falls are connected by a wormhole, which explains why when Burton and Speke ventured into the African wonder and source of the Nile the Natives, who had never before encountered Victorian Englishmen, asked “How’s Walter Raleigh doing? Oh, and that Guy Fawkes nutter… did he ever have his fireworks show? They haven’t been around lately.”
True to Oscar Wilde’s adage that (paraphrasing) “Everyone who disappears is said to be seen later on in San Francisco”, the Second Coming of the Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth occurred on Haight Street, circa 1966. He was dismissed as just another one of them long-hair dopefiend reprobates and jailed for vagrancy. (Today, he’s since shorn the hair & beard and works as a janitor for a Wal-Mart in Sacramento.)
19: The movie Napoleon Dynamite was actually based on Napoleon Bonaparte’s awkward teen years. In the movie however Tina the llama is complete fiction. The real life Tina was a badger named “Mr Jean-Luc Cuddlepuss” who had three testicles.
Cleopatra fell down a flight of stairs, snapping her neck on her way to what was to be a fateful visit to the Aspery.
The Eiffel Tower was intended to be a landing platform for alien craft thought to be headed for earth to annoint the French as the masters of the earth. When no aliens came to use the Tower and the French found themselves facing worldwide ridicule, the Paris Globe issued a statement to the nations of the world saying "We Give Up!!
This has been their national motto ever since.
Mary Magdalene fell off her ass onto her ass, suffering a miscarriage. Her husband Joseph then kidnapped an infant which they slipped into the manger thinking it would be quite easy to fool a mere angel. The ruse worked, and billions of Christians ever since have unknowingly worshipped a saviour whose real name was Bocephus.*
Everybody stay 10 feet away for when the lightning comes.
Actually, Alice Liddle was a child prodigy who wrote all of the works (Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking-glass, etc.) credited to Charles Dodsen, who was a mathematical idiot savant who could not even write. Alice also composed most of Mozart’s works, including the aforementioned “Eine Kleine Pinballmaschinesch.” She was also an avid pinball player, having invented the machine based on mathematical theories discovered by Dodsen.
(?)One of the greatest speeches in American history was dramatically altered just before it was delivered when Martin Luther King’s young daughter Yolanda said to him “Daddy, I have a dream sometimes that I’m in school in my underwear…”, inspiring him to change the most famous line in his speech to “I have a dream that…” from the original “Wouldn’t it be cool as shit if…”
The world conspiracy of newspaper publishers was unmasked when, due to a screw-up on the part of an intern, the full coverage of the Hindenberg disaster was printed on May 4, 1937, two days before the actual disaster had been scheduled to occur. A similar slip-up resulted in the Dewey Defeats Truman headline, which they then masked by changing the script for the year to have Truman win. Computer hackers have supposedly uncovered the drafts for “Osama bin Laden to Guest Star on Joey” (May 2006) and “Hillary Defeats Condoleeza in Landslide…then asks her to marry her”, scheduled for sweeps weeks in 2008.
Charles Dickens was the James Frey of the early 19th century, having to do some serious backtracking when it was revealed not only were there no records of him ever having worked in a bootblack shop while his father was in debtor’s prison but there being substantial coverage of his temper tantrum that resulted in overturning a buffet table and assaulting a waiter with a riding crop when the caviar served at his 12th birthday party was from a sturgeon he deemed “not up to the House of Dickens standards!”
The preserved body of Pharaoh Tutankhamon, “the boy king” whose tomb was THE big story of the 1920s, was later identified as belonging to Abercrombie Llewellyn-Suggs, a Scottish exterminator who disappeared on holiday in Cairo in 1919 and evidently spent the next few years in a bitumen vat. His wife agreed not to press charges or open her mouth as long as she could call herself “Mrs. Tut” and have the T-shirt sales for North America.
Hidden in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling are, among other things, Mich’s recipe for Tuna-Seaweed Surprise, a portrayal of Julius II being flogged by a left handed termite, and the words (in Hebrew, Latin and Greek, but disguised as paint droppings) “I totally banged every single model for my statue of David, and there were dozens of them!”
England’s Queen Victoria was actually an immortal, faking her own death and publicly resurfacing only briefly, in the 1960s, in the guise of a male comedian called “Benny Hill.”
It is a commonly repeated falsehood that Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel in 1804. Actually, it was Aaron Brown who killed George Hamilton in a duel in 2003. (An understandable mix-up.)
Emperor Nero did not actually “fiddle” while Rome burned. He really just sort of “twiddled around.”
The Vikings numbering system was based on yelling.
The main reason for the Russian Revolution was an intense disagreement on whether it was spelled ‘Tsar’ or ‘Czar’. Nicholas actually didn’t care and really wanted to be called ‘Grand Poobah’ or ‘Nick the Big Palooka’.
The United States Bill of Rights originally contained a section on taxidermy and also created the barbershop quartet as the national singing group.
Gandhi was an expert harmonica player until he stabbed the Eskimo winner of a contest he thought he should have won. His conversion to non-violence was a direct result of this. He then took the name Gandhi, which is Eskimo for harmonica. His real name before this was Crazy Phillip Sandpiper II.
Contrary to claims made this past year, the actual information dealer to Woodward & Bernstein, known cryptically as “Deep Throat”, was in fact…Buck Henry.
Intensive analysis of the Zapruder footage leads to one conclusion - there WAS a second shooter on the grassy knoll. And that shooter was…Buck Henry.
The Tate-Lobianco murders were not actually carried out by members of the Manson Family. They were framed by the hippie-hating Los Angeles police department. The true killer was…Buck Henry.
Martin Luther was in fact a devout Catholic who stolidly supported the hierarchy of the Roman papacy. The 96 Theses were actually written by…Buck Henry.
The Hindenburg Luftwaffe explosion was sparked by the carelessly-tossed match of an obstinate passenger who refused to comply with the Hindenburg’s ‘no-smoking’ policy. That passenger’s name was…Buck Henry.
The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour television show (famous for it’s anti-establishment humor & the trenchant anti-war stance of its’ hosts) was axed not because of it’s controversial content, but because neither of the Smothers Brothers would submit to the demands of a CBS executive who wanted to be ‘serviced’ in a sexual manner. That CBS executive was…Buck Henry.