The lesser known historical facts thread
DrHappyAngry
Member Posts: 1,577
in Off-Topic
I thought it'd be fun to have a thread for lesser known historical facts, especially the funnier ones. I've posted the first couple in other threads before, but thought they'd be a fun starting point to get things rolling.
Did you know that the ancient Greeks were just as dirty as we are today? Case in point, look at the Eurymedon vase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurymedon_vase. It's a dirty vase from the Greek and Persian wars. I won't actually link to a picture here, but if you really want to see it, do a google images search for it. Even the Wikipedia article doesn't show a picture of it, but it is kind of hilarious.
Did you know that fart humor was popular among the nobility in the middle ages? King Henry II gave Roland the Farter an estate and all the man had to do was "one jump, one whistle, and one fart for the King's court at Christmas." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_the_Farter
Did you know that until the 20th century, the Dalai Lama was like a medieval Pope? He'd elevate a Mongol he liked to local Khan, and send him after his enemies to kill them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamlet_chicken_processing_plant_fire
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyU-PvbOjlo
Did you know that the ancient Greeks were just as dirty as we are today? Case in point, look at the Eurymedon vase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurymedon_vase. It's a dirty vase from the Greek and Persian wars. I won't actually link to a picture here, but if you really want to see it, do a google images search for it. Even the Wikipedia article doesn't show a picture of it, but it is kind of hilarious.
Did you know that fart humor was popular among the nobility in the middle ages? King Henry II gave Roland the Farter an estate and all the man had to do was "one jump, one whistle, and one fart for the King's court at Christmas." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_the_Farter
Did you know that until the 20th century, the Dalai Lama was like a medieval Pope? He'd elevate a Mongol he liked to local Khan, and send him after his enemies to kill them.
-- René Grousset: The Empire of the Steppes
Did you know that the Macedonian general, Pyrrhus, was killed in Argos after being downed by a woman throwing a tile that hit the base of his neck and beheaded by a soldier named Zopyrus?-- Plutarch: The life of Pyrrhus
Did you know that in Hamlet, North Carolina, a bunch of workers were killed at a chicken fixing plant in 1991 when a fire broke out because the owner would lock the doors so workers couldn't leave?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamlet_chicken_processing_plant_fire
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyU-PvbOjlo 13
Comments
The earliest known cartel in history was in Athens back in 386 B.C. The price of grain had risen substantially , probably because of things like the Corinthian war. Athens had to import almost all of its grain and did so through the port city of Piraeus. So the merchants buying grain from the ships in Piraeus basically supplied all of Athens with food.
So these merchants formed a cartel, forcing the importers to sell at a lower price while selling it to Athens at a higher price. The original idea seems to have been to lower the price on grain in general, for the sake of all of Athens. But things soon spiraled out of control. The prices got even higher while grain exporters (mainly from Cyprus) started to avoid Piraeus.
We don't know what happened to the merchants, but they were apparently extremely unpopular even before the cartel and most people wanted them executed for this. Parts of the trial against them are recorded in a speech by Lysias. He actually has to defend himself for insisting on a trial instead of just lynching the lot. He concludes his speech by saying that the merchants should be executed, because then "you will both do justice and buy your corn at a fairer price".
EDIT: And here's the link to the speech by Lysias.
Womens rights have had many champions, who have paid a high prize for their fight. Reducing the the many tribulations of their fights to “the power of tears” is a bit too much imo.
Btw: I dare say that its a very well known fact that womens rights still need improvements... i think no country can say they have true equality
Would be interesting for some of the other or upcoming contributions to this thread to include at least some link with more (background) information.
So, pine cones, and the Russian Revolution.
During the revolution, civil war and foreign invasions that followed it, the Soviets controlled a rather small portion of what would eventually become the Soviet Union. As a result they were facing a chronic shortage of gas, coal, and oil for heating and energy production generally as most supply lines for energy production were cut. In order to keep the lights on, and what trains they had running, the Soviet government put out a call for various university based scientists to investigate alternative sources of energy to help ablate the crisis.
A professor in Moscow discovered that, as far as biomass is concerned, pine cones actually burn rather hot and for quite a bit longer than one would expect. So the government set up a program whereby the elderly and school children would be sent into what coniferous forests existed within Soviet territory to gather pine cones off of the ground and load them up, whereupon the pine cones would then be transported to a special factory that had been set up for processing the pine cones into briquettes for burning.
The briquettes would then be transported to power plants and other critical energy production infrastructure by train. The program however ran into a major problem in that the trains that were to transport the briquettes often used them to fire their engines so as to save their coal and fire cords for other tasks. In the end the program was a total failure because *most* of the trains that transported the briquettes would burn through the majority of their pine cone cargo simply to reach the collection points and transport the briquettes to their destinations. They very effectively got several trains to run, but they would run through almost their entire cargo to accomplish this task. The project was declared a failure and the dreams of a pine cone powered war machine were abandoned, although processing of pine cone briquettes for domestic use never ceased completely, being used today as a cheap alternative to wood in home heating solutions.
The audio quality was so bad and the emperor spoke so formally in classical Japanese that people had hard time even understanding what he said. To make matters worse, he didn't even explicitly say that Japan had surrendered. Just that the government had accepted the Potsdam declaration. After the announcement, a radio announcer clarified that, yes, Japan had surrendered. I wonder if things had been more chaotic and confusing if they had just played the announcement with no clarification.
Then, completely out of the blue, they find out that Japan had somehow lost the war. All the sacrifices they had made were in vain. Worse yet, the Emperor himself had issued the surrender--what could be more humiliating than that? According to the militarist ideology the government had been touting for decades, this was the absolute worst thing that could have happened. In Hirohito's own words, they were "suffering the insufferable and enduring the unendurable."
So the Americans moved in to occupy Japan. All the Japanese soldiers went home. And everyone had the worst expectations for what would happen: the Japanese soldiers warned their mothers and sisters and daughters to flee into the woods when the Americans came, fearing that the foreign soldiers would embark on a campaign of mass rape, just as the Japanese had done elsewhere in Asia. The Americans, likewise, thought they were going to be faced with an army of women and children fighting with bamboo spears.
Yet neither of these things happened. In spite of years of mutual hatred and propaganda portraying the Japanese as monkeys and the Americans as gorillas, the encounters turned out to be both nonviolent and even friendly. The Japanese didn't even offer nonviolent resistance and cooperated with the Americans in spite of everything, while the United States poured in $2 billion in aid to rebuild the nation and keep people fed (largely to prevent the rise of communism in the country), shielded Japan from demands to pay reparations to their wartime victims, and spared the Emperor and practically everyone else from war crimes charges, even though the terms of the surrender were made unconditional specifically because the Americans wanted the power to hold a trial for Hirohito.
So one day, this old Japanese guy is sitting next to an American soldier, watching a building get reconstructed with American money, and he turns to the American and says, "Japan won the war, no?"
After seven years of occupation, the U.S. left Japan to avoid generating resentment. The victims of Japanese internment were freed, partially compensated, and the government eventually issued an apology to the Japanese-American citizens imprisoned during the war. The United States extended a security umbrella over Japan in exchange for the preservation of Article 9 in the Japanese constitution, which bars Japan from waging war even in self-defense, and Japan turned its attention from military expansion to economic progress and innovation. To this day, Japan is one of our closest allies and dearest friends, and has an economy to rival our own.
Imagine that. One of the bloodiest and most hate-filled wars in history, between the nation of immigrants and an insular island nation, between a Western democracy and an Eastern military-led oligarchy on the other side of the planet with virtually no common ground of any kind between them, which ended with the horrific aftermath of the deadliest weapons ever created... ultimately resulted in a friendship that's lasted for 70 years. Anti-Japanese sentiment in the U.S. and anti-American sentiment in Japan is virtually nonexistent where once it was universal.
What better proof could there be that world peace is possible?
-> "Mah fellow Vespuccians..."
Did you know that the Cotton Gin had been in use in India and China hundreds of years before Eli Whitney "Invented" it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_gin
Did you know that Thomas Jefferson sent a stuffed Moose to a French Nobleman to prove that Americans weren't inferior to Europeans? https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/01/15/262916045/thomas-jefferson-needs-a-dead-moose-right-now-to-defend-america
Did you know that the Gin and Tonic was originally for malaria prevention? Tonic water originally had quinine in it, which is a preventative for malaria, and mixing it with gin was a way to make it more tolerable. Quinine is very bitter, if you've ever had it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quinine
Did you know an elephant was once hanged for murder?
Story here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_(elephant)
Did you know that Francis Ford Coppola was initially reluctant to direct (but agreed to produce) a Godfather sequel, and suggested that Martin Scorsese direct it in his place?
Speaking of which, did you know that Godfather 2 was the first movie sequel to simply be named "[Name of 1st movie] 2" - a decision that was vigorously opposed by the studio?
And did you know that Godfather 3 should never have been made?
Did you know that Attila the Hun's defeat at the Battle of Chalons likely featured the highest casualty count of any battle prior to WW1, with well over 100,000 casualties reported?
And did you know that Attila later died in his sleep from a nosebleed?
http://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2013/09/knight-v-snail.html
Did you know that you have the ancient Romans to thank for both graffiti and pornography?
Of course, we have historical evidence:
Speaking of Rome, did you know that its Empire might never have come into existence if not for the honking of some geese?
I sometimes feel strangely sad for all the inside jokes, references, memes and trends throughout history that now are gone and forgotten forever.
The CIA captured American and Canadian citizens, both adults and children, and tortured them both physically and emotionally, using drugs, radiation, and chemical experiments, in an effort to find a workable, repeatable method of mind control. This project was officially sanctioned by the US government in 1953 and was officially halted in 1973.
In 1975, the Church Committee brought to the public their investigation into the project, which was hampered by the fact the CIA Director Richard Helms had ordered all records of the project destroyed.
In 1977, as a result of the Freedom of Information Act, 20,000 documents from Project MK Ultra that were not destroyed were accidentally found in a general purpose warehouse. These documents been sent in by the subjects of the investigation in a disorganized mass along with thousands of unrelated, unimportant documents as kind of an intended slap in the face for the investigators. This little joke backfired and the project was revealed via actual documentation.
In a public hearing on March 15 1995, Valerie Wolf, a professional social worker who gave counsel to some of the survivors of the project, testified before the Presidential Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments of the impact of the project on the health of the experimental subject.
She said: “The main reason that mind control research is being mentioned is because people are alleging that they were exposed to mind control, radiation, drugs and chemical experimentation which were administered by the same doctors who are known to have been involved in conducting radiation and mind control research. Because these people were children and were easily controlled, they appear to have been used in more than one research project.”
On October 3 1995, Bill Clinton issued a formal apology on behalf of the US government to all victims and families of victims of radiation experiments, which included the victims of Project MK Ultra. Most people missed the apology because the media were focused on the OJ Simpson trial verdict which aired 3 hours later that same day.
(Source: just google or bing “Project MK Ultra” and read any of the articles. You can also find many of the documents uploaded to the CIA’s public website, which I will source here: https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/search/site/mk%20ultra )
Did you know that the perfect woman DOES exist?
Even today, entering the German reading of the joke into Google translate will literally result in a "Fatal Error."
You can read more about the gruesome details of this experiment here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Funniest_Joke_in_the_World
That old joke of having the same people cross a vantage point over and over again to pretend that one side has more troops than the other, isn’t a joke in fact, the British used it to take Detroit during the war.
The American position seems impregnable, but Brock has a secret weapon - psychology. Hull has already been led to believe that three hundred militiamen are regulars. Now Tecumseh and his Indians are ordered to march in single file across an open space, out of range but in full view of the garrison. The spectacle has some of the quality of a vaundeville turn. The Indians lope across the meadow, vanish into the forest, circle back and repeat the manoeuvre three times. Hull’s officers, who cannot tell one Indian from another, count fifteen hundred painted savages, screeching and waving tomahawks. Hull is convinced he is outnumbered.
Brock is still scrutinizing his objective, all alone, some fifty yards in front of his own troops, when an American officer suddenly appears, waving a white flag and bearing a note from his general. The American commander, it seems, is on the verge of giving up without a fight...
Hull wants a truce, has asked for three days. Brock gives him theee hours: after that he’ll attack.
After this no-nonsense ultimatum it becomes clear that Hull is prepared for a full surrender. He will give up everything - the Fort, it’s contents, all the ordnance, all supplies, all the troops, even those commanded by the absent Cass and McArthur.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salting_the_earth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthage#Roman_Carthage
Mission: Mind Control — Rare 1979 ABC News Documentary on Mind Control Experiments
The only reason I happened to look it up was curiosity after watching Banshee Chapter, in which it is mentioned.
When Jefferson's wife passed away, her dying wish was for Jefferson to never remarry, and he kept that promise. But that's the thing about his wife's request: she only asked him to never marry another woman.