History is a vast subject, for sure. And with so little time to cover everything, many things are left out in favor of bigger stories, like World War II and the Louisiana Purchase. These things are certainly interesting stories, but they have nothing to do with these crazy facts that we discovered.
Turns out there’s a lot more to history than we previously thought.
25. Albert Einstein could have been President of Israel when it was formed, but he refused.
24. Before the invention of dentures, teeth were removed from the mouths of dead soldiers to be used as prostheses.
23. The Roman emperor Gaius, also known as Caligula, turned one of his favorite horses into a senator.
22. There is a giant mushroom in the Malheur National Forest, Oregon, with a root system that covers more than 2,200 acres, making it the largest living organism in the world.
21. In 1929, researchers at Princeton University claimed that they had turned a living cat into a phone.
20. Heroin was once a perfectly acceptable medicine prescribed by doctors for everything from cough to headache.
19. While Pope Gregory IX was in power, he declared that cats should be associated with devil worship and had them exterminated in droves.
18. It’s believed that the disappearance of those cats helped mice spread the bubonic plague, or Black Death, which killed hundreds of millions of people in the 12th century.
17. Russian dictator Joseph Stalin had often retouched photos to remove people who died or were removed from office.
16. Chinese women used to painfully bind their feet to make them appear smaller and more feminine.
15. The shortest war in history was the Anglo-Zanzibar war. It lasted only 38 minutes.
14. Former North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il was said to be a great lover of music and composed six operas while in office.
13. The Leaning Tower of Pisa, in fact, was never simple from the beginning. The foundations began to sink when they started on the second floor.
12. Ronald Reagan is best known for being president and acting in several movies, but he was also a prolific lifeguard, saving 77 people from drowning.
11. Investigators believe that the terrible expressions of the famous Guanajuato mummies are the result of victims buried alive.
10. The Klerksdorp spheres are foreign objects that were unearthed near Ottosdal, South Africa. Spherical objects are billions of years old and no one has been able to fully explain the markings on the sides.
9. A famous Native American named Blackbird is said to have loved the horse so much that they buried him sitting on top of him.
8. Before the alarm clocks appeared, there were “scouts” who were hired to shoot dried peas with a compressed air pistol at people’s windows to wake them up in the morning.
7. The largest bird had a wingspan of almost 20 feet. It lived 60 million years ago.
6. Russian mystic Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin survived by being poisoned, shot, and stabbed multiple times before finally being drowned in the Volga River.
5. This mysterious ancient monument bears the inscription “DOUOSVAVVM“. Some believe it was left behind by the Knights Templar as a means of finding the Holy Grail.
4. People in Spain used to use a form of torture called a Spanish donkey. The victims had to sit on top of a table as torturers tied increasingly heavyweights to their legs. Oh!
3. Speaking of torture, the Mayans used to sacrifice people by removing their still-beating hearts from their chests.
2. The use of the word “prostitute” as a term for prostitute originated with General Joseph Hooker of the Civil War, who brought prostitutes in campaigns for his men.
1. During the Great Depression, people used to make clothes out of potato bags. Seeing this, the dealers made their bags more colorful to help people stay at least a little fashionable.
Even if you’re a fan of history, I bet you didn’t know about most of these weird facts. It makes you wonder what other secrets the past holds.
Share these strange historical facts with your friends below and see how many they know!
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