No matter who you are or what period of history may be your favorite, I know there are always more tidbits of history out there to learn. So, here are 10 fun facts about history that I learned recently that I thought were good enough to share. Enjoy!
1. Philip, the recently departed Duke of Edinburgh, husband of the late Queen Elizabeth II, was not the only male consort in England’s history. In 1554, King Philip II of Spain married Queen Mary I of England, and became King Consort. Mary was a devout Catholic anxious to undo many of the Protestant changes and damage that her father, Henry VIII, had done to England. (She did not succeed.) When Mary died, English law ensured that her half-sister Elizabeth, not Philip, became the monarch of England.
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After the death of Mary and the marriage of Elizabeth, Philip aimed to marry Elizabeth as well. Spain’s interests were to turn England back to Catholicism, which was his main motive for marrying Mary. But Elizabeth was sophisticated: she led him, all while supporting other Protestant states.
In 1588, Philip sent an armada of almost 130 ships to invade England and depose the Protestant queen. The British had to repel the Spanish in the Channel. At midnight one night, the British sent eight ghost ships laden with incendiary items into the sea at Armada.
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The Spanish cut their cables and left for sea, and with their formation broken, they had no choice but to sail north, towards Scotland – and in one of the “worst storms to hit that coast in years.” According to Historic UK, “When the tattered Armada eventually returned to Spain, it had lost half its ships and three quarters of its men.” Philip never gained control over England, and the country’s lucky defeat of his monstrous Armada was considered a divine blessing of the Protestant state.
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2. On December 12, 1952, a nuclear reactor in a laboratory suffered an explosion. Long before he became President of the United States, 28-year-old Navy lieutenant and nuclear engineer Jimmy Carter volunteered to help dismantle the Canadian nuclear reactor, which had begun to melt down. Carter was part of a team of scientists who each took 90-second shifts inside the radioactive core to carefully deconstruct it.
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3. In Heian- and Kamakura-era Japan, there was a practice called uwanari-uchi, which literally translates to “beating the second wife.” According to author Chieko Irie Mulhern, uwanari-uchi is “the sanctioned right of the first wife to fight the next wife” – basically, if her husband decided to elope with wife #2, wife #1 had the right to attack the other wife, either for revenge or to protect her property and investment in her husband.
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4. The colossal 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora, a volcano in present-day Indonesia, caused a global volcanic winter event that we now call the “Year Without a Summer.” According to Smith College, the eruption was “the most destructive explosion on Earth in the last 10,000 years,” and “10,000 people living on the island were killed.” The eruption affected the entire planet. In New England, for example, frost killed crops, heavy snow fell in June, and lakes and rivers remained frozen until July. Summer never came.
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5. In 1846, a young Abraham Lincoln might have considered joining the wrong Donner Party. Lincoln was friends with James F. Reed, an organizing member of the pioneer group, and Reed wanted him to come along. Mary Todd, who already had one child with Lincoln and was pregnant for the second time, opposed Lincoln joining the expedition. In the end, Lincoln decided to stay in Illinois, where he developed his political career.
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6. Luca Pacioli was a Franciscan friar of the 15th century, mathematician, and friend of Leonardo da Vinci known as the “father of accounting”. He formalized and published a book on double entry bookkeeping, which is still the required system for many businesses today.
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7. In 1579, almost ten years before he was to become crucial in England’s defeat of the Spanish Armada, the English explorer and privateer Sir Francis Drake sailed to California to look for new trade routes for England. Just like the explorer Juan RodrÃguez Cabrillo before him, and despite sailing right along the coast of California, Drake failed to “discover” San Francisco Bay. Because the Bay (as well as the land around it) was inhospitable and shrouded in fog, Drake (and Cabrillo before him) lost sight of it altogether and instead sailed further north, probably where Drakes Bay is today.
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There, he made contact (by all peaceful accounts) with the people of the Coast Miwok, nearly three decades before the establishment of the colony of Jamestown in Virginia.
8. Lucrezia Borgia had a total of three men in her life. The first, Giovanni Sforza, got married when she was only 13 years old, while he was 26 years old, and the year after they got married, her family tried to kill him.
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Giovanni had become a bit of a problem, politically, in 1494 when he was forced to choose between his loyalty to his uncle Ludovico Sforza and Lucrezia’s brothers, Juan and Cesare.
Juan and Cesare told Lucrezia about their plan to kill Giovanni, so she allegedly forewarned him. He fled to Milan disguised as a beggar. After that, her family asked for an annulment, claiming that the marriage was never consummated because Giovanni was impotent. Yikes. Eventually, Giovanni gave his consent to the annulment (which included admitting the lie) when Pope Alexander VI, Lucrezia’s father, said he could keep her dowry.
9. Genghis Khan, the first khan of the Mongol Empire, is estimated to have killed as many as 40 million people, or 11% of the world’s population. The sheer number of people it killed led to vast reforestation of the devastated areas, leading to what ecologists say could be “the first case of successful man-made global cooling”. Areas reforested due to Khan’s genocides led to a “storage of 700 million tons of carbon” that was absorbed by the atmosphere.
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According to History.com, Genghis Khan likely killed “a full three-quarters of the modern population of Iran during his war with the Khwarezmid Empire,” and that during his lifetime “China’s population declined by tens of millions.”
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10. And finally, a wholesome story: Bobbie the Wonder Dog was a beloved Oregon dog who surprised his owners by showing up on their doorstep. The almost miraculous part? Bobbie was lost on a trip to Indiana, but his owners lived in Silverton, Oregon! According to the Oregon Encyclopedia, an investigation launched by the Oregon Humane Society “[confirmed] that Bobbie had indeed traveled 2,800 miles in the dead of winter to return home.” Scrappy and scrawny, “a much celebrated dog Bobbie received medals, keys to cities, and a jeweled harness and collar.”
If there are any dramatic, interesting, or just cool facts from history that you love, please, please, please drop them in the comments! I always like to learn more historical information, and I’m sure other people do too. Or, if you prefer to share anonymously, fill out the form below!
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