I am a huge huge history buff. Really the main reason I love it is for all the messy dramatic content it provides me, but there’s also stuff that’s just fun, and interesting, and I love to share it! So, from petty Napoleon Bonaparte to Abe Lincoln and elephants to John Wayne and the KGB, here are 10 historical facts that I just had to share.
1.
Teenage Napoleon was apparently SUPER emo, and wrote self-insert prose fiction so awful it butterfly-effected him into becoming the commander of the Army of Italy (which, BTW, was a French Army despite its confusing name) and eventually Emperor of the French.
Anyway — Napoleon “books were my only friends” Bonaparte wrote a lot of bad fiction, but my favorite is Clisson et Eugénie, a romantic story about a soldier (definitely not based on Napoleon) and his girlfriend (definitely not based on Napoleon’s ex), who cheats on him and makes him super depressed (definitely not based upon real events). This would be a recurring theme in Napoleon’s life.
3.
The Yuan Dynasty had passports as far back as the 13th century, and they looked like this:
4.
Historians think there might have been a female empress of Rome who briefly ruled outright: Ulpia Severina.
Galileo was the person to discover that the moon wasn’t a perfect, pearlescent sphere, and actually had imperfect topography like Earth.
6.
Apparently, in 1861 King Mongkut of Thailand (then Siam) generously offered the United States the gift of two elephants, to “be turned out to run wild in some jungle suitable for them.” He apparently had the idea that elephants would just be a really cool thing to have populate the continent. Love the vision.
7.
Apparently Joseph Stalin was a John Wayne fan (yes, as in the cowboy movie guy) and loved his movies, but, according to a biography on John Wayne’s life, Stalin decided to call for Wayne’s assassination due to his staunch anti-communist views. Stalin thought that Wayne’s rhetoric was influential enough to threaten the existence of the Soviet Union.
“The FBI had discovered there were [KGB] agents sent to Hollywood to kill John Wayne,” says Michael Munn, film historian. “John told the FBI to let the men show up and he would deal with them.”
8.
I recently saw this tweet and was struck by that gorgeous dress, but… reader, I had never heard of Marjorie Merriweather Post. Naturally I had to know who was wearing something so fabulous, and thus I discovered the woman who was, potentially, America’s most glamorous heiress, who was apparently the wealthiest woman in America for literal decades:
Since I’m in my little Napoleon phase, I obviously had to go read more about the diamond necklace. And in reading about the necklace, I discovered another piece of jewelry he’d commissioned: the Napoleon Tiara.
9.
In 1805, Napoleon gifted this gorgeous tiara to Pope Pius VII… as an insult. The Pope couldn’t even wear it, because it weighed five times more than the previous papal tiara and was also too skinny to even fit on someone’s head. And ALSO, do you see that huge chunk of an emerald on the top? Nice, right? Well…
10.
And finally… I recently learned about the “Pig War.” What’s that, you ask? Oh, it’s how the US border between Washington and Canada in the San Juan Islands was decided. “We fought a war over that?!” you’re probably saying. Well, we didn’t fight a war, but we had a war. A bloodless one (except for that of the pig).
The US government was like, “…this all started over a pig?” And even though the resulting border dispute was debated for 12 years (!), no one ever shot each other, which is great. How did it get resolved, you ask? In the most random way possible.
If there’s any dramatic/interesting/cool stuff from history that you think I would love, please please please drop stories in the comments! I love to learn about this stuff, and I’m sure other people do, too.
Source: https://www.buzzfeed.com/juliacorrigan/10-fun-facts-history
