actually maybe I will just do a disjointed thread of History Trivia What I Have Learned
there was a Chinatown in Tenochtitlan within ten years of the fall of the Aztec Empire
the weird bulging eyed expressions on the Viking Lewis chessmen probably weren’t intended to be funny at the time 
it seems increasingly likely that basically all the ancient Greco-Roman statues were painted incredibly garish colours
relatedly, suits of plate armour were often elaborately decorated and enamelled rather than just being bare metal
16th century Germanic mercenaries were incredibly important to the balance of power in Europe but they were scandalous because both their hats and their codpieces were considered indecently large
as much hype as ‘blitzkrieg’ gets on the history channel, when Germany invaded the USSR most of its equipment was moving on foot or by horse
no Ottoman sultan went on hajj for about two centuries
there’s been evidence of female gladiators having been common in Ancient Rome for decades but it mostly got conveniently ignored
my favourite figure of the Russian revolution is Arseny Avraamov, a conceptual composer who twice played (and conducted, using flags) a symphony with a city that included factory whistles, truck engines, rifle fire, and the foghorns of the red fleet
he tried to get Lenin to order the destruction of every piano in Russia as a bourgeois instrument
Vladimir Putin’s grandfather was Stalin’s chauffeur
the Holy Roman Empire and the Dutch Republic fought a war in 1784 consisting of one battle, in which the only casualty was a soup kettle hit with a musket round
during war with the Ottomans, the Austrian Army once accidentally fought a night-long battle with itself while the Ottomans captured the nearby city
the most French thing I’ve ever heard is that the Grande Armée’s slang for a bayonet charge was ‘déjeuner à la fourchette’, ‘lunch on a fork’
during the Battle of the Atlantic, one interim solution for the gap in air cover was to put catapults on merchant ships to launch a single fighter plane, which would drive off U-boats and then ditch in the sea, the pilot hopefully to be retrieved by the convoy
UN troops ran out of ammunition so frequently during the Korean War that at one point the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders were left throwing mess tins at the advancing Chinese and North Korean troops
prior to D-Day half a dozen allied troops were killed in a training exercise practicing the use of floating tanks, but it was covered up for fear of compromising the landings and their families were never told how they died
a number of French villages were so completely destroyed by the First World War that they could never be rebuilt or even repopulated, but they still administratively exist and have representation in local government, at least theoretically
until as late as 1991, the legislature of the Republic of China (Taiwan) still had members representing constituencies on the mainland; since they couldn’t be replaced with new elections, they were an unelected power base for the ruling KMT
under British rule, the communist party of Hong Kong ran itself as a chain of convenience stores rather than a political party
the Russian Army only started issuing its soldiers socks in 2003, having previously used long (and extremely bad-smelling) footwraps
the Portuguese dictator Antonio Salazar suffered a debilitating stroke shortly before he was overthrown by the Carnation Revolution, so they Goodbye Lenined him and just told him he was still in charge
in 1987, 13 years after he died, persons unknown broke into the tomb of Juan Perón and cut off and stole his hands
when the Royal Navy’s ships returned to Britain after the Battle of Jutland, crowds booed and threw rocks, coal and poop at the sailors
during the Second World War, the British government had to issue a special lapel badge for members of the merchant navy going on leave because people kept trying to beat them up for not being in uniform
between about 1940 and 1975 it’s a pretty safe bet that a soldier in combat was on issued amphetamines at least some of the time
Jörg Jenatsch, a Swiss politician of the Thirty Years’ War, was assassinated during a carnival by a man wearing a bear costume
Thomas Urquhart, Scottish aristocrat and the first translator of Rabelais to English, died of laughter on being told that Charles II had been crowned king of England
one of said Charles’ mistresses once dispersed an angry mob that had surrounded her carriage and were shouting about her being the king’s catholic whore by shouting back that she was actually the king’s protestant whore
Ferdinand I, Emperor of Austria-Hungary, was so inbred that his head looked like a Cal Arts bean head and responded to news of the 1848 revolution by saying ‘but they’re not allowed to do that, are they?’
Oliver Cromwell’s head is buried in a secret location in Cambridge
Until 2010, Albert Einstein’s brain was stored in a mason jar inside an old coffee box in a doctor’s office in Wichita, Kansas
Chopin’s heart was embalmed in a jar of cognac and entombed in a cathedral wall in Poland while the rest of him was buried in France
probably the last words JFK ever heard was the First Lady of Texas saying ‘well, Mr President, you certainly can’t say that Dallas doesn’t love you’
Woodrow Wilson needed to be read racist bedtime stories to go to sleep
probably the last words Lincoln ever heard: a comedic American character calling his nosy British mother in law a ‘sockdologising old man-trap’, because Booth knew the play and timed his entrance for a line he knew would get a big laugh
Ulysses S Grant suffered the rest of his life with survivor’s guilt because he was meant to be at the play with Lincoln and unlike the president, had a bodyguard with him, but cancelled
Lincoln’s son was by pure chance present for two presidential assassinations, his father’s and James Garfield’s
the USS Indianapolis was torpedoed and sunk and left in open water, precipitating the largest mass shark attack on humans, because it was on its way back from a secret mission to deliver the first atomic bomb to Tinian Island
if the submarine had caught it on the way there, Hiroshima might never have been bombed. Nagasaki was only bombed because of bad weather; the intended target was the city of Kokura
incidentally, Indianapolis radioed for help before it sank; the transmission reached three American listening posts. the officer in charge of one was drunk, another was asleep and the third thought it was a Japanese trap
so much of the atomic bombings sounds like this - they had to physically arm one of them on Tinian due to a wiring defect and they nearly obliterated the entire island
Richard Nixon spent the Second World War hustling poker as a supply officer
JFK’s older brother Joseph was the one being groomed for office, but was killed in an early attempt to develop a UAV by filling a remotely-piloted heavy bomber with explosives
Orde Wingate, the commander of British special forces raids into Japanese-occupied Burma, gave all of his briefings completely naked
In the early days of the First World War, Austria-Hungary attempted to do an end-run around the problem of how to fit a machine gun on an aircraft
thinking along the same lines, an Italian dude tried to kill the king of France in 1835 by spending weeks assembling 35 different guns into one enormous volley gun in an apartment he had gotten for the purpose
when he fired it, four of the barrels exploded, badly injuring him, but the rest obliterated the entire window and killed 18 people near the king, only grazing the actual target
before the invention of radar, the state of the art in detecting aircraft was in trying to hear them coming better
at the turn of the 20th century there was a fad for pistol duelling using wax bullets, a sport that required you to dress like this
the nazis tried to breed the aurochs back into existence but only succeeded in creating cows that were very strong and furious at everything
Hitler was obsessed with the Western pulp novels of German writer Karl May, to the point of insisting that his generals read them to gain strategic insights
also a huge fan of Disney cartoons
Churchill had a habit of just pissing in whatever room he was in when he needed to
Stalin liked drawing muscular male nudes in his spare time, often with sarcastic annotations
one of the earliest tactics of Italian fascists was forcing their opponents to drink large quantities of castor oil as a laxative
King John of Bohemia wanted to fight in the battle of Crécy despite being completely blind, so he had his guards tie his horse to theirs and charge the enemy, who promptly killed him
8th century Anglo-Saxon king Offa minted coins with the shahada, the Islamic profession of faith, on them, because the coinage in common circulation was the Abbasid dinar and he either thought it was decoration or wanted to defraud other Europeans
European artisans edged dresses and veils in nonsense Arabic letters because they thought it looked cool
in 415BCE, before departing Athens to invade Sicily, men of the general Alcibiades got drunk and went around the city snapping the dicks off all the statues of Hermes
the Maya people of Chichen Itza painted their sacrifices to the gods blue - both blue-painted human bodies and goods were thrown into the sacred cenote. the blue pigment was so long-lasting that it formed into a 14 foot layer at the bottom of the cenote that’s still there
the cloth covering of the Kaaba 🕋 used to vary between being red, green and white instead of just black, and they never took the old one off when replacing it, just covered it again, until part of the building collapsed under the weight of all the accumulated cloth
it used to be pretty common for medieval churches in England to have an anchorite, a sort of personal hermit who lived in a cell adjoining the church with a special viewing port for them to watch mass and receive the eucharist
the state of the art in Victorian emergency medicine for drowning was to fish them out and literally blow tobacco smoke up their asshole. the embankments of the Thames used to be provided with lifebelts and bellows specifically for the purpose
the border between Bangladesh and India features enclaves within enclaves within enclaves
