I love these little lists of oddities and was thrilled when this one was sent in to me. I have to confess that I didn’t know most of the things on this list. The ones that seem the strangest or most unlikely to me, I verified and found they are, indeed, true! So, onwards, let’s learn some odd facts we didn’t already know.
1. Before the Boston Tea Party, the British actually lowered tea taxes, not raised them.
2. England’s King George I was actually German.
3. Abel Tasman “discovered” Tasmania, New Zealand and Fiji, on his first voyage, but managed to completely miss mainland Australia!
4. Ethnic Irishman Bernardo O’Higgins was the first president of the Republic of Chile.
5. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both died on the same day – the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Declaration of Independence.
6. When the American Civil War started, Confederate Robert E. Lee owned no slaves. Union general U.S. Grant did.
7. Kaiser Wilhelm II, Tsar Nicholas II and George V were all grandchildren of Queen Victoria.
8. Karl Marx was once a correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune.
9. Josef Stalin once studied to be a priest.
10. Henry Kissinger and Yassir Arafat won the Nobel Peace Prize. Gandhi never did.
11. The Constitution of the Confederate States of America banned the slave trade.
12. The Finnish capital of Helsinki was founded by a Swedish king in 1550.
13. The “D” in D-Day stands for “Day” – “Day-Day”
14. There was a New Australia in Paraguay in the 1890s.
15. A New Orleans man hired a pirate to rescue Napoleon from his prison on St. Helena.
16. Like Dracula (Vlad Tepes), there really was a King Macbeth. He ruled Scotland from 1040 to 1057.
17. In 1839, the U.S. and Canada fought the bloodless “War of Pork and Beans”.
18. Despite the reputation, Mussolini never made the trains run on time.
19. The world powers officially outlawed war under the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact.
20. Ancient Egypt produced at least six types of beer. [See them drinking their lovely beer in the picture above.]
Contributor: Tequila Mockingbird
Ack! My mistake, Iain. I thought that was one of the bits in Geoffrey that were actually historical.
Well stone the crows!
According to the fount-of-all-knowledge-pedia:
“New Zealand was part of New South Wales from 1788 until 1840 when it was proclaimed as a separate colony. [nb a colony - not a dominion, which came later]
New South Wales, according to Arthur Phillip’s amended Commission dated 25 April 1787, includes “all the islands adjacent in the Pacific Ocean” and running westward to the 135th meridian. These islands included the current islands of New Zealand, which was administered as part of New South Wales.”
It still relies on the definition of “adjacent”.
The information abouit Grant owning slaves when the Civil War began is incorrect. The truth:
MARCH 29, 1859. Despite the financial troubles of the Grant family, there was one remedy Grant refused to consider. He set free his slave, William Jones, who had come to him through his wife’s family. Source: Document in Missouri Historical Society. http://twister.lib.siu.edu/projects/usgrant/hist/chronology2.htm
I meant to write “somewhat incorrect”
Augh! Keep hitting submit too soon. Julia Dent Grant’s father was a slave owner.
However, Robert E. Lee was in fact a slave owner. Or, more correctly, his wife’s family were slave owners, and while Lee did detest slavery, he was not keen to free them or otherwise get rid of them because of his long absences in military service and Mary’s ill health. (Mary favored eventual emacipation and educated Arlington slaves, as did the other Custis family members, in anticipation of the end of slavery. Lee did not object.) He was the executor of the Custis estate and freed all slaves at Arlington in December 1862 in accordance with the will. Reference: http://www.nps.gov/arho/historyculture/slavery.htm
D-Day stands for “Day of Days” and was a common military term used to describe the beginnings of military action, until this one in particuliar gained such notariety, since then it has not been used for any other military action.
“I wouldn’t regard number 12 as an oddity, considering the fact that the area that now constitutes Finland was under Swedish rule at the time. New York was founded by the Dutch but we don’t see that on the list.”
I agree. But otherwise this list was great, and I learned a lot of new things.
Sharki – I was born and raised in the Southeastern US, and I can tell you that they gloss over the vast majority of details here about the Civil War. In fact, History in its entirety seems to be losing its signifigance. Nearly everything I’ve learned about the vast majority of the world in my case is self taught. The public school system here is just plain pathetic.
mmm beer….I love oddity lists
btw, 1st comment, long time reader!!!
sikamikanica – welcome aboard
Nicholas II was not a grandson of Victoria. His wife Alexandra (formerly Princess Alix of Hesse) was Victoria’s granddaughter. And while Wilhelm II was Victoria’s grandson, George V was her eldest son.
OOOPS! I just realized now where I read that fact about Abel Tasman hehehehe…..
i m not anti-Gandhi or anything. i also agree that he didn’t deserve the noble prize. i was born to a Sikh family in India, and well people of the religion were ignored while the whole free-the-India-ordeal. he was very pro-Hindu kind of an individual and somewhat of racist to other religions. i don’t belong to any religion but seeing that such a great personality and peace loving person can have racist view of other people, simply says that they don’t deserve the Nobel prize.
he was a self-acclaimed Hindu mystic but he was great politician but that was all there is to it. i am pro-Gandhi but there are some realities that are overshadowed by his goodness.
ooo btw.. more on Gandhi.. his assassin was once his supporter.
just something I’d to throw out there.
I really hope there’s a second list adding to this, because this list is awesome
George V was not Victoria’s eldest son. Edward VII was.
tsar nicholas II was not related to victoria by blood ( i don’t think?); however, his wife certainly was.
Re: #4. Bernardo O’Higgins was not Irish, he came from an Irish family though and he was born in Chile. Also, he wasn’t the first Chilean president, although the first one did come from another country: Argentina.
D-Day is just military code. The hypen is used like a colon. It’s merely the abbreviation with the word it’s abbreviating. Like C-Central I-Intelligence A-Agency
thaks for them but some of them not be very intersting.
D-Day means Decision-Day.
The Nobel Peace prize is arbitrary and meaningless. Arafat, a terrorist, won one. Al Gore won one for making a friggin’ power point. It’s no more noteworthy than winning “Best Smile” from your highschool year book.
Joseph Stain was not his real name it was Iosif(Joseph)Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili.Stalin was a name he took.STALIN means STEEL.He wasn’t even Russian,he was from the Republic of Georgia.
Jefferson Davis the first and only President of the Confederate States of America was born in Kentucky(not a Confederate state)the same state as Abe Lincoln! And he was the son-in-law of another U.S.President Zachary Taylor.
Robert E.Lee was the President’s first choice to lead the Union army against the Confederates.Robert E.Lee’s wife was George Washington’s (step)great granddaughter.
Ulysses S.Grant was at the the beginning of the Civil War a civilian
storekeeper living in Saint Louis,Mo.He was not a infranty officer when he first originally served in the U.S.Army.He was in the quartermaster corps(supply type).And his name was not Ulysses S.Grant it was Hiram Ulysses Grant.He changed it when he entered West Point because he didn’t want other cadets to call him HUG!The S. doesn’t mean anything it is just an initial.
Harry S Truman doesn’t have a middle name either and it should not have a period behing it!Just an S!
And last but not least, Henry Ford and his wife had an adopted child from China, though as much research as I have done on the subject, I can not find any reference to the *****, name or what ever became of the child!
Stalin did that on purpose. My history is rusty, but he choose that name after he got in power because his “predecessor” did something similar. Or the man who Stalin was predecessor to, did the same thing after he took “office” I need to go review my history notes. My convoluted point? Stalin was not the only leader to choose a name. Whew. Need a drink.
Hitler’s real last name was “Schickelgruber” or some such spelling. I don’t remember what they said the reason was for him to chose Hitler as a name.
To Mr. Grant:
You probably has never been so right in your life like this time. Humans need to understand that is not inteligent to judge other people with the “eyes” of our own culture and experience.
How many people, upon seeing indians from the Amazone river, feel so much pitty for the way they live and all the things they lack. What the people don’t realize is that probably those indians are living better that they do:
1. Is the mortgage crisis taking away your sleep? not to the indians; they don’t even have mortgages.
2. The TV transmission system is going to change in 2009! Well the indians couldn’t care less, even if it changes in the next two minutes.
3. Your company is streamlining resources and there’s a layoff comming! Eh, those indians have nothing to do about it.
4. What a cool HDTV you got! And it costs $7,800.00 that will take you 10 minutes before forever to pay! Well, in the Amazone they don’t have credit card companies extorsioning them.
5. And…. their next door neighbor lives like a 5 miles from them; and guess what? are not the Joneses.
After thinking on this, I wouldn’t be surprise if they think that we are the ones to be pitty.
I wonder what is odd with #12? Most cities of Finland are founded either by some Swedish King or Russian Emperor. By the time King Gustaf Wasa founded Helsinki in 1550, the capital of Finland was Turku, founded by the Swedes in abt. 1220. Helsinki became the capital of Finland in 1812 by the order of Emperor Alexander I, the Grand Duke of Finland.
9. Josef Stalin once studied to be a priest.
i can’t wait to tell my friends this
Half of this stuff is completely not true.
Surely everyone knew that the european monarchy was hideously inbred? and the helsiki sweden thing aint suprosing because of how many times the borders have shifted in the past 500 years.
A little late on the scene but, golly folks, so many of you do seem to get heated up about purported historical facts. Just take it as infotainment, as most history is anyway. And remember that information from the internet is really interesting but should be generally taken with the same respect you’d give a drunk in a bar. SOME of it may be true.
If I may: an example. My favourite death of all time was that of the ancient Greek poet Aeschylus, who was said to be killed by a falling tortoise dropped by an eagle. No-one can prove the truth or fallacy of this one way or the other. It is plausible, because Golden Eagles in Greece today drop tortoises onto rocks (often rock platforms)so they can get to the soft middle bit. So much time and so many kilobytes have been taken up by people conjecturing on this. So what? It MAY have been true and should not be dismissed as a lie. But then, it could very well have been a good Greek yarn. We’ll never know.
The good news is that so many people are interested. Just don’t use this stuff as anything to nail your money or actions on. That’s what makes religious wars, pogroms, and much unnecessary internecine strife. Remember: history is an art (too often with a capital “f”) not a science.
Q; Thank you.
It is not the “pork and beans war” it is, in fact, the “pig war”. It was fought on the island of San Juan in northern Washington.
Please, if you’re going to post a list, research the facts yourself! There are too many inaccuracies!
Tim: Although Grant didn’t like his initials “HUG”, he wanted to be known as Ulysses Hiram Grant, not Ulysses S. Grant. He didn’t change his name when he entered West Point. He was nominated for admission to West Point by a congressman called Thomas Hamer. When Hamer signed the papers for Grant’s appointment, he wrote down “Ulysses S. Grant”. Grant tried to correct the mistake when he entered West Point but he was told that the name he had been registered under couldn’t be changed. Hamer chose “S” for Grant’s middle initial because he remembered Grant’s mother’s maiden name was Simpson; although Grant later wrote in a letter to his wife that “it does not stand for anything”.
First time I have seen this site .What great fun to read all the comments from people whodo nothave a clue what they are talking about..keep it up its great fun,
You would all make good MP, ( Member of parliment for those who do not know !!! )
Gandhi was the only person to defy British Rule over India and who won through non violent means. To denigrate his achievements is mean and petty. The English massacred unarmed Indians at Amritsar which had nothing to do with him. Thank you Mr. Graves, by the way most wars were funded and profited by world bankers.
Yeah I was interested in these facts until I saw the one about D-Day. D doesn’t stand for Day it stands for Dooms i.e. Dooms-Day
Wrong I’m afraid, Joe. Why would the Allies refer to the invasion of Northern Europe as ‘Dooms-Day’? The ‘D’ in ‘D-Day’ does indeed stand for ‘Day’, but that is not such an anachronism in the context of a military operation. There are other terms like ‘H-Hour’ and ‘A-Assault’. It’s simply a shorthand term.
Couple notes:
19. The Kellogg-Briand Pact doesn’t outlaw war. It basically just created the concept of Crime Against Peace. So you can’t invade another country to annex territory, and use of force generally has to be rationalized by the right to self and/or collective defense.
16. Conflating Vlad Tsepes and MacBeth is ridiculous. The highly fictive account of the play aside, the historic MacBeth is generally seen as a generous, good king, who ruled for 17 years.
13. The ‘D’ in D-Day does not stand for ‘Day’. That concept is something of a retronym. There were lettered Days in the course of WWII related to operational actions: A-Day, C-Day, G-Day, I-Day, K-Day etc. None of the letters stood for anything. (the exceptions of course, V-E Day & V-J Day). D-Day is just more commonly known because the actions of that particular D-Day were so momentous.
2. Technically, yes, George I came from an area that is now in Germany. However, Germany as a united country did not exist at the time. George I was the ruler of the Electorate of Hanover. He was next in line to the British throne, so the two countries became, briefly, merged through a personal union, until Victoria. She was in line for the British throne, but not the Hanover one, as Hanover followed Salic law, which didn’t give women status in succession. George was far from an oddity, at any rate. Less than a century before, the King was William II, who was Dutch. The Stuarts before that were originally Scots. And the houses of Tudor, York and Lancaster were, in their origin, French. England hasn’t had an “English” monarch since 1066.
I always thought D-Day meant Disembarkation-Day (as in, the day a bunchload of soldiers disembarked from their ships to storm the beaches). This is what I had always heard at least.
Anyway, as to the Gandhi debate, while I agree that he preached a non-violent independence from Britain, I cant just gloss over the fact that he was, in fact, racist. In any case, the NPP is xtremely political so I dont know how important it really is…
From what I’ve been told growing up, D-Day stood for disembarkment day, since it was allies pilling out of boats into France.
GTT – Will have to politely disagree with you. If you knew Indian history, you would know that Gandhi would have given his life before he was called a racist.
Why? He worked his entire life to up lift lower caste (very similar to racism) people in India. He went so far ahead to call these people, “the people of god” – HARIJAN (HARI is god and JAN is People!)
If you have any evidence that Gandhi was racist, i would be more than happy to study the same and revert back to you.
SEE!!! i ALWAYS try to explain how hard the egyptians partied. i mean, u work hard, u play hard, and with all the great structures, educational advances, and every other greatness that came out of egypt, who DOESNT deserve a cold brew after all that? lol
Somebody already said it, but was obviously ignored:
Nicholas the II was NOT Victoria’s grandchild, his WIFE was.
You really need to fix that, because it’s wrong.
“2. England’s King George I was actually German.”
Dom Pedro I, a brazilian emperor (actually the first one) was portuguese.
Matt42: Wouldn’t suprise me as the Portuguese were the major colonial force in Brazil. They still speak Portuguese I believe.
On the D-Day thing, recently the US Military has used “D” for day. But in WWII it had no particular meaning.
“145. Drogo:Hitler’s real last name was “Schickelgruber” or some such spelling. I don’t remember what they said the reason was for him to chose Hitler as a name.”
Actually it was Hitler´s father(Alois Schickelgruber)who changed it to Hitler.Adolf Hitler wasn´t even born at the time.So he had nothing to do with a name change.
#19 didn’t last long
Only living people can be nominated for the Noble Peace Prize. At the time of it’s issuance, Ghandi was dead.
3. Abel Tasman “discovered” Tasmania, New Zealand and Fiji, on his first voyage, but managed to completely miss mainland Australia!
OK, thats hilarious. Even I couldn’t manage that.
Dear Mr. Graves and Kaylan,
Do some more research and you will see that Gandhi wrote a lot about his hatred of other races, especially the black man. It was pretty common at the time for this kind of thought, and Gandhi was no different.
It was also common practice for Gandhi to give young girls colonics and it was written that he actually did this quite often. You speak as if you know the man. It’s funny.
i have not read all posts, so sorry if this has been brought up, but 13 us incorrect, one of my friends has recently done a project on this topic, and according to all history teachers i have asked, the D in D-Day does not actually stand for anything, it was just a a name.
#11, the constitution of the Confederate states banned slave trade, but it did not ban slave ownership, loaning, giving or otherwise moving slaves from one owner to another. They were property. New slaves could not be brought into the region, but existing slaves would remain in slavery and all offspring would be born into slavery. any escaped slaves would be brought back to their original owner, which was supported in the north and the south. We need to be careful about making the assumption that banning the slave trade would have put an end to slavery. The war wasn’t all about slavery, it was one facet of a much bigger issue.
Number 6 and 11 are very funny.
ghandi caused instability and riots and violence even if you support his cause those facts remain.
the confederates banned slave importing from africa because the british had outlawed global slave trade and they and the french (among other) strictly enforced it by attacking and arresting any ship that tried it.
the muslims of algeria continued capturing and selling white slaves until the US attacked them in the 1800′s
You are taught #2 in australian schools
did you all know:
-that hitler was once hired to be a strip teaser by a group of rich old jew women?
-that dracula set out to live in india to find out about ghandi’s women?
-that i could send you plenty of these history oddities without any historical evidence just by typing what my head tells my hands?
…ow, c’mon, why do we believe in Tequila Mockingbird when his/her name can’t be believable at one glance? Tequila-being a drunkard while mockingbird-mocks us readers into being so gullible… he has no proofs at all. Amen.
Schiesl, if you won the Toledo war, why did the feds give us the U.P. to keep us from going south?
BTW- Hitler was nominated for the nobel peace prize- you can look it up on the Nobel website. Before the war, and before people knew what he was doing, he was viewed worldwide as a wonderful leader and savior of the oppressed German people. Of course, he wasn’t, but in truth was an evil, degenerate bastard. Sometimes, people just latch on to a leader and make them in their own image.
#13 is wrong : d stands for ” decision ” Decision Day … that’s it !
You write, “7. Kaiser Wilhelm II, Tsar Nicholas II and George V were all grandchildren of Queen Victoria.”
Are you sure? I always thought that Nicholas II’s wife, Alexandra, was the descendant of Queen Victoria. Her line, which originated with the Queen, carried the hemophilia gene. Am I just middle-aged and confused?
@Nancy [179]: I agree with you!