


10 Origins of Commonly Used Phrases

10 Shocking Times Love Led to Murder

10 Haunted Places to Visit in Philadelphia

Ten Strange Things You Never Knew about the Wild West

Top 10 TV Theme Songs from the 1980s

10 Amazing Animals That Farm

10 Game Characters That Look Dangerous but Are Nearly Harmless

10 Intriguing Items Rock and Roll Legends Took to Their Graves

10 People Who Made Medieval European Science Awesome

10 Things History Gets Totally Wrong about the Black Plague

10 Origins of Commonly Used Phrases

10 Shocking Times Love Led to Murder
Who's Behind Listverse?

Jamie Frater
Head Editor
Jamie founded Listverse due to an insatiable desire to share fascinating, obscure, and bizarre facts. He has been a guest speaker on numerous national radio and television stations and is a five time published author.
More About Us
10 Haunted Places to Visit in Philadelphia

Ten Strange Things You Never Knew about the Wild West

Top 10 TV Theme Songs from the 1980s

10 Amazing Animals That Farm

10 Game Characters That Look Dangerous but Are Nearly Harmless

10 Intriguing Items Rock and Roll Legends Took to Their Graves

10 People Who Made Medieval European Science Awesome
20 Historical Oddities You Probably Don’t Know
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