People Share The Most Shocking Historical Facts They Know

Even if History and Social Studies were not our favorite courses in high school, history is full of interesting, wild, and unbelievable facts and events, many of which were not taught in the classroom.

Some of them are so shocking, it's hard to believe they're true.

Taking notes, Redditor thankdestroyer asked:

"What's a historical fact that would shock most people to find out?"

Quite The Vetting System

"The ancient Greeks, inventors of democracy, would elect their officials to one-year terms. Each official's finances were audited at the beginning and end of their term. If anything was amiss, they would be tried and executed."

- Putrid-Reputation-68

"Can you imagine if those rules came back into play today?"

- K_Xanthe

"Please? Don’t tease me…"

- TheProphetDave

I Like It, Picasso

"Picasso, Bruce Lee, and JRR Tolkien all died the same year."

- lordpanda

"Picasso would have big dinner parties in restaurants and draw on the check so it wouldn't be cashed. I know someone who has one of these checks. It's just a doodle but it's worth more than cashing it."

- TheLastZimaDrinker

"There's a famous story (possibly a legend) where Picasso once paid for dinner with a drawing, and when the owner complained he hadn't signed it, he replied, 'I wanted to pay for the meal, not buy the restaurant.'"

- nigelhammer

Playing A Long Con

"Siaka Stevens was technically both the shortest and longest-serving leader of Sierra Leone."

"He was an opposition leader that won an extremely close election, and the ruling party that had been ruling the country since independence didn’t want to lose their power, so they planned to arrest him just before he could take the oath of office, but things didn’t go exactly to plan and he ended up being removed from office a little while after taking the oath of office, meaning he was technically president for a little less than an hour before being removed from office."

"However, there was a counter-coup a few months later and Siaka Stevens was brought back into power. During his time in office, Stevens became increasingly authoritarian and eventually established a one-party state, ruling the country for 17 years."

- partyonpartypeople

Eat Your Heart Out, 2020

"The year 536 was deemed the worst year to be alive. Volcanic eruptions caused prolonged dark skies for up to 18 months. This then caused a mini ice age, crop failures, and plague over the next 10 years."

"Also, the name Tiffany has been in use since the 1600s."

- little-bird89

"Those two facts are presumably not related."

- limbodog

Fin-tastic Facts

"Sharks are older than the rings on Saturn."

- mightytonto

"Also, in the tree of life, we're closer to tuna than tuna is to sharks."

- javier_aeona

"For some reason, this really bothers me."

- Keyspam102

"The reason: both us and tuna have bones. But it shouldn't bother you, although they're more 'demanding' to produce than cartilage, bones are much stronger and are more impressive to the ladies."

- javier_aeona

The First Female President

"Woodrow Wilson was mentally and emotionally incapacitated by a massive stroke in October 1919, and his wife and doctors essentially ran the country until Harding took office in 1921. Some historians refer to Edith Wilson as 'the first female president.'"

- BuckChickman2

Second Try

"Sharpshooter Annie Oakley had a stage act where she would shoot a cigarette out of someone's mouth. While she was touring Europe, Kaiser Wilhelm Il of Germany surprised everyone on a whim and insisted on holding the cigarette."

"Ever the professional, Oakley shot the cigarette without harming the Kaiser."

"Several years later WWI is underway and the US goes to war against Germany. Oakley wrote a letter to Kaiser Wilhelm asking if she could have another try at that shot."

"He didn't reply."

- doublestitch

An Unfathomable Timeline

"We are closer to the time of the T-Rex than the T-Rex is to the time of the Stegosaurus."

- pumper911

"This one always gets me."

- SerDuckOfPNW

"Ancienter Egypt"

"Ancient Egypt had Egyptologists who tried to study (their) ancient Egypt."

- Indercarnive

"I recall that something that perplexed archeologists for a while was finding a recentish building filled with artifacts from wildly disparate locations and times, with people theorizing it must have been a treasure vault or a taxation collection facility."

"Till someone put the dots together and realized it was a museum. Ancient Egypt had museums dedicated to Ancienter Egypt."

- guto8797

The Mars Race

"The first vehicle created by humans not powered by animals or the wind (ie sailing ships) was the train, and it took something like 300,000ish years to go from no powered vehicles to trains."

"Then it took about 100 years to go from the first powered vehicle to the first powered flight. It then took another 58 years to go from the first powered flight to the first human in space."

"It took eight years from that to put the first human on the moon."

- MontCoDunV

"Yeah, but it's taking forever to put a human on Mars, d**mit."

- Weiner_Queefer_9000

"The space race had different incentives. There’s nothing major to be gained from going to Mars beyond scientific pursuit and unfortunately, that’s not enough."

- BearsLikeBeets

"That's what people don't understand. The Space Race was called a race for a reason. There's no Mars Race. The U.S. doesn't have a geopolitical rival today like the Soviet Union was during the Cold War."

"I think even if China or Russia landed a person on Mars and brought them back, it would not encourage the U.S. to fund NASA. The U.S. doesn't have the same rivalry with today's Russia or China as it did with the Soviet Union."

- eatingpotatochips

There's A 'Walk Into A Bar' Joke Here Somewhere...

"Hitler, Stalin, Tito, Freud and Trotsky were all in Vienna, 1913."

- Tsquare43

"They were living within a few minutes' walk of one another, too. There is no evidence that I know of that any of them met."

- prosa123

Priorities!

"We put man on the moon before wheels on suitcases."

- Knowledge_Regret

"I remember having to carry suitcases through airports as a kid and how awful that was."

"You know how there's a thread on Reddit once a week or so asking, 'When you were a kid, what was an indicator of wealth?' For me, it was wheeled suitcases because I didn't get wheeled suitcases until I was an adult."

"I don't need new suitcases these days, but I'm still always a little bowled over when I see a nice set for a good price at Costco or somewhere."

4E4ME

The Unknown Of The Deep

"When the SS Britannia went down in the South Atlantic, a raft of survivors managed to get away."

"According to the men on the raft, there was one more survivor on the raft with them. But he was unfortunately pulled under by a Giant Squid which then returned and attacked their Lieutenant named Cox, who they managed to save before scaring the beast away."

"Their claims were called out as preposterous and made up when they returned home...until Lieutenant Cox got sick of being accused of such and went to see a local marine biologist at a college. The biologist validated Cox's claims as he had scars one and a quarter inches in size, which definitely belonged to a 23-foot-long squid."

"It is believed that this story is the only known substantiated report of death by Giant Squid."

- killingjoke96

The Woes Of War

"During World War II, the United States military developed a plan to use bats as bombs. The idea was to attach small incendiary devices to bats and release them over Japanese cities at night. The bats would then roost in buildings, and when the devices detonated, they would start fires, causing chaos and destruction."

"While the project, known as 'Project X-Ray,' never saw combat, it's a bizarre example of the lengths to which military strategists were willing to go during the war."

- xastronix

It's so interesting to think about how some of these facts never fully came to be or little they were first understood, like the presence of the Giant Squid or the possibility of Egypt housing a museum of its older history.

This conversation is a great example of how we simply can't know everything, even in our own time, but it's invaluable to try.