Historical Oddities You Probably Don’t Know
September 16, 2008 by uphaaWe love these little lists of oddities and was thrilled when this one was sent in to us. We have to confess that we didn’t know most of the things on this list. The ones that seem the strangest or most unlikely to us, We verified and found they are, indeed, true! So, onwards, let’s learn some odd facts we didn’t already know.
England’s King George I was actually German.
Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both died on the same day – the 50th anniversary
of the U.S. Declaration of Independence
Abel Tasman “discovered” Tasmania, New Zealand and Fiji, on his first voyage,
but managed to completely miss mainland Australia!
Ethnic Irishman Bernardo O’Higgins was the first president of the Republic of
Chile.
Before the Boston Tea Party, the British actually lowered tea taxes, not raised
them.
When the American Civil War started, Confederate Robert E. Lee owned no slaves.
Union general U.S. Grant did.
Kaiser Wilhelm II, Tsar Nicholas II and George V were all grandchildren of Queen
Victoria.
Karl Marx was once a correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune.
A New Orleans man hired a pirate to rescue Napoleon from his prison on St.
Helena.
Like Dracula (Vlad Tepes), there really was a King Macbeth. He ruled Scotland
from 1040 to 1057.
Ancient Egypt produced at least six types of beer.
In 1839, the U.S. and Canada fought the bloodless “War of Pork and Beans”.
Despite the reputation, Mussolini never made the trains run on time.
The world powers officially outlawed war under the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact.
Josef Stalin once studied to be a priest.
Henry Kissinger and Yassir Arafat won the Nobel Peace Prize. Gandhi never did.
The Constitution of the Confederate States of America banned the slave trade.
The Finnish capital of Helsinki was founded by a Swedish king in 1550.
The “D” in D-Day stands for “Day” – “Day-Day”
There was a New Australia in Paraguay in the 1890s.
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