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29 Facts You “Weren’t Taught In School” To Help You Get A Complete Picture Of The Past
If you start to delve into events, one can often find that certain things end up being covered or “simplified” to perhaps not make some folks uncomfortable. But history is history, it can be fascinating, cruel, dull and often a lot stranger than fiction.
Someone asked “What's one historical fact that they won't teach you in school?” and people shared their examples, ranging from “I didn’t pay attention” to some things that are truly obscure. So get comfortable as you read through, upvote your favorites and be sure to share your own thoughts in the comments below.
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#1
About 1/3 of the working cowboys in the Old West were black men.
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#2
Japanese WW2 war crimes are seldom discussed in detail.
Rich Black 3 days ago
maybe not in japan. but in korea, china and the USA there's a whole LOT of info.
#3
That Helen Keller (that we all learned about in school) led a Children's March to Washington DC to push for a REDUCTION in the hours children were made to work, all so they could attend school. source: People's History of the United States.
Rich Black 3 days ago
lots of kids picked vegetables, shucked oyster, and worked in mills to help their impoverished parents put food on the table. helen keller was fortunate to be born into a millionaires family
#4
That Stalin was a real piece of work. 9 million + people died as a direct result of Stalin’s policies. He doesn’t get the same demonization as a certain Austrian that tried to take over Europe because the Soviets were on the winning side of WWII.
#5
The smell. Most times in history smelled awful.
#6
I was 28 when I learned about the Tulsa massacre.
#7
The guys defending the Alamo were the bad guys.
Texas was Mexico at the time. To attract settlers to the land, Mexico allowed American farmers to move there and bring their enslaved workers with them. Slavery was not something Mexico was crazy about and soon banned slavery in the entire country except for Texas. A few years later, they tried to ban it in Texas. That's when the Texas Revolution started. The Texans were fighting to keep slavery, not for freedom from an oppressive government.
Not everyone at the Alamo died. The enslaved workers were spared and are largely the reason we know what happened. If you visit the Alamo today (or at least when I did in 2022) most of the information is left out of the booklet and signage. It does mention the enslaved workers by name, but that's about it. Fighting to preserve slavery isn't the narrative they want to display today. I remember learning about the Alamo in school and slavery wasn't mentioned. And then how absent it was from the actual site.
#8
Texas and MacMillan Books removed important Native American history like ‘Trail of Tears’ from their textbooks .
#9
The Ottoman Empire systematically k**led over 1mil Armenians during WW1 via camps and it remains largely unacknowledged by Americans because the US wants to keep positive relations with Turkey who oscillate between denying it ever happened and saying they were justified because they were fomenting armed rebellion.
Never seen it in any American textbook or course. I, like many others in the US, have only learned about it because of the advocacy of the band System of a Down.
Rich Black 3 days ago
its not americans covering up the genocide. it's the current turkish government. why they are even allowed in NATO is a mystery to everyone.
#10
Every major change in the last 150 years that benefited the average American had to be bought with blood and violence - from the American labor movement, to Women's Suffrage, to Civil Rights.
They don't teach it in schools because if you knew what it took to fix the problems in society you might actually start planning a way to make it happen.
#11
The pilgrims weren't seeking religious freedom. They practiced religious repression and executed people for the crime of being Quakers.
#12
I didn’t know much about the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic Golden Age until I was in college. I really feel like a lot of history classes seem to gloss over the so-called Dark Ages.
Rich Black 3 days ago
public schools don't have any requirements to teach chinese history, arab history, etc. US history is positioned as part of "citizenship"
#13
The fact that African tribes sold their own people.
Rich Black 3 days ago
this is pretty widely understood. the correct verb tense is actually "still sell" . . .
#14
The circumstances surrounding the death of Meriwether Lewis (of Lewis and Clark) are shrouded in conspiracy. In the months leading up to his death many people reported that Lewis had become paranoid, claiming that he was being followed and that his life was in danger. In a desperate attempt for help, he sent a letter to his close friend, and then president Thomas Jefferson to request an audience. While traveling along the Natchez Trace, he stayed a night at an inn. During the night, the owner reported hearing multiple gunshots but never went out to check on the source. In the morning, Lewis was found dead in his cabin, sitting against the wall looking at the door, rifle in hand and shot in the back. In addition, while the room was ransacked, the only missing objects of note were Lewis’ riding back and personal documents.
After an official investigation, his death was ruled a s***ide and all further inquiry into the instance have been barred by the Us government. While Lewis himself did not have any immediate descendants, his extended family have submitted requests every year to have his body exhumed in order to confirm the cause of death. To this day their requests have unanimously been denied.
#15
The CIA deposed or destabilized many democratically elected leaders to install leaders who were more friendly to us (read: us business) policies, causing enormous loss of life and suffering all over the world.
Rich Black 3 days ago
i'm okay with this as long as they were dictators starting wars. being elected one time doesn't mean a leader observes the rule of law forever after.
#16
The mass deportation of Mexicans, yep the US tried it before under Hoover. Many were US citizens.
#17
Went to a British school in Asia. They glossed over the opium wars.
Rich Black 3 days ago
today we're glossing over the fentanyl and m**h wars. the wheel of history continues to move.
#18
When the United States detonated the first hydrogen bomb, Castle Bravo, on Enewatak Atoll in the Marshall Islands in 1958, it was many times more powerful than calculated. The residents of Enewatak and Bikini Atolls had previously been forcibly relocated to Rongelap Atoll. Rongelap was downwind from the Castle Bravo radiation cloud. The US did not evacuate them for two days, and allowed them to return only a week later, even though the radiation levels were highly unsafe as we understand now. From 1958 to 1984, the US repeatedly refused to evacuate the Rongelap residents even as the birth defects and cancer rates continued. It was finally Greenpeace in 1984 who assisted in moving many of them to Mejatto island in kwajalein atoll. If you go to Mejatto today, the signs on the church and school still say Rongelap. There is evidence that this refusal to evacuate was a calculated decision to study the long term effects of radiation exposure in humans.
Edit: corrected Castle Bravo to 1958.
Rich Black 3 days ago
thank goodness america was the first nation to stop above ground testing, and encouraged Russia and China to abandon it as well
#19
The Dutch ate their prime minister. As in an angry mob lynched him and actually consumed his flesh.
#20
That modern money came into existence by people storing their gold in banks and getting notes as proof that their gold was there.
Banks found out they could write more notes of gold than there was actual gold being stored there.
Rich Black 3 days ago
if we were limited to the amount of gold stored in vaults, no one would ever get a mortgage or car loan.
#21
The Great War of Africa like, *just* happened, historically speaking. And over five million people died. As far as I’m aware, it’s not being taught in schools.
#22
half the world still believes the h*******t is made up, and never happened.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H*******t_denial
#24
Treaties between Indigenous Tribes and America are still broken to this day! (My tribe was directly attacked in 2020) We still fight for the Earth and our place in this terribly poisoned and loveless society.
#25
The actual "pilgrims" were not the good guys in any New England history. Religious bigots to be honest.
#26
How Hawaii came to be a part of the US. Basically, a bunch of white guys living on the islands didn’t like to be ruled by a monarchy of natives, so they grabbed some guns and started a revolt. When it was clear they weren’t going to win, they called US for help, and the US Government sent in the marines to occupy the islands and eventually annex them. It’s only recently that the government has finally admitted it was in the wrong to do so.
Rich Black 3 days ago
this how every tribal culture falls. higher tech people arrive in ships, with their guns and written communication. imagine what happens to us when space aliens arrive
#27
Women needed husbands' permission to have a credit card in their own name until mid 70s.
Rich Black 3 days ago
this was only true if they had no personal income. if you don't have a job even today, generally you have co-signer for your auto loan or credit card.
#28
All throughout school they told us the buffalo died from natural causes. I only just learned a couple months ago that they died out because the American settlers k**led them out for sport to cut off the native Americans food supply.
Rich Black 3 days ago
i'm waaaay old and we were NEVER told this in school. There have always been abundandnt pictures of prairies filled with carcases.
#29
Federal highways were purposely built through affluent black neighborhoods. Looking at you, Oklahoma.
Rich Black 3 days ago
no they weren't. they were built were land was least expensive to acquire - whether the needed land was rural or urban. this is a racist myth
You might also like: 47 Interesting Photos That Show The Side Of History That Didn’t Make The Cut Into Textbooks
#30
When I went to school, we were taught that the American Revolution came about because King George III arbitrarily imposed taxes on the American colonists.
Many years later, talking to a historian of the 18th century, I learned that the colonists had begged England for aid during the earlier French and Indian War, promising to repay it all, but then once the war was over, reneged on that promise. After repeated (and repeatedly rebuffed) requests for repayment, and after fair warning, Parliament imposed taxes on the Colonies (which were still lower than the taxes British subjects actually living in England were paying) in order to recoup those costs.
Bonus fact: I also learned that, contrary to what I was taught in school, it was the colonists who drew first blood in the Revolution (the H.M.S. *Gaspee* incident, which oddly none of my history teachers had mentioned).
Rich Black 3 days ago
i seriously doubt that every major historian is wrong, and the one you talked to is the only person who's right.
#31
Let's just say, George Washington's teeth weren't made of wood.
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Rich Black 3 days ago
this is the most hilarious collection of dubious one-liners without attribution that i have ever encountered. priceless.
Rich Black 3 days ago
this is the most hilarious collection of dubious one-liners without attribution that i have ever encountered. priceless.
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