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30 Of The Weirdest And The Most Disturbing Facts From Known History, Shared By People In This Online Group
History lessons in school may have seemed boring to some, but it is useful to know how far we’ve come and where we came from. It may seem boring because the events took place a very long time ago or they just don’t seem relevant to us personally. But the history that is taught at school isn’t the only truth and doesn’t encompass all the things that happened in the past.
There are so many events and people that we don’t get to hear about and maybe they didn’t have a big impact on the world, but those stories are so interesting to listen to or read about. Today you will find out some history facts that you may not have heard of before, and they come with a twist, as Redditor Doyouareisstupid asked, “What is the weirdest/most disturbing fact about our world’s history that you know?” It’s a perfect read for the spooky season we are now in because people have knowledge about some unbelievable things that occurred years ago. So enjoy and upvote the answers that surprised you the most.
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Most people have 16 great great parents, Cleopatra had 2. She's lucky to have developed working lungs, let alone be competent enough to accomplish anything. That was a family tree was a wreath
40% of all homeless people in America still goes to work every day
That literally ever race of people that have ever existed on this planet have been slaves to another at some point in history and most of them have overlapping time frames with other races.
And this is never talked about.
Exactly. In medieval spain the moors in Al Andalus actually prefered blond germanic slaves. So much that the word slave in spanish (and likely in english) "esclavo" comes from "eslavo" (as in an slavic person)
Germanic and Slavic are two different ethnicities. Not trying to nitpick but genuinely curious (as a Slavic person myself) if it was in fact Slavic people that were the preferred slaves in medieval Spain?
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Well it is estimated that more people live in slavery today than any point in human history, how about taking that discussion. Mosty women from countries with widespread powerty.the Philippines, Nigeria, Cambodia etc Saudi Arabia, Dubai etc are well known for importing people to work there snatching their passports and just f*****g stealing these people. Slavery isn't over and done with its still prospering 🤮 not to mention trafficking wich is very much a form of horrific slavery
More individuals because world population is so high. Percentagewise we have made progress.
Load More Replies... Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't most slave-owning cultures pretty undiscriminating about who they enslave? The ancient Romans took slaves of all races from all over the known world, same for the Vikings and Mongols, and most peoples that engaged in conquest and slavery.
I think everyone knows this. Doesn't mean that slavery in the Americas wasn't crappy and helped created a pretty f*cked culture here. Let's also not overlook how many people are now trapped in legal domestic slavery and ...Mauritania.
Not true... atleast not in my country, I know precisely 5people that know this of the 5 I informed two of them
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This is talked about a lot, especially by people that want to downplay a specific slave trade and more importantly its legacy in current society. (Obviously it is an irrelevant point).
Thank you, Ranax, for saying exactly what I was thinking when reading this posting and all the comments.
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the fact that slavery was consider a part of life have been forgotten, at one or other point in history anybody could become a slave if they were unlucky enough...didn't have anything to do with ethnicity...yet the way people have treated slaves are been very different. many places had actuall rules to what an owner could do to a slave, and only a few times have slaves been completely without rights ie Rome or the continental slave trade...
Nobody is denying that. However, for the last couple of hundred years, white people have colonized and brutally mass murdered brown and black populations around the world. They still look at us as inferior. You can't excuse that history of mass murder and looting by saying 'white people were once also enslaved.' Nobody's saying that no white person was ever enslaved. But brown and black people are still enslaved in one way or the other. Many African countries are forced to pay France a hefty amount of money and anyone who thinks that the post colonial nations aren't still being economically strangulated by certain western countries is not adequately informed on the subject to comment on it.
Great Britain killed more people since its inception than Stalin and Hitler put together.
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It's constantly talked about by the type of people who think @#* lives matter is an acceptable response to BlackLivesMatter. It doesn't arise.
True. Slavery was well established in the Americas long before any Europeans or Africans arrived. It was common for Native American tribes to enslave rival tribes after winning a battle. They would enslave the men, take the women as their concubines, and integrate the children, reeducating them to the tribe's customs. In AD 100 there were 10,000 tribes. By 1100 there were around 800. By 1492 there were maybe 500 actual tribes in the Americas. Had they been left alone, by today it might only be 100.
Absolutely, slavery has been around since the dawn of time and there have been racial elements before but it doesn't change that the situation in the US was unique and the side effects are still being felt today.
This is true, but slavery only gained racial overtones in the 18th century. The "why" of it takes too long to explain in this format, but the short version is that they had to justify their rapacious imperialism, and race was a good excuse at the time.
“Never talked about” my ass. The second anyone talks about American slaves, some racist will pop in with “white people were slaves too!!!”
Roomie and I were discussing this recently, that enslaving others has always been part of human society. USA for-profit prisons are slave factories. USA is currently debating Critical Race Theory and how to make reparations for our long-term enslavement of African descendants.
Literally no one has ever said that amaerican slavery was the only type of slavery, we do however keep asking why white ppl only feel the need to remind people about it during black slavery conversation? And there’s never an answer. If slavery of another race or your own effects you then speak about it, no one said you couldn’t.
Not racist but mostly because to remember that offends most black people. Don't start hating. Just my experience. And no I'm not white.
If history has shown us anything, it's that humans are willing to engage in depravity when it suits them.
Slavery exists/existed in almost all parts of the world. A lot of it was based on who was the victor and who was the loser; losers became slaves. However, when some white skinned people (I too am northern European descent) decided that they were superior to dark skinned people, history began to show the enslavement of a race based on skin color and legitimized via incompetent understanding of biblical history. Of course, if those (primarily) Africans had been better equipped to put up a fight about it, maybe history would have been changed significantly. All of this is fueled by the human need to have someone to control and look down on....
My ancestors are Vikings, who enslaved many people. Proud of being a Viking, the other, not so much.
Yes, but you don't need to talk about races here. Slavery has been practiced everytime and everywhere, indeed, and long before the mere concept of "race" was even elaborated (let alone the fact that there is no such things as human races actually). Slave owners had preferences about physical features - they wanted their slaves strong or beautiful according to the taste of the moment ; they treated their slaves as animals because that was their status in the local laws ; but they didn't need any pseudo-scientific background about being biologically "superior" or whatever to do all of this. In other words, skin color didn't really matter, and any misfortune could lead you from master to slave regardless of what you looked like. I insist on this because it is eye-opening for the present time : you don't even need to be racist to be a slave-owner...
Please read my comment above regarding the difference between slavery and hereditary slavery.
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The big difference is that the enslaved that were brought to America by the Europeans who imposed hereditary slavery. In other cultures and societies a slave could work off their servitude. In American slavery an enslaved person's children were also enslaved. A person's children could be bought and sold like chattel. It was a never ending cycle util the Civil War. If Andrew Johnson hadn't voided it all, America would be a very different place.
i get it. animals be better than humans sometimes. but that don't excuse him for what he did.
It is something I have heard white people say to gloss over the subject of slavery in the US... Heard it for decades
It's not the narrative they want for today. Only the facts that fit the narrative are allowed, all other facts are shut down with abuse and no-platforming. I would go so far as to say that information today is the most restricted it's ever been in human history.
That's incredibly laughable. "Most restricted its ever been" you type from your smartphone.
Load More Replies... Yep, only difference being they didn't have social media to tell you what you had to think.
Problem is. It's still happening to ppl modern day so ppl do care..... complaining???? Who's complaining? Demanding to be treated equal is complaining?
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Adolph hitler was an animal rights advocate who banned the live boiling of lobsters.
There are books in the Harvard University library which are bound in human flesh
One is titled : "How to cover a book in human skin and get away with it"
The US Government has a literal gigantic dossier of classified operations hidden from the public, no brainer. What's shocking are things they've actually declassified.
Among these documents is the detailing of one of the largest human experiments in history, when the US dropped a bacteria-infused fog on the city of San Francisco to test how well "germ-based" biological warfare could prove by masking it with natural fog, which occurred back in the 1950s.
It was widely successful. A specific case is that of Edward Nevin, who passed away from Serratia marcescens, a bacteria that makes bread turn red. It had spread to his heart from a UTI and he passed away
In 1977, the government released a thoroughly detailed report at the testament of Nevin's grandson. Nevin's grandson tried to sue the government for wrongful death, but the court held that the government was immune to a lawsuit for negligence and that they were justified in conducting tests without subjects' knowledge. According to The Wall Street Journal, the Army stated that infections must have occurred inside the hospital and the US Attorney argued that they had to conduct tests in a populated area to see how a biological agent would affect that area.
Imagine what they're hiding.
Gee, you mean nations commit horrible atrocities even on their own citizens? Gasp, shock, faint ----- and, yes, that was sarcasm.
Some ancient cultures knew that they could control population growth by denying fertile females both fats and carbohydrates. This process guaranteed that embryos would not mature in the womb due to the lack of food energy derived from carrying mothers. The embryos would self-abort. A certain ratio of body fat is required for successful pregnancies.
There are more people in slavery today than at any other time in history.
here's a list: As of 2018, the countries with the most slaves were: India (18.4 million), China (3.86 million), Pakistan (3.19 million), North Korea (2.64 million), Nigeria (1.39 million), Indonesia (1.22 million), Democratic Republic of the Congo (1 million), Russia (794,000) and the Philippines (784,000).
That we've been on the brink of a global nuclear exchange several times. And that in one case (Cuban blockade), it was only because a single man (Vasily Arkhipov), disagreed with standing orders, that a nuclear exchange was likely averted.
Due to Fresh drinking water being so scarce on the Galápagos Islands, some bird species, such as the Galapagos Hawk, have adapted by drinking the blood of other animals.
Cleopatra lived closer to the moon landing than to the building of the pyramids.
That’s insane. I remember watching Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon.
From the fall of the Roman empire up until the mid 19th century, not a single city in Europe had a sewer system to dispose of human feces.
City planners didn't build sewers until it was proven in 1855 that the cause for all the cholera epidemics was drinking water contaminated by human feces.
The Mayans partied hard. They would take alcohol and hallucinogenic enemas.
In Social Studies they had us watch a special on them and I vividly remember an artists rendering of a Mayan doing a handstand while getting an enema.
The original keg-stand.
Russia still has not recovered its population prior to WWII
Ireland hasn't recovered from the potatoes famine. There were 8 million in Ireland in 1841, now there are about 6.
Up until the early 1980s doctors did not think newborn babies could feel pain. They didn't use anesthetic only used muscle relaxers on newborns.
Rainbow Valley of Mount Everest is named for the rainbow colors of clothing of passed away people there
Spartans bathed their newborn babies in red wine instead of warm water
And the babies slept very quietly after their baths! But seriously, water was often contaminated in the ancient world, and alcohol killed bacteria so it might actually have been a good idea. Did you know that Roman army was able to conquer much of the known world because they carried huge vats of low-quality wine and mixed it with whatever drinking water they found? It killed enough pathenogenic microbia that the armies didn't get sick en masse in dubious areas.
The United States injected unknowing Puerto Rican’s with cancer cells to see how the illness worked
In the Tuskegee Study, the U.S. government injected African Americans with syphilis so that they could find how it spreads and works its way through the body. And they just left them infected rather than giving them penicillin afterwards.
The founding fathers of the USA didn't know dinosaurs existed.
And it took even longer from that point to now to work out that we still have dinosaurs in the form of birds and reptiles.
The ability to tell time (circadian rythm) is an evolutionary reaponse.
Cells that learned to replicate at night and rest during the day ultimately survived.
I'm bastardizing it but I find that amazing.
One way that chronobiologists and sleep researchers have used to identify and study circadian rhythms is to spend extended periods isolated from natural light, temperature fluctuations, or other stimuli that could signal the time of day. Today, some laboratories have special facilities to achieve this isolation, but early researchers used caves. Nathaniel Kleitman conducted the first cave experiment in 1938 when he and a graduate student spent 32 days isolated from the outside world in Mammoth Cave, Kentucky. The researchers imposed a 28-hour cycle on themselves consisting of ten hours of work, nine of leisure, and another nine hours of sleep. Bedtime shifted four hours later each day during the Mammoth Cave study. Despite the alternative schedule and the absence of external cues, Kleitman found that body temperature continued to fluctuate in an approximately 24-hour cycle, suggesting the existence of an endogenous clock.
If you lined up this history of earth on a 12 hour clock, modern humans making an impact on the planet would be about 1/10 of a second ago.
Adolf Hitler was saved from drowning at age nine in a fountain by a priest
Not so much disturbing as it is funny (at least to me).
The Kettle War. Long story short, Spain (The Holy Roman Empire) and the Netherlands (The Seven Republics of the Netherlands) were beefing. One boat from Spain engaged in a fight with a Dutch naval ship. One shot was fired. The only victim of that cannonball was a pot of soup that was cooking. The Spanish ship then surrendered.
Ireland exported potato’s during the great potato famine.
Someone won a Nobel Prize by doing large-scale research on large historical and current famines, and found the same pattern in every one: There was always enough food to feed everyone, but in a famine, large numbers of people just had no access to the food. They were either deprived of food, or weren't given enough resources to afford food.
That in UK, some time in the 12th century, two children of unusual GREEN skin colour appeared in the village of Woolpit in Suffolk, England.
The girl later communicated she and her brother had come from Saint Martin's Land, a subterranean world inhabited by green people. This actually happened!
The baltic states conquest was buried in history (not many people know it) because ww2 and the holocaust happened at about the same time.
The Germans smuggling Lenin into Tsarist Russia, to bring it down.
imagine like being putting your luggage through the scanner at the airport and inside they find trotsky
Note: this post originally had 33 images. It’s been shortened to the top 30 images based on user votes.
I usually like this type of lists but this one is seriously lacking credible sources and some entries are downright false.
I always have this thing that if I find it interesting, I look it up to find out more about it. Cleopatra and the Dutch eating their prime-minister for instance. And those seem to check out. The latter a little less click baity as it is put there, but still very gruesome. The not anesthesising babies is sadly true. Homeless people still having jobs is a fact that's easily checked (not every homeless person is carless or roofless). And the rest just didn't really resonate. I mean, someone saved Hitler from drowning? Yeah. Well. Great. Whether it's true or not, it doesn't impact history.
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The only thing that stood out from this article was the appalling spelling mistakes.
The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster was a 2011 nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Ōkuma, Fukushima Prefecture, Japan. The proximate cause of the disaster was the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. Clouds of radiation were released and the Pacific water was contaminated. The US had Navy ships that went through the radiation contaminated clouds. We had a family friend whose son was on one of those ships.
With all these very modern government experiments and deprivation of their subjects, it amazed me that people today actually trust their politicians and will argue that the government knows what's best. Their advisors know what's best. Behind every despotic action in history is a scientist Dr type with a god complex to justify atrocities and societal breakdown
In fairness, it would be nice to have a post where people shared all of the accomplishments and advances from world history.
I usually like this type of lists but this one is seriously lacking credible sources and some entries are downright false.
I always have this thing that if I find it interesting, I look it up to find out more about it. Cleopatra and the Dutch eating their prime-minister for instance. And those seem to check out. The latter a little less click baity as it is put there, but still very gruesome. The not anesthesising babies is sadly true. Homeless people still having jobs is a fact that's easily checked (not every homeless person is carless or roofless). And the rest just didn't really resonate. I mean, someone saved Hitler from drowning? Yeah. Well. Great. Whether it's true or not, it doesn't impact history.
Load More Replies... The only thing that stood out from this article was the appalling spelling mistakes.
The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster was a 2011 nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Ōkuma, Fukushima Prefecture, Japan. The proximate cause of the disaster was the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. Clouds of radiation were released and the Pacific water was contaminated. The US had Navy ships that went through the radiation contaminated clouds. We had a family friend whose son was on one of those ships.
With all these very modern government experiments and deprivation of their subjects, it amazed me that people today actually trust their politicians and will argue that the government knows what's best. Their advisors know what's best. Behind every despotic action in history is a scientist Dr type with a god complex to justify atrocities and societal breakdown
In fairness, it would be nice to have a post where people shared all of the accomplishments and advances from world history.
