22 History Facts You Probably Didn't Know
Stuff you probably never learned in school.
Published 5 years ago in Wow
2
“Napoleon was once attacked by a horde of bunnies. In 1807, Napoleon signed the Treaty of Tilsit, ending the war between France and Russia and he decided to celebrate with a rabbit hunt. He told his Chief of Staff, a guy named Alexandre Berthier, to make it happen. So Berthier set up a big hunt with a bunch of military officers and captured something like 3,000 rabbits for the occasion.” But when the rabbits were released, they didn’t scurry off into the woods. Every single rabbit bounded right at Napoleon. 3,000 rabbits started bolting right for the most powerful man in the world.”
6
“Belize is the only country in Central America with English as a primary language due to coral reefs and pirates. Belize has a giant barrier reef along its coastline. During the days when the Spanish ruled that part of the world, English speaking smugglers, privateers, and merchants would raid Spanish settlements and then navigate their smaller ships through the reef- the larger Spanish ships couldn’t make it through. It wasn’t worth it to the Spanish to figure out how to stop them, so they basically said, “y’all can have that land if you stop fucking with us.” Belize became an English colony and has remained English speaking through independence.”
8
“When Beethoven was challenged to an improvisation duel by one of his rivals Steibelt, Beethoven took a piece of Steibelt’s music, turned it upside down, played it and then improvised on that theme for over an hour. Steibelt simply left halfway through and never returned to Vienna where the duel took place.”
14
“After the discovery of the new world, the pope mediated a dispute between Portugal and Spain to renegotiate a previous treaty that gave Portugal exclusive rights to trade and colonization below the canaries, with the goal of making a vertical line instead and having this new world fall under Spain’s sphere. Amid the negotiation, the Portuguese randomly asked that the line be moved west by a few thousand miles or so. This only gave Portugal more sea while potentially giving Spain land in the Pacific, so they accepted. A few years later, Brazil was “discovered”, with its gold mines, tropical wood and cash crop climate, placed under Portuguese rule by that line shift.”
19
“James Madison wrote a series of letters for President George Washington and the Congress, to each other. There were four letters in total, and neither party knew that it was just Madison writing the letters to himself and reading it aloud to the other party. He was too embarrassed to say anything.”
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