History
100 verified facts in this category.
- Abo Elementary School in Artesia, New Mexico was the first public school in the United States constructed entirely underground.
- Mammoths still walked the Earth when the pyramids were built—woolly mammoths survived on Wrangel Island until ~2000 BCE, 500 years after Giza's construction.
- The guillotine was still in official use in France when Star Wars was released in 1977; the last execution by guillotine occurred in 1977, abolished in 1981.
- The last widow of a Civil War veteran died in 2020: Helen Viola Jackson married 93-year-old James Bolin in 1936 when she was 17.
- The Great Emu War of 1932 saw the Australian military deploy soldiers with machine guns against 20,000 emus—and the emus won, with the operation abandoned as ineffective.
- Cleopatra lived closer in time to the Moon landing (1969) than to the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza by roughly 500 years.
- Five Vietnamese-American journalists were killed between 1981 and 1990, in violence FBI agents suspected was linked to the National United Front for the Liberation of Vietnam.
- Five Vietnamese-American journalists were killed between 1981 and 1990, in violence FBI agents suspected was linked to the National United Front for the Liberation of Vietnam.
- While Abu Zubaydah was inside the large confinement box, workers constructed a plywood wall inside his cell so interrogators could slam him against it during 'walling.'
- The United States dropped more bombs on Laos than on any other country in history.
- One-third of the bombs dropped on Laos remained unexploded after the war ended in 1975, and these unexploded bombs killed 20,000 Laotians over the following three decades.
- The U.S. secret war in Laos killed 10 percent of the country's population.
- U.S. bombing of Laos averaged one attack every eight minutes for nearly a decade.
- In an anti-Castro operation, an associate of Robert Maheu left wiretapping equipment openly in a Las Vegas hotel room, where a maid discovered it, local police were called, and the associate's identity and actions were recorded in the Clark County justice system.
- Between 1960 and 1965, the CIA attempted to neutralize Fidel Castro's influence eight times, using methods including botulinum-toxin-laced cigars, exploding cigars, a poisoned wetsuit, and an exploding seashell.
- Between 1960 and 1965, the CIA attempted to neutralize Fidel Castro's influence eight times, using methods including botulinum-toxin-laced cigars, exploding cigars, a poisoned wetsuit, and an exploding seashell.
- Construction at Göbekli Tepe began around 9000 B.C., centuries before the first domesticated grains appeared at settlements in the surrounding region.
- Natufian communities in the Levant had permanent settlements of up to several hundred people as early as 13,000 B.C. while still being foragers rather than farmers, hunting gazelles and gathering wild rye, barley, and wheat.
- One of the Göbekli Tepe skull fragments has a drilled hole, resembling modifications made by the Naga people of India to suspend skulls from strings.
- Archaeologists discovered three Neolithic human skull fragments at Göbekli Tepe in Turkey bearing deep, purposeful linear grooves, a form of post-mortem skull modification never previously documented anywhere in the world.
- Fritz Vincken reportedly witnessed the truce in a remote cabin near the German–Belgian border.
- Fritz Vincken reportedly witnessed the Christmas Eve truce of 1944 as a child.
- Abo Elementary School contained emergency storage facilities designed to accommodate up to 2,160 people in the event of nuclear warfare or other catastrophe.
- Abo Elementary School had a concrete slab roof that doubled as the school's playground.
- Abo Elementary School was completed in 1962.
- Abo Elementary School was designed to function as an advanced fallout shelter.
- Pre-Columbian civilizations of the Andes region identified astronomical configurations based on dark silhouettes rather than bright stars.
- The samurai class existed during the same era as cowboys—Japan's samurai era ended with the Satsuma Rebellion in 1877, overlapping the American Wild West period.
- Ancient Roman concrete, used in structures like the Pantheon, is stronger than modern concrete and becomes more durable over time through chemical reactions with seawater.
- The Pony Express, icon of the American West, operated for only 18 months (1860-1861) before the transcontinental telegraph made it obsolete.
- The shortest war in history lasted 38-45 minutes: the Anglo-Zanzibar War of 1896, when British forces bombarded the Sultan's palace after he refused to step down.
- Oxford University began teaching centuries before the Aztec Empire was founded—Oxford by 1096, Tenochtitlan established in 1325.
- On the eighth day of his interrogation, CIA interrogators repeatedly slammed Nashiri against a specially designed wall using a towel wrapped around his neck.
- Venona records identify Soviet agents who infiltrated the U.S. Department of Justice, Department of State, Department of the Treasury, Office of Strategic Services, and War Department, as well as agents with access to the White House, Congress, political parties, the media, and defense industries.
- British intelligence decodes in the CIA's Select Documents recorded the roundup and transfer of Italian Jews to Auschwitz.
- The CIA's ZR/RIFLE project was a plan to develop an assassination capability that designated a European associate of organized crime to recruit future operatives, but never advanced beyond the drawing board.
- In one CIA anti-Castro operation, an associate of Robert Maheu left wiretapping equipment openly in a Las Vegas hotel room, leading a maid to discover it, local police to be called, and the associate's identity and actions to be recorded in the Clark County justice system.
- The CIA tried to recruit organized-crime figures to assassinate Fidel Castro because agency officials believed the mafia employed 'master assassins' and still had influence in Havana's underworld.
- The number of major U.S. defense prime contractors declined from 51 in the late 1980s to five.
- NIE 15-90 identified Bosnia as 'the greatest threat' of violence in Yugoslavia's breakup, even though the estimate focused more heavily on Kosovo, where fighting appeared imminent.
- The October 1990 US National Intelligence Estimate 'Yugoslavia Transformed' (NIE 15-90) forecast that Yugoslavia would cease to function as a federal state within one year and would probably dissolve within two.
- NIE 15-90 identified Bosnia as 'the greatest threat' of violence in Yugoslavia, even though the estimate focused more heavily on Kosovo, where fighting appeared imminent.
- In October 1990, the US National Intelligence Estimate 'Yugoslavia Transformed' (NIE 15-90) forecast that Yugoslavia would cease to function as a federal state within one year and would probably dissolve within two.
- Senator Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican, blocked Peter Diamond's nomination to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors even though Diamond had recently won the Nobel Prize in economics, and Diamond was never confirmed.
- Mike Gravel briefly ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 with a campaign manager and chief of staff who were both 18 years old at the time.
- In 1971, Mike Gravel conducted a one-man filibuster against the Vietnam-era draft and read 4,100 pages of the 7,000-page Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record.
- Archaeologist Laura Dietrich analyzed more than 8,000 grinding tools from Göbekli Tepe, along with hundreds of stone vessels, including vessels large enough to produce 43 gallons of beer or porridge.
- Göbekli Tepe was abandoned completely around 8200 B.C., with no evidence that its inhabitants gradually adopted domesticated grains or began herding goats and sheep.
- The Jebel Sahaba victims are considered evidence of the world's oldest-known large-scale armed human conflict.
- Göbekli Tepe contains huge stone vessels capable of holding more than 40 gallons of liquid.
- Göbekli Tepe contains no burial sites; instead, archaeologists have found pits containing human bones mixed with animal bones and flint tools.
- Microscopic analysis showed that the grooves on the Göbekli Tepe skull fragments were deliberately made with a flint tool.
- The decorations on the 12,500-year-old Shigir Idol resemble geometric motifs found at Göbekli Tepe, an 11,000-year-old temple in modern-day Turkey.
- Ground-penetrating radar and geomagnetic surveys at Göbekli Tepe mapped at least 16 additional buried megalith rings across 22 acres, while the excavated area covers only about one acre, less than 5 percent of the site.
- George Mueller's 'all-up' testing philosophy meant the Saturn V's first flight used all three live stages and a live Apollo command and service module, rather than testing stages incrementally with ballast.
- During Apollo 7, astronaut Donn Eisele's sextant star sightings were sometimes obscured by flurries of vented, frozen urine crystals.
- Apollo 7's crew—Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele, and Walt Cunningham—reentered Earth's atmosphere without wearing helmets, despite Mission Control's warnings about cabin leaks, rapid depressurization, and landing impacts.
- The Christmas Eve truce of 1944 took place during the Battle of the Bulge.
- The Christmas Eve truce of 1944 reportedly occurred on Christmas Eve, December 24, 1944, in the Hürtgen Forest.
- The Christmas Eve truce of 1944, also known as Truce in the Forest, was an informal ceasefire between American and German soldiers during World War II.
- Vitruvius described the aeolipile in his work De architectura.
- One of the prizes offered for solving a problem recorded in the Scottish Book was a live goose.
- The Archimedes Palimpsest is a medieval parchment manuscript that was scraped and overwritten but originally contained several previously unknown works by Archimedes.
- The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were conducted with British consent.
- The United Kingdom began the world's first nuclear weapons research project, codenamed Tube Alloys, in 1941.
- The Hawaiian Islands were known as the Sandwich Islands in 1874.
- King Ferdinand the Catholic himself confirmed Juan Cabrero's pivotal support for Christopher Columbus's voyage.
- Diego Columbus confirmed Juan Cabrero's pivotal support for Christopher Columbus's first voyage.
- Christopher Columbus credited Juan Cabrero, along with Diego de Deza, as being responsible for the Catholic Monarchs' acceptance of his Indies Enterprise proposal in 1492.
- Ovis longipes palaeoaegyptiacus was one of the two most commonly domesticated sheep depicted on the reliefs of early pharaonic tombs.
- Ancient Egyptians domesticated corkscrew-horned sheep and depicted them on stone tomb murals of pharaohs.
- Ancient Egyptians believed coffins could transform the deceased, not just contain them.
- Napoleon was actually average height for his time at 5'7", but British propaganda depicting him as tiny became the lasting image.
- During WWI, Germany's African colony surrendered two weeks after the war ended in Europe—colonial troops received the armistice news late and fought until November 25, 1918.
- A fire on Christmas Eve 1851 destroyed two-thirds of the Library of Congress's collection.
- To rebuild the Library of Congress's collection, Congress purchased former president Thomas Jefferson's personal library of 6,487 books for $23,950 on January 30, 1815.
- The Library of Congress replaced many books lost in the 1814 fire by purchasing Thomas Jefferson's personal library.
- During a national emergency, the Under Secretary of Transportation for Security was authorized to coordinate domestic aviation, rail, surface, and maritime transportation, and to oversee transportation-related responsibilities of federal departments and agencies other than the Department of Defense and military departments.
- Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri was held briefly at the CIA's 'Salt Pit' prison in Afghanistan before being transferred to the 'Cat's Eye' black site in Thailand, arriving on Nov. 15, 2002.
- Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri was held briefly at the CIA's 'Salt Pit' prison in Afghanistan before being transferred to a black site in Thailand.
- The President's Intelligence Checklist (PICL) was first delivered on 17 June 1961, after the Bay of Pigs invasion.
- Harry Truman was the first U.S. president to receive a daily intelligence digest, called the 'Daily Summary,' which began production in February 1946 and continued until February 1951.
- In 1943 and 1944, Stalin deported hundreds of thousands of Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tartars, and other North Caucasus groups, claiming with little evidence that they were potential Nazi collaborators.
- In the 1980s, the U.S. military was restricted to providing no more than 55 advisors to El Salvador's government in its fight against the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front insurgents.
- Peter Naffsinger wrote that Arab trainees commonly dismissed blame with the phrase "min allah" ("It is from God") and responded to warnings against future misconduct with "inshallah" ("If God wills it").
- CIA analyst Peter Naffsinger's 1964 assessment argued that "face," or honor, was the predominant cultural imperative in the Arab world, to which other values were subordinated.
- Peter Naffsinger's 1964 CIA assessment argued that 'face,' or honor, was the predominant cultural imperative in the Arab world, to which other values were subordinated.
- In 1964, CIA analyst Peter Naffsinger wrote an article titled "'Face' among the Arabs" for the Agency's in-house journal Studies in Intelligence.
- CIA staff historian Jack Pfeiffer wrote the fifth volume of the agency's internal Bay of Pigs history between 1979 and 1984, but his superiors rejected the draft for 'serious shortcomings in scholarship,' a 'polemical tone,' and failure to add significantly to understanding the controversy.
- The first public release of translated VENONA messages occurred in July 1995 and contained 49 messages concerning Soviet attempts to obtain information about U.S. atomic-bomb research and the Manhattan Project.
- American cryptologists needed almost two years to break the KGB's encryption used in VENONA-related communications.
- In 2012, Illinois Rep. Jan Schakowsky was one of 108 Democrats who did not vote on a resolution holding then-Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress, and she was the only one of them to submit a statement saying she would have voted against it.
- NIE 15-90 contained no dissenting footnotes.
- NIE 15-90, issued in October 1990, judged that Yugoslavia's breakup would be violent and that the conflict might spill over into adjacent regions.
- The October 1990 NIE 15-90 judged that Yugoslavia's breakup would be violent and that the conflict might spill over into adjacent regions.
- In the 1980s, most members of Congress lived in Washington, D.C., with their families, socialized across party lines, and ran campaigns costing only a few hundred thousand dollars, according to Democratic Rep. Jim Cooper.
- The House voted to repeal President Obama's health care law at least 33 times during the 112th Congress.
- The three justices who issued a concurring opinion in Bush v. Gore that is considered the genesis of the modern independent state legislature theory were then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
- North Carolina Republicans gained control of both chambers of the state legislature in 2010 for the first time in more than a century.
- In Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that federal courts have no authority to review partisan-gerrymandering cases.