"During prohibition, grape concentrate bricks called Vine-Glo were sold.
On the packaging, it included a very specific warning: "After dissolving the brick in a gallon of water, do not place the liquid in a jug away in the cupboard for twenty days, because then it would turn into wine."."
"Humans developed agriculture around 12000 years ago. By storing grain, huge numbers of rodents flourished. Cats showed up to eat the rodents, and humans learned that if they took care of the cats, the cats would control the rodents. Therefore, it was the invention of agriculture that led to the domestication of the house cat."
"The Netherlands sends Canada 20,000 tulips every year for liberating them during WW2. The Netherlands also has a cemetery dedicated to Canadian fallen troops."
"During the Irish famine the Choctaw Nation from the USA sent financial aid to them and while a small amount at the time it was seen as a great gesture in return during Covid many Irish people donated money to the Navajo Nation to help them. There’s a statue in County Cork to commemorate it as well."
"Abraham Lincoln's son (Robert Todd Lincoln) was present at three different presidential assassinations. After McKinley, he decided not to accept any more invitations."
"The Canadian-Denmark whiskey war was probably the most polite war ever. It involved a small island off the coast of Greenland. The Canadians claimed it by putting the Canadian flag and bottles of Canadian whiskey on the rock, and the Danes would replace it with schnapps and the Danish flag. Both sides reached an agreement to split the island in 2022. I'm guessing this is more well known to Canadians and Danes than some of the rest of us."
"Mongolian invasion of Japan was stopped by a typhoon. When they tried again, they were stopped by another typhoon. To this day these were the only two typhoons recorded in that place."
"Ancient Romans would put sandals on the hands of sleeping people then tickle their face so they would slap themselves."
"The reason we have coal is because trees weren't biodegradable back then, so it just underwent the geological proces and formed underground under pressure and high temperatures.
The fungus that breaks down trees, only evolved 40 million years ago."
"The Chinese sparrow hunt in 1960. It was to protect crops but it allowed invasions of locusts that no longer had a predator and this caused the great Chinese famine."
"A very recent historical fact that is weirdly not talked about as much as it should be -- Microsoft had accumulated such a big monopoly over the personal computer market through the 80s and 90s that in 1997 Microsoft was nearly broken apart by the US government. In an attempt to avoid an investigation, Microsoft invested nearly $150 million into a then-failing Apple Computer to give the US government less ammunition in a potential anti-trust case. This saved Apple from bankruptcy and helped them to become one of the biggest tech companies in history. Microsoft, however, profited off of this investment. In 2003, Microsoft sold their shares in Apple for nearly $600 million."
"For Americans: the Coal Wars were a series of armed conflicts from the 1890s to the 1930s in which the exploitation of mining workers led to riots and then outright battles between the workers and the armed mercenaries hired by mining companies to terrorize and kill them. It culminated in the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921, which ended when the United States Army was deployed on domestic soil to eliminate the strikers.
And then our nation collectively memory holed it because we wouldn’t want other exploited workers to get ideas."
"In general, most of the "peaceful" movements that resulted in freedoms we enjoy today (civil rights, labor organizing, anti-war protests, the anti-colonialist movements led by Gandhi and Mandela, etc), required **significant** direct action and targeted political violence in order to succeed."
"The Great Emu War in Australia (1932) - soldiers armed with machine guns fought emus to protect crops. The emus won."
"The Pony Express lasted only a year and a half.
TheAndrewBrown: It does seem to have been marketed heavily, but it was also one of the first ways to communicate across the country. It also went bankrupt because the telegraph was invented and made it obsolete, which led to it being romanticized like a lot of other “old west” stuff was that got replaced by newer technology. But it was a huge deal during that year and a half"
"Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on the same day."
"Stegasaurous died out 145 million years ago, T Rex 72-65 million years ago, the Stegasaurous was as old to the T-Rex as the T-Rex is to us.
Grasses evolved about 70 Mya."
"Humanity was likely nearly wiped out about 900,000 years ago when our ancestors were reduced to about 1280 breeding individuals and stayed around that many for 117,000 years."
"Morocco was the first country to recognize the United States of America as an independent country."
"Many people know about Neanderthals, but there were also other human species as well. Homo heidelbergensis and Denisovans the other ones that we know of that existed in the time of Homo Sapiens."
"Thomas Jefferson created his own version of the Bible by hand that removed the whole first testament and any and all mentions and references to miracles and the supernatural. It’s called a Jefferson Bible and you can still get them."
"Bicycle face. "In the 19th century, a mysterious condition called "bicycle face" was created to scare women from riding bicycles - **flushed cheeks, hard clenched jaw, bulging eyes** are just some of the symptoms"."
"The tale of the dancing plague of 1518. In Strasbourg (modern-day France), a woman named Frau Troffea began dancing uncontrollably in the streets. Within a month, about 400 people had joined her. The phenomenon, now believed to be a case of mass hysteria or ergot poisoning, resulted in several deaths from heart attack, stroke, or exhaustion."
"More people died during the production of the V2 rocket than were killed by it as a weapon of war."
"The magician Harry Houdini hated people who claimed to be psychics and clairvoyants so much that he once testified before congress in an attempt to get fortune readings and things like that made illegal."
"Coca Cola still uses coca leaves in their formula but just for the flavor. They are the only US company that is legally allowed to import coca leaves. The processed leaves are then sold to a pharmaceutical company."
"In the early 1900s, the Tennessee Children’s Home Society was an illegal orphanage that kidnapped babies from poor households and sold them.
If you're interested, read the book Before We Were Yours."
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#10 now that is some Darth Plagueis level of irony.