History & Culture

Julie d'Aubigny — known as La Maupin — was a 17th-century French opera singer and one of the most feared swordfighters in Paris. When her girlfriend's parents sent the girl to a convent, Julie checked in as a novice, placed a dead nun's body in her lover's bed, set the building on fire, and escaped with her. She was sentenced to death. The king pardoned her. She went on to perform at the Paris Opéra for 15 years.

In 1324, Mansa Musa — ruler of the Mali Empire — made a pilgrimage to Mecca with a caravan of 60,000 men and thousands of pounds of gold. When he stopped in Cairo, he gave away so much gold that he crashed the local economy. The price of gold didn't recover for twelve years. He is widely considered the wealthiest person who ever lived.

In 2012, archaeologists dug up a parking lot in Leicester, England, and found the skeleton of King Richard III — lost for 527 years. He was the last English king killed in battle, buried in a hasty unmarked grave in 1485. An amateur historian convinced a university to dig up the car park on a hunch. They found him in the first trench, six hours into a two-week excavation. The parking space above his grave was marked with the letter "R."

In 1990, the cockpit windshield of British Airways Flight 5390 blew out at 17,400 feet. Captain Tim Lancaster was sucked halfway out of the aircraft. Flight attendant Nigel Ogden grabbed his legs and held on for 20 minutes while co-pilot Alastair Atchison made an emergency landing. Lancaster survived with frostbite and fractures. The cause? 84 of the 90 windshield bolts were the wrong size — installed by a shift manager who'd done it by eye instead of checking the manual.

For centuries, the Gordian Knot defeated every scholar and king who tried to untie it. An oracle declared whoever solved it would rule all of Asia. Alexander the Great studied it for a moment — then drew his sword and cut straight through it.

A rival cut off Takeda Shingen’s salt. Uesugi Kenshin sent him salt anyway—saying wars are won with swords, not salt.

During a war between France and England in 1697, Louis XIV ordered the release of a captured English engineer who had been building a lighthouse. His reasoning: "France is at war with England, not with humanity."

In 1869–1870, boosters called Washington vulnerable and pitched St. Louis as the nation’s natural center, even hosting a Capital Removal convention.

In 1930, six anonymous Chicago businessmen formed a secret vigilante organization to take on the city's rampant crime. They investigated bombings, kidnappings, and bank robberies — and Al Capone himself said they were responsible for bringing him down.

In 1971, a man named Dan Cooper hijacked a plane, extorted $200,000, parachuted into a stormy night, and vanished without a trace. The only clue ever found was $5,800 of the ransom, rotting on a riverbank years later.

In 1932, the Australian military deployed soldiers armed with machine guns to combat an invasion of 20,000 emus destroying farmland in Western Australia. After six days of failed attacks, the emus outsmarted the soldiers, and the military withdrew in defeat.

In 1986, federal prisoner Ronald J. McIntosh escaped during an unsupervised prisoner transfer. Eight days later, he returned in a stolen helicopter and broke out his girlfriend, bank robber Samantha Lopez, from federal prison in a daring daylight rescue.

The largest nuclear bomb ever built, the Tsar Bomba, caused damage up to approximately 1,000km away.

Nicholas Alkemade, a pilot during World War 2, survived falling 18,000 feet after jumping from a burning Lancaster bomber.

Depression-era bank robber "Pretty Boy" Charles Floyd reportedly destroyed mortgage documents during at least one or two heists. While the legend claims he freed hundreds from debt, FBI historians note this was likely occasional rather than routine—but the rumors helped cement his Robin Hood reputation among struggling Oklahoma farmers.

In 1910, as Earth passed through the tail of Halley's Comet, people bought "Anti-Comet Pills", special "comet umbrellas", and gas masks, because there was public hysteria that all life on Earth would be destroyed by gas - called cyanogen - that was detected in the tail.

In 585 BC, a solar eclipse occurred in the middle of a battle between the Lydians and the Medes. They promptly ceased fighting and signed a peace treaty.

The record for most passengers on an airplane was set in 1991 when 1086 Ethiopian Jews were evacuated on a Boeing 747 to Jerusalem. The plane landed with 1088 passengers as two babies were born during the flight.

Thomas Edison taught his second wife Morse code so they could communicate in secret by tapping into each other's hands when her family was around. He even proposed to her this way — tapping "Will you marry me?" into her palm during a carriage ride. She tapped back "Yes."

Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor, was left stranded on a deserted island in 1704, but survived for over 4 years, partly by using feral cats to protect him from ravenous rats that attacked during the night.