Random History Facts

    107 facts tagged with History Facts

    The ‘@’ sign is centuries old, and was used in Europe to denote a unit of weight (the “arroba”) equivalent to 25 lbs.
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    Japanese Holdout
    Japanese Holdout
    After World War 2 ended in 1945, a Japanese officer named Hiroo Onoda didn't surrender and continued the war for 29 years because he didn't know that Japan had surrendered and the war was over.
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    In 1537, England's King Henry VII officially declared February 14th the holiday of St. Valentine's Day.
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    In the 1830s, a Greek prime minister tried to spread the potato in Greece but people weren't interested so he put armed guards in front of shipments of potatoes so people would think they were important. People then started stealing these potatoes so much that the crop spread to all of Greece.
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    When the Egyptians destroyed Libya in the 13th century B.C. they took 13,230 penises of the conquered enemies as trophies.
    220
    Rocket Mail
    Rocket Mail
    In 1959, the USPS attempted to deliver mail via cruise missile and successfully shipped 3,000 pieces of mail from Virginia to Florida in 22 minutes.
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    A monk had once written over a book that contained information about calculus that was written by Archimedes in ancient Greece that could have made us 100 or even 1000 years more mathematically and technologically advanced.
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    In 1770, the British Parliament passed a law condemning lipstick, stating that “women found guilty of seducing men into matrimony by a cosmetic means could be tried for witchcraft.”
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