In ancient Athens, the worlds first democracy, they had a process called ostracism, where once a year the people could vote on the politician they thought was most destructive to the democratic process. The “winner” was banished from Athens for 10 years.
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In 1518, a "dancing plague" struck Strasbourg, Alsace, whereby hundreds of people danced fervently in the streets over the period of a month. Some suffered heart attacks or strokes, and many others died from sheer exhaustion. It remains unexplained.
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A man named Heraclitus had an illness that made his body swell up with water. To try to sweat it off, he buried himself in a steaming pile of animal poo, but then overheated and died of dehydration.
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Instead of McDonald's tearing down a ~200-year-old Georgian mansion, citizens of a small NY town forced them to renovate it instead, resulting in a uniquely historic franchise location.
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France’s King Louis XIV was offered biological weapons by an Italian chemist. He not only refused, but also paid the chemist an annual salary to never reveal the technology to anyone else.
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In Ancient Greece, small penises were desirable, and big ones were for ‘old men and barbarians’
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Chunosuke Matsuyama, a Japanese Seaman, sent a message in a bottle in 1784 that his ship had wrecked. It washed up in 1935 in the village where he was born.
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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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