One of the things I enjoy most about learning history is coming across facts that genuinely reframe how I see the present, ike those “oh, that’s why we do it this way” or "wow, we used to do things so differently" moments, or realizing how radically different (and sometimes illogical) past practices were.
In some ways it makes life feel more coherent; in others, less so, especially when customs change without an obvious rational explanation.
At the same time, I’ve noticed how many popular “historical facts” circulate without solid evidence behind them. I’ve followed citations from one book to another only to hit a dead end. Sometimes apparently a "fact" is just a claim that's repeated often enough.
I’ve also been corrected by people more knowledgeable than myself, for example, I once repeated the idea (even learned from a college prof) that most people in the Middle Ages believed the Earth was flat, but a historian (history grad) wa spresent who said that's a misconception.
So I’m curious: what actual, well-documented historical facts have you learned that you still find impressive or enlightening? A fact that tend to surprise others when you share them?
thanks
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In his letters from England, Voltaire mentions that light takes six and half minutes to reach the Earth from the Sun.
So back as far as Newton, Scientists of the day were aware that there was a speed that light travels in, that it isn't instantaneous, and they made attempts to measure and calculate it. They were wrong on the figure, but still, it's impressive.
For background, Ole Rømer measured the speed of light in 1676. He was observing eclipses of Io, the innermost moon of Jupiter.
He noticed that when Earth was moving away from Jupiter Io's eclipses appeared late, and when Earth was moving toward Jupiter, Io's eclipses appeared early.
This could be explained if light has a finite speed and the time of travel chages depending upon the distance between Earth and Jupiter in their orbits.
He estimated light takes 22 minutes to cross the diameter of the Earth's orbit.
Previously, Galileo had tried to measure the delay in uncovering lanterns placed a mile apart and concluded "too fast to measure".
In the 1700s Scientists made attempts to derive a measurement but their estimation for the distance between the Sun and the Earth was on the short size, hence the six and half minutes they came up with.
To be fair, 6.5 min is really quite close to our current number of ~8.3 min
It still blows my mind knowing how fast light travels and it taking that long still, it’s like really puts into perspective how truly massive our universe is
Here's something else to make your mind melt:
If I were to call you Mars, it would take twenty minutes for that call to reach you.
You can walk a mile before a call gets to you via light speed.
Neptune is so far out it takes four hours to reach it at light speed.
Because I had to look this up: one light year is 9.46 trillion km or 5.88 trillion mi.
What people seem to be amazed by most is when I put history on a scale for them. Most common ones are cleopatra living closer to the invention of iPhone than to the building of pyramids, or the Oxford university being older than the Aztec empire.
It is kind of amazing
First stone tools to metal working ≈ 3.5 million years
First metal working to iron age in europe ≈8,000 years
Start of the iron age in europe to the moon landings ≈2,500 years.
This one is true but pretty misleading depending on why people find it surprising.
Oxford itself existed as a institution before the Aztec Empire formed, but it wasn't a university in the sense we think of it then.
Conversely, while the Aztec Empire as a specific political network only formed in the late 1420s, Tenochtitlan, it's capital, existed since 1325, and other city-states that formed core parts of the empire and had an "Aztec"/Nahua identity had been around for centuries prior to that, perhaps as early as 700-800AD.
And then other civilizations, some which the Aztecs took major influence from, were in the area even earlier then that, with the earliest major towns and cities (though which did not survive to the Aztec period) in what later became the core of the empire existed thousands of years prior
The Aztec Empire is just an especially late forming nation/empire/political network, in a region that had civilization for millennia. By comparison, Spain itself (if we define it as the union of Castile and Aaragon) didn't form until many decades after the Aztec Empire did, and Germany wouldn't form until the 1800s by some definitions, yet obviously there were many other kingdoms and empires in those areas going back a long time. It's the same concept.
The difference is that most people know about Medieval European Kingdoms, the Roman Empire, etc, but most people don't know about the Tepanecs, Tula, Teotihuacan etc. So the trivia kind of preys on people's ignorance of Mesoamerican civilizations to seem meaningful.
Personally, I think it's a way more interesting and less misleading fun fact to note that the Aztec Empire and Spain formed in the same century, or that the last indepedent Mesoamerican states, such as the Maya kingdom of Nojpeten, only fell in 1697, almost 200 years after Cortes and a few years after the Salem Witch Trials in the 13 American Colonies.
For people interested in more, I made my own big comment with cool Mesoamerican trivia here
CrashCourse's Big History playlist was really fun for me for this reason
Oxford being older than the Aztec empire isnt that amazing though. It's like saying Harvard is older than Germany. Technically true but meaningless. The Aztec state was just a recent polity in a region that has been home to urban civilization about as early as China . Oxford is also older than the Inca Empire, which was the latest Andean powerhouse in a region that goes back +5,000 years to the Norte Chico civilization that was contemporary with the building of the Egyptian pyramids)
I'm not claiming it to be meaningul. Simply saying that people are often surprised by it. They tend to think of the past as neatly separated into different categories and are often surprised when you break through them.
The people that are surprised by it are just ignorant, to put it simply
The difference between lifespan and life expectancy. A lot of people know that life expectancy was extremely short before modern medicine, often hovering around the 30s. Many people take this as people were considered 'middle aged' by their early 20s (I've even heard a college professor say this) back in the day, but this is obviously wrong.
People were just much more likely to die young, especially in early childhood/infancy, which skewed averages way down. Those that survived childhood tended to have lifespans not significantly shorter than today. Most people that made it to 20 had a pretty good shot of living into their 60s as long as they avoided violence, starvation, and or disease (much easier said than done back then). Plenty of people made it into their 70s, 80s, and (much more rarely than today), their 90s. They weren't senior citizens by 35, they aged pretty similarly to modern people, but they often died of things that are easy to treat today.
Sophocles, the Ancient Greek playwright, wrote his last play at 92.
I’ve heard this from history teachers too. Like yeah sure, plenty of people would die at 30, but we have sooooo many documents of elderly in their 70’s or 80’s all the way back to the Greeks or before as well as very infamous people who lived much much longer than then
It makes sense when you think about it, even people today get crazy worried when their baby gets the common cold (rightfully so) so you can just imagine how much worse it would’ve been for our ancestors
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As long as your mother wasn't an anti-vaccer.
No, they didn't. That's the opposite of the point being made.
Ben Franklin lives a VERY long life by any standard
84, sure. That’s an old man. John Adams lived to 90, James Madison 85, Thomas Jefferson 83. It wouldn’t have been like “their equivalent of 100” or anything, it would be their equivalent of 84 to us basically. Above average but within the realm of normal.
And 1 of his 2 known children died as a baby from smallpox, just as inoculations were introduced to the colonies, thus skewing the average even in that 1 family.
Innoculations, alone, had a 4% fatality rate. Less than smallpox, obviously
PT Barnum was a successful politician - progressive on many issues, draconian on others - he sponsored a bill in CT that included legislation which made using birth control punishable by jail (men and women.) His motivation was to push temperance laws in Connecticut (he saw booze as the real evil) which he tried out as mayor of Bridgeport. The laws were on the books until Griswold v. CT in the 1960s, a landmark case which overturned the legislation and paved the way for roe v Wade. Not just a circus guy, that Phineas. *curtsies in grad thesis no one will ever read.
Edit: the CT contraception legislation that was exceptionally nationally restrictive may have been so because of a misplaced comma, with the original intention of the bill to be less punitive, but it hasn’t been proven.
The first foreign power to occupy Japan was the United States of America.
Was this before or after the Japanese people colonized the Ainu people?
Early Greeks surmised that matter was composed of teeny tiny particles and that there may be huge space between these particles. Even though I know this to be fact, holding my phone and knowing it’s mostly space is amazing
Bronze Age Collapse. Most people have no clue it even happened, and even today we're left guessing as to a large part of the context.
It’s no more obscure than the rest of the Bronze Age. The end of the Bronze Age and Ea-nasir memes seem to be the only things Redditors know about the Bronze Age.
It’s worth noting that there were quite a few collapses over the course of the Bronze Age. It was, after all, a period of about 2000 years.
Around 2200-2150 BCE, for example, Egypt fragmented into locally governed nomes at the end of the Old Kingdom, the Akkadian empire collapsed, there was a large-scale abandonment of walled cities in the southern Levant, and important sites in mainland Greece were destroyed or abandoned for several centuries.
“Did a mega drought topple empires 4,200 years ago?”
Yep was just reading about all this earlier tonight The 4.2 ky event fucked up a lot in the early bronze age collapse, then they got hit again by another drought/ climate change called the 3.2 ky event lol only egypt had learned to stockpile for this kind of situation and did okay at the end of the late bronze age collapse. We know who the sea peoples are, just a bunch of refugees/raiders from the other late bronze age big 3
Maybe everyone just checked out
Cleopatra and Julius Caesar getting together. At least it blew my mind when I learned it.
I think it’s because we put locations in a box of chronological times. “The Mesopotamians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, then the Roman’s, etc” instead of recognizing that these places continue to grow, maybe under different names but likely the same ancestors / similar culture as before
When it concerns historical figures doing or saying things they assumed were unknown in their time, people really get into it. Among them:
Thomas Jefferson's favorite dinner: macaroni and cheese.
Orville Wright, first to successfully fly a powered airplane, died in 1948, in the year the first man to walk on the moon, Neil Armstrong ,turned 18. Though it is unlikely they ever actually met, the fact that they could have illustrates the blistering progress made during the 20th century.
The message intercepted from Hitler that indicated his disbelief that the Allies would land in Normandy was presented to Eisenhower, after being decoded by a digital computer - in 1944.
George Washington mandated a smallpox vaccine to join the Continental Army. Yes, they had that back then, but it was primitive and potentially dangerous.
Einstein was excellent at mathematics, contrary to popular myth. But he could not complete his theory of general relativity for 10 years, since he needed the assistance of mathematicians to develop tensor calculus, which was the only way his theory could be formally described.
Harrison Tyler, the last surviving grandson of America's 10th president, John Tyler, died in 2025. That's only two generations from a man who served as president from 1841-1845, twenty years before the Civil War,. It''s fitting to acknowledge that President Tyler was born in 1790, while Washington was serving his first term as President. Read: the United States is still a young country!
Humans built the pyramids in Egypt. You can show them a progression of rudimentary pyramids to impressive pyramids, just like how cars, trains, planes, and ships improved, and still, they want to invoke aliens.
If they were consistent and said that aliens built Teslas, maglev trains, 747s, and the Ford nuclear aircraft carriers... now we're talking, because there is considerably more magic in those things.
This is one thing I see people struggling to understand. As a species, we've always been, well, us (not counting the species we evolved from). By that I mean, the earliest humans were just as capable of learning as anyone is today. We're the exact same people. We have never needed the extraordinary or supernatural to explain how we have been able to do things, throughout history.
Humans have always been able to figure out how to build things. Heck, we've been genetically modifying plants and animals for our entire existence.
Was talking with a family member / test pilot about the amazing stuff planes can do these days. "How the heck do we figure figure out all this stuff?"
Response: "We stand on the shoulders of giants." True in every field.
I had a buddy who claimed that microchip and stealth technology are both products of alien technology. I was like, really? Because I can easily explain to you how those things work. He'd rather believe the magic stuff though.
To be fair, if I had to pick a 20th century technology to be "an alien suggested this and then humans covered their tracks to pretend they came up with it themselves" the transistor would be a pretty good candidate. The entire semiconductor solid state thing is a hell of an effect to actually exist in the real world
But I'm just repeating the Fallout universe worldbuilding that has their point of divergence at "transistor not discovered until far later"
I'm re-reading Turtledove's "Worldwar" tetralogy, where some 1940s British RAF guys are trying to analyse and reverse-engineer the technology used by the reptilian invaders in their fighter and fighter bomber aircraft.
They're making great strides figuring their jet engines, but the alien radars really confuse them, because Earth is still using vacuum tubes.
Honestly a lot of the WW2 radar stuff is completely bonkers sounding. Like I don't understand really how a magnetron works now, let alone back then
Like anything, it was developed in small steps over decades. Nothing magic, just very clever people working very hard and building on the work done by others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_transistor
Yeah, when you look at the progression of devices only you see this enormous jump that is hard to explain.
But there was a steady progression of transistor theory, and a lot of the precision manufacturing developed from earlier analog/tube electronics eventually enabled the realization of a hypothetical device that had been described in increasing detail in the literature for a while.
More than one Science Fiction author has discussed missing "the transistor'. An idea so far out even the best guys at thinking about that stuff couldn't come up with it
There's one early pyramid where they got the slope wrong, they were too ambitious, so about halfway up it changes to a much less slopey slope. It looks very silly.
Bent Pyramid. Only one that still has most of its casing stones.
I don’t know why but “slopey slope” made me giggle
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Robert Heinlein.
Any sufficiently researched magic is indistinguishable from technology - me.
Having met some shipyard workers, I'm still open to aliens and the Ford carriers.
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For Japan, the attacks that brought the western powers into the war began on December 8th. Hong Kong, the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies were all attacked on the 8th. Because of the international date line, the attack on Pearl Harbor was technically on the 7th, but from Japan's perspective they chose to widen their ongoing war with China on December 8th.
It's one of those little things that reminds you people can have different perspectives and both be right. I was in my 40s before it occurred to me December 7th, 1941, a date which will live in infamy, was only a technicality from the Japanese side. For them it was the 8th, with some elements happening on the 7th because of the international date line.
Same goes for Russia when it comes to memorializing VE Day, Den Pobedi, in Russia is celebrated on May 9th because news of the surrender didn’t arrive until after midnight.
Another fun one for Russia is the October Revolution, which, because they were still on the Julian calendar, happened in November for everyone else.
NYC traffic deaths in 2022: 255 (highest in years)
NYC traffic deaths in 1929: 1,360 (highest ever)
Would you like London's?
102 in 2022.
Monopoly was invented by an economics professor. There were two sets of rules, the first was without taxes the second with taxes. The first game was very short and ended with one person owning everything. The second could post almost forever.
Two random facts that ultimately don’t mean much but are fascinating:
Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s wife, Mary Ann Randolph Custis, was the step great-granddaughter of George Washington.
The brother of John Hinckley, Jr. (the guy that shot Reagan in in the 1981) was scheduled to have dinner with Neil Bush (son of then Vice President George H.W. Bush and brother of George W. Bush) the day after the shooting.
And Arlington was built by her father, as a kind of memorial to Washington and the founders. It was not the ' Lee homestead ', which is for whatever reason, how it seems to be regarded.
The Sepoy Rebellion in India 1857
The events were triggered by several factors, including the introduction of the Enfield rifle with cartridges that, according to rumors, had been treated with beef tallow and lard, which was a religious insult to devout Hindus and Muslims.
The rumour was it was both pork and beef, I think, hence Muslims and Hindus.
Particularly as using the cartridges involved biting the end with the bullet off and spitting it down the barrel, so the soldiers would be required to "eat" some of the offending substance.
Yeah, there is an American version of this myth involving pork-covered bullets in the Moro Rebellion.
Roald Amundsen, on his trip to be the first to reach the South Pole, had to pioneer an unknown route over one of the steepest glaciers, and nearly straight up over the Transantarctic mountains. He and his colleagues averaged 15 miles per day on ski, with dogs pulling the sledges, even in near-whiteout conditions.
They all gained weight on the trip, eating two meals a day. And they got there first.
Mentioning pretty much any major element of the politics of the United States 1783-1800 will bamboozle people whose knowledge of the republic's origin consists of founder worship.
I would counter that those "missteps" (I assume you're discussing the Articles, Shay's Rebellion, the A&SA, etc.) were exactly the kind of iterative genius that solidified the US standing on the world stage.
The founders weren't in alignment on much, if you really look at the conversations they were having and the events that the populace decided needed to happen for their own safety and sanity.
But, they sat down, talked it through, hammered it out, and gave us what we have, today.
We get almost NOTHING right the first time. But we improve, constantly, consistently and often at a better pace than we're "supposed" to.
All in all, not a terrible legacy.
The US constitution is really slow to change, comparatively. 27 amendments in total since it was codified. The German constitution for example has had over 70 amendments since 1949.
From an outside perspective, it really does look like the trope of the infallibilty of the founding fathers really impacts the ability to change. I would assume much moreso what they intended.
If they intended the document to be more organic, they likely would have eased the constraints on getting amendments passed and integrated, is my guess
The main constraint on amending the USA's constitution is the requirement of ratifying any new amendments by 3/4ths of the states (after ratifications by 2/3rds by the national/federal House of Representatives and the Senate), which exponentially increased the amount of people you had to convince for any amendment to make it all the way through the process. (And the number of people necessary, and thus the burden to amend the constitution, has only increased as the number of states has grown.)
This was a messy compromise because states were generally reticent about ceding too much of their power directly to the national/federal government for a lot of reasons, so significant concessions were made in that process that left the constitutional amendment process significantly unwieldy to use, so a lot of federal power in laws has actually been created over the years by extremely generous interpretations of the Commerce Clause instead of true amendments, because the amendment process is such a bloody headache.
Leaving aside the philosophies of the Federalists and Anti-Federalists (which are very interesting reading considering what many of the figures involved thought about the whole project), the last thing most people who cared in the fledgling nation wanted at that point was for some bloc of states to decide "those fucks in Washington are going to have too much power over us. We're leaving and forming our own government instead of signing up for their constitution" - and I think that was an extremely valid concern, considering what happened during the USA's Civil War when a chunk of states did leave the union in a disagreement over slavery (and some economic divides based around industrializing and trade vs. agricultural / slave economies, tariffs, and other stuff, but mostly slavery) and it was an absolute bloodbath. It was a bloodbath the USA could endure and settle in 1861, but not one it could have had in 1789 without getting picked apart by the European Grand Powers taking advantage of it and recolonizing or setting up the factions in the USA as puppet governments.
A messy and inconvenient compromise that's led to asinine situations like being able to be busted for a federal offense because you've got weed you bought from a state-licensed store, and caused all kinds of jurisdictional problems, but one that had to be made in the moment to get the original constitution through in the first place, when having enough national unity to resist a British re-invasion (as in 1812, or the general interference of other European colonial powers) was an existential problem in the short term for the new nation.
Parts of it are ludicrous now, but the reasoning and realpolitik behind them then made sense at the time.
Of course that's your contention. You're a first year grad student. You just got finished readin' some Marxian historian -- Pete Garrison probably. You're gonna be convinced of that 'til next month when you get to James Lemon, and then you're gonna be talkin' about how the economies of Virginia and Pennsylvania were entrepreneurial and capitalist way back in 1740. That's gonna last until next year -- you're gonna be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood, talkin' about, you know, the Pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization.
Do you like apples?
God I love them apples
Well, as a matter of fact I won't, because Wood drastically underestimates the impact of social distinctions predicated upon wealth, especially inherited wealth
Yea even just the fact that the founders were not a monolith attempting to craft a perfect system and were in fact a disagreeing quarrelsome bunch politicians who came up with the constitution via a series of compromises no one was truly happy with is lost on a lot of people.
They try to hammer this home in every middle and high school civics class, but people still think a founders opinion on something must be the correct way to run the country 250 years later even though you can likely find a contradicting statement from another guy who’s on the money.
I highly recommend Beeman's "Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution". It's an excellent read.
It's amazing that people still need to be explained that the Sherman was a fine tank, German tanks are heavily overestimated, but yes British tank development was sort of a bad joke. Because most people only read one book about armored warfare in WWII and it's Belton Cooper's book and Belton Cooper's book is a headache that just never goes away.
From my understanding (which is very limited) the Sherman was a logistical marvel, it had an amazing range compared to maintenance ration, could be easily mass produced and repaired and had the benefit of being shippable. Sure the German tanks had bigger guns and more armor, but in the end we’re logistics nightmares. And anyone who has ever studied war will tell you that it pretty much hinges on logistics
To the first yes, but to the later people commit many errors;
They often compare the Sherman to late war model Panzer IVs, ignoring that when the Sherman first hit the field in 1942 in North Africa it completely outclassed the Panzer II, III, and the early model Panzer IV. The Germans had to upgrade the Panzer IV (initially just a command tank with a snub gun and room for a radio) to deal with the Sherman and other tanks they encountered in 1941/1942 that were better than their main inventory. This is often left out completely of the story in popular renditions of the 'story.' After upgrades, the Panzer IV and Sherman were fairly equivalent performance wise.
The panther had better armor and a better gun, and the Tiger was heavier but yes. Both were hard to maintain, but also they barely existed. At any given time in the war it was rare for more than 100-150 Tigers to be operational at any given time. Yet the idea of the Tiger dominants people's perceptions of the war where tanks are concerns. The biggest threat to the Sherman wasn't Tigers. It was Panzerfausts and other shaped charges that the armor of the time was not well suited for stopping. The Sherman's 75mm is often unfairly disparaged because it couldn't penetrate a Tiger's armor but where are all the Tigers? While heavily criticized like they committed some cardinal sin, American war planners who pushed back against the need for 76mm (or larger) guns were ultimately correct. The US didn't need them to win the war and the 75mm was just as good if not better against bunkers, buildings, and soft cover which were far more common than Tiger tanks.
Other issues are kind of just myths. Cooper for example claims the Sherman had a unique flaw that caused it to go up in flames but that was a 'flaw' of every tank of the period and the Sherman dealt with it better than others once the US upgraded to wet ammo storage.
Performance wise, the Sherman is with the T34 as one of, if not the, best tanks of the war. Even when you compare it to the tanks that were created to respond to it, like late model Panzer IVs.
I think this an example of a much larger problem people have when trying to compare war materiel directly, based primarily on the "combat stats" numbers (assuming the numbers are accurate) for the individual weapons: sure, based purely on "combat stats", a Sherman or a T-34 is going to lose a 1v1 duel with a Tiger, Panther, or even an upgraded Panzer IV the vast majority of the time.
But if a Sherman was going 1v1 with one of the heavier German tanks, there was already an enormous tactical/logistics problem. (Despite the manufacturing disparities, this did happen a few times I've read of during the push after D-day, especially when the Germans had essentially started using heavier tanks as low-mobility, or even outright dug-in, armored defence weapons instead of "tanks", saving fuel while still allowing decent control over local chokepoints.) Ideally, and by production numbers, the Shermans or T-34s would be outnumbering them in any mobile confrontations.
That's prettymuch every WWII tank that saw practical production numbers, isn't it? Infantry anti-tank weapons during that war made it to the point that (under most circumstances) unless you were absolutely suicidal, you needed to have something (a mounted machine gun on the tanks, friendly infantry in the area, etc. - or literally all of the above and more if you had the resources) to pinpoint and clear enemy infantry if you wanted to bring your tanks into the fight.
Simplistically, tanks could beat pillboxes and other machinegun emplacements that could shred infantry, but infantry could overpower tanks with recoilless rifles and early rocket stuff using shaped charges, unless your tanks had their own infantry backup, particularly if their infantry was focused on your tanks and wasn't watching out for your infantry. I know it's all a lot more complicated than that, but advancements in weaponry made anything less than a fully-combined operation between tanks and infantry a horrible tactical maneuver most of the time.
And amusingly, there were even some periods during that push where USA troops were using captured panzerfausts whenever possible because they thought they were more effective than their issued infantry anti-tank weapons, maybe due to the shaped charge and other design features that made them a lighter and better one-man single-shot solution on the battlefield instead of the bazooka, because what made those panzerfausts deadly to Shermans made them about as deadly to what tanks Germans had on hand. I'm not going to opine on which weapon was truly better, since all of them went through so many revisions and all did plenty of damage, but it does seem the average GIs preferred going tank-hunting with a panzerfaust during the push to Berlin, with some anecdotes claiming that after a GI managed to down a German tank solo (1v1 me - infantry on tank! You really want to die?) with a captured panzerfaust and got a week's leave in Paris and a shiny medal for it (Citizen Soldiers - Stephen E. Ambrose. I know it's a 'popular history book', but this bit seems accurate enough for our purposes), word spread fast, and soon plenty of GIs were using the same shit the Germans had been lobbing at their tanks, and throwing away the expendable tubes to become less encumbered infantrymen after trying a tank shot.
Just to make it extremely clear, I have no significant disagreements with what you said, And heartily agree with most of it. There are some bits in the middle of it and what I said that are like the pieces I'd slice out of piece of meat because it started carbonizing before other parts even reached a good temperature, but isn't it best to have someone who has some different ideas yet thinks you really nailed basically all of it?
I think that people either don't know how big the difference in war production was between the alies and germany or the massively under estimate its importance. The best anti-tank gun in the world is not much use if the attacking enemy has more tanks they you have anti-tank shells which happened at least once.
P.s. not a historian just an interested person.
Yep.
Kind of what I'm getting at. Most of the Sherman's perceived 'design flaws' are not actual flaws with the Sherman itself but common to the period.
For the numbers on Tiger production and operational status, I'm fairly certain I'm getting the numbers from a chart in Showalter's book Hitler's Panzers. If I'm incorrect I welcome to be corrected. I have the book around here somewhere but it might be buried in a box.
Thank you for that informative response! That’s all really cool to know
Are you suggesting most people read books?
Yes. You're right. How foolish of me XD
Most people read exactly zero books about armored warfare in WWII :p
Almost anything to do with the Precolumbian Americas, since it's so poorly taught about and barely used in pop culture
Here's a bunch of interesting or weird facts, just from Mesoamerica (The Aztec, Maya etc in Mexico, Guatemala etc):
Teotihuacan was a city from mainly 200-600AD in the same valley as would become the core of the Aztec Empire, 1000 years before they existed, and before Mesoamerica had any metallurgy period, yet at it's height was in the top 10-20 largest cities in the world, with almost all it's denizens living in fancy palace compounds with dozens of rooms, painted frescoes, plumbing systems etc, and may have invaded Maya cities over a 1000 miles away
Speaking of Teotihuacan, the Aztec preformed archeological excavations at and collected artifacts from Teotihuacan and other older Mesoamerican civilizations, (the most extreme example is an Olmec mask the Aztec re-deposited into their Great Temple would have been made ~2000 to ~3000 years before the Aztec existed. Another mask the Aztec would have excavated at Teotihuacan, modified with new inlays, before the Medici family of Italy somehow got a hold of it and also then modified to be mounted to a wall.
There are some distance date inscriptions at the Maya sites of Quiriguá and Copan,which record mythological events which calculate out to being hundreds of millions of years, to dozens of septillions of years in the past. Obviously, these didn't actually happen, but the number crunching involved to record mythical events that far back is impressive.
Multiple Spanish, Italian, and German sources, from Conquistadors, to Friars, to Court Historians and famous artists, praised Mesoamerican art, cities, systems of law and order and even moral ethics and virtues, to the point of saying they could be compared favorably to Greeks, Romans, the Spanish themselves or Renaissance Italy. For example, Bernal Diaz stated that artists in Tenochtitlan/Mexico City rivalled Michelangelo
Once such genre of artwork the Spanish were amazed by was that the Aztec, Purepecha, and some other Mesoamerican civilizations made clothing, tapestries, shields, helmets etc covered in patterns and designs made from mosaics of tens of thousands of iridescent color changing feathers rather then with paint or weaving, which the Spanish commissioned many pieces of with Catholic iconography in the early colonial period
On the note of the Purepecha, they had the third largest Empire in the Americas as of Spanish contact, after the Inca and Aztec, located just to the west of the latter, with the two having gotten into a major war in the 1470s after a spat over the Toluca valley escalated. The Purepecha in that conflict handed the Aztec their most devastating military defeat in history, crushing a large scale attempted invasion, though the Aztec would wrest control of the Toluca valley again, after which the two shifted into a sort of cold war with militarized and fortified borders one had to receive prior authorization to pass. The Purepecha, in addition to feather mosaics, were also famous as having Mesoamerica's largest center of copper and bronze production: We've even found some Bronze sewing needles in some smaller Aztec towns which may have been smuggled over from the Purepecha.
Kʼinich Janaabʼ Pakal I, one of the most famous kings of the Maya city of Palenque, was (depending on your count), in the top 5 longest reigning kings in history, on the throne for over 68 years. We have monuments also which record the specific days different events occurred in, and which show infighting between different royal heirs, etc
The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan was almost as large as the largest cities in Europe at the time like Paris and Constantinople, and was built on both artificial and natural islands, the former of which was used not just for extra urban space but also as hydroponic farms, and had hundreds of palaces, temples, markets, royal zoos, botanical gardens, aviaries, and aquariums.
Tenochtitlan was technically two cities, as it physically fused with Tlatelolco after it conquered the latter. The conquest was allegedly instigated by fratboy Tenochca noblemen catcalling a Tlatelolca noblewomen, who then insulted his skills in bed before she was assaulted. In response, Mohquihux, the king of Tlatelolco, plans an invasion, which one of his wives (from Tenochtitlan) who he abused and blueballed by having orgies without her, has a premonition from her vagina talking to her. She warns the Tenochca, so when Mohquihux sends spies ahead of the invasion to see if the Tenochca were vulnerable, the in-the-know Tenochca king and officials feign ignorant by nonchalantly playing a ballgame like a looney toons bit, really having prepared an ambush, which catches the Tlatelolca army off guard. The resulting Tenochca counteroffense was so fierce that even Tlatelolca women joined, spraying breast milk to disrupt and bewilder the attackers, before the Tenochca king Axayacatl ended up slaying Mohquihux's on Tlatlolco's main pyramid in single combat.
Another crazy and probably (this time certainly embellished narrative) is how in some versions of the fall of the legendary Toltec civilization, it's collapse was in part due to a lord, Huemac, searching for a wife with super big buttcheeks, 4 hand spans wide
The Aztec had incredibly developed sanitation standards as well as medical practices and botanical sciences for the time: One was expected to wash their face, teeth, and hands multiple times a day, sweep regularly, and most social classes to be clean shaven at all times; with a lack of care for one's home being liable to have it being taken away and dirtying public property in theory being punishable by execution. There was a huge industry of soaps, shampoos, colognes, breath fresheners, toothpastes, and body washes made from a variety of plants. Elite botanical gardens and palace estates (such as Huaxtepec, which covered 10 square kilometers, or Texcotzinco, which was built into a mountain and was fed water via a 5+ mile long aqueduct which at some points rose 150 feet above ground, and flowed into shrines and pools before forming waterfalls to water the gardens) were not just for relaxation, but also stocked medical herbs and were used as sites of study and experimentation with them. Even Francisco Hernandez, the personal royal court physician and naturalist of Philip II, traveled to Mexico and admitted Aztec botany and medicine surpassed his own
The Mixtec were one of two major civilizations, alongside the Zapotec (and a few other less prominent ones like the Chatino) in what's now the Mexican state of Oaxaca, and were so renowned for incredible gold jewelry, fine ceramics, and precious stone mosaics that a group of Mixtec artists were kept in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, and even today pieces on the private art market are sometimes falsely listed as Mixtec to fetch higher prices. They're also famous for the feuds between some major kings and queens we have records of, such as 8 Deer Jaguar Claw: He was born the son of a high priest, got his start fighting as a general for other kings, gets the backing of lords from influential religious centers, and then conquers nearly 100 cities in a short time span and massacring the entire extended family/dynasties of his politically-married arch-rivals, King 11 wind and Queen 6 Monkey (a famous conquerer in her own right)... except he left one boy alive, who ended up growing up to overthrow him.
If you're curious about more info on Mesoamerican history, I have a trio of resource comments here:
The first goes over some of their accomplishments and achievements
The second talks about the records we have left and has resources to learn more
The third is a summarized timeline of Mesoamerican history
Shakespeare and Jamestown existed at the same time.
The chainsaw was invented to help with childbirth. The doctors would literally cut the pelvis to allow a larger area for a child to fit through the birth canal.
That the first transatlantic cable was laid successfully in 1858!!! It still seems borderline impossible with the tech of that era. F'ing amazing
Free speech in the US was originally only about prior restraint. It was freedom from censorship, not freedom from being prosecuted for obscenity afterwards.
It’s always really grinded my gears that everyone just assumes that people in ancient times were stupid and if they went back in-time they could somehow revolutionize the world. For instance there was an insane amount of technologies and scientific knowledge in China and Korea. Many of them exceeded the West by hundreds of years. There’s an absurd amount from China but even Korea had absurdly powerful shipbuilding and invented heated green housing and movable type press hundreds of years before the west. Korea even designed the alphabet to be easy to learn to read and the shapes of the letters to correspond with the shape of your mouth when saying them.
The difference was that both China and Korea often failed to apply their technologies, for example Korean shipbuilding was extremely good for its time and instead of using it for trade Korea became isolationist. Korea had both movable type print and a gestural alphabet and instead of pushing for mass-literacy tried to maintain their rigid aristocracy. China, once the intellectual and artistic capital of the world, fell into stagnation.
Japan was different, while they often were second to discovering technologies, during the Imjin war for instance they had inferior artillery and shipbuilding to Korea, they often scaled what they had much better, had much less corruption and were more open to trade (technically because they were forcibly opened, but such attempts were made on China who fought back and Korea who repelled them and was not pursued.)
Many of the mathematical, scientific and technological innovations that would matter aren’t exactly things you could easily beat or reproduce, and even if you could, it’s unlikely you could scale them or utilize them in a meaningful way.
As a frequent reader of /r/historywhatif and /r/historicalwhatif, these come up quite a lot, with the same answer: nothing much changes.
I wouldn’t consider it huge by any means but I didn’t know until recently that Joseph Smith (the creator of Mormonism) wanted to run for president at one point before he got murdered.
I don’t think he would have won, even with the Mormons block voting but imagine if he had?!
It’s always really grinded my gears that everyone just assumes that people in ancient times were stupid and if they went back in-time they could somehow revolutionize the world. For instance there was an insane amount of technologies and scientific knowledge in China and Korea. Many of them exceeded the West by hundreds of years. There’s an absurd amount from China but even Korea had absurdly powerful shipbuilding and invented heated green housing and movable type press hundreds of years before the west. Korea even designed the alphabet to be easy to learn to read and the shapes of the letters to correspond with the shape of your mouth when saying them.
The difference was that both China and Korea often failed to apply their technologies, for example Korean shipbuilding was extremely good for its time and instead of using it for trade Korea became isolationist. Korea had both movable type print and a gestural alphabet and instead of pushing for mass-literacy tried to maintain their rigid aristocracy. China, once the intellectual and artistic capital of the world, fell into stagnation.
Japan was different, while they often were second to discovering technologies, during the Imjin war for instance they had inferior artillery and shipbuilding to Korea, they often scaled what they had much better, had much less corruption and were more open to trade (technically because they were forcibly opened, but such attempts were made on China who fought back and Korea who repelled them and was not pursued.)
Many of the mathematical, scientific and technological innovations that would matter aren’t exactly things you could easily beat or reproduce, and even if you could, it’s unlikely you could scale them or utilize them in a meaningful way.
I study Cold War History primarily and live in the United States so I am consistently bumping heads with Americans in my area as they can be very, let's say, "Patriotic" and not very keen on scholarly consensus.
A more widely known factoid being that roughly 80% of German casualties were on the Eastern Front[1] and a lesser known fact that Stalin was a heck of a Clarinet player and Tenor.[2]
[1] "When Titans Clashed" by D. Glantz
[2] "Stalin" by S. Kotkin
The average Joe doesn't seem to know new world had metal working. Moche in South America and many tribes just south of Aztecs knew to combine copper with things like arsenic to create bronzes
Further up around Michigan area they were the first people ever to cold forge copper. They just stopped doing it
The first Indian restaurant in the UK pre-dates the first Fish and Chip shop by 50 years and curry started to appear on restaurant menus in major cities in the late 18th century. The earliest curry recipe we have in an English cookbook is 1747 and a distinct Anglo-Indian cuisine has it's root in the 17th century. Further, the Japanese Katsu Curry is originally based on the curry that the Royal Navy fed their sailors in the 19th Century.
Thus, the idea that Britian invaded the world for spices and never used them is nonsense because it's a country that has been obsessed with Indian food from the very first moment it was available and today there is about the same number of Indian restaurants as Fish and Chip shops.
We are closer in time to Cleopatra than she was to the building of the pyramids.
In general nationalism
There is tons of stuff that people don’t know. But it right under their nose and they don’t believe it still.
The Vikings American colony of Vinland. No one knows where it was. They left maps for crying out loud. Gave directions in the sagas.
It’s Quebec and where the fresh water comes in the Lawrence River.
The sphinx. Even the latest documentary about it that idiot Egyptian guy talking as if the head is the age of it. It’s double that. The amount of water erosion on the body only happened before the climate changed.
That about 10 thousand years ago.
Then there is the power tools that were being used to machine granite 5000 years ago using bonded diamond abrasive discs that we only started using again 50 odd years ago.
Egyptians left their writing in Australia and South America.
The Sydney area and entire east coast was visited.
The Galatians were Vikings. Alexander blue eyes and blonde hair comes from somewhere else than Greece.
The Crusades were not a Christian genocide of Muslims. They were a response to decades of Muslim conquest of Christian regions and the slaughter of Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land.