Amazing Historical Facts You Never Knew

Surprising bits of history are perhaps the most fun bits of history, and here are a few tidbits curated by the Papergy review team.

1 Turkeys Were Once Worshipped Like Gods

2 Paul Revere Never Actually Shouted, "The British Are Coming!"

3 The Olympics Used to Award Medals for Art.

4 One Time, 100 Imposters Claimed to Be Marie Antoinette's Dead Son

5 Napoleon Was Once Attacked By a Horde of Bunnies

6 Women Were Once Banned from Smoking in Public

7 The Government Literally Poisoned Alcohol During Prohibition

8 Captain Morgan Actually Existed

9 Using Forks Used to Be Seen as Sacrilegious

10 The Titanic's Owners Never Said the Ship Was "Unsinkable"

11 There Were More Than 600 Plots to Kill Fidel Castro

12 Cleopatra Was Not Egyptian

13 Pope Gregory IV Declared a War On Cats

14 Mary Actually Had a Little Lamb

15 Richard Nixon Was a Great Musician

16 Lyndon B. Johnson Gave Interviews From the Bathroom

17 Ketchup Was Sold in the 1830s as Medicine

18 President Abraham Lincoln is in the Wrestling Hall of Fame

19 July 4th Isn't the Real Independence Day

20 Abraham Lincoln Was Also a Licensed Bartender

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The Best History Books of 2020

For a great range of history books, trust Papergy review.

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

In this “Oprah’s Book Club” pick, Isabel Wilkerson presents a compelling argument for shifting the language used to describe how their country treats black Americans. As the Pulitzer Prize–winning author tells NPR, “racism” is a vague term for the country’s ingrained inequality. A more accurate characterization is “caste system”—a phrase that better encapsulates the hierarchical nature of American society.

Drawing parallels between the United States, India and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson identifies the “eight pillars” that uphold caste systems: Among others, the list includes a divine will, heredity, dehumanization, terror-derived enforcement and occupy American society’s hierarchical nature categories ensures that those in the middle rung have an “inferior” group to compare themselves to, the author writes and maintains a status quo with tangible ramifications for public health, culture and politics. “The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality,” Wilkerson explains. “It is about power—which groups have it and which do not.”

The Great Secret: The Classified World War II Disaster that Launched the War on Cancer

When the Nazis bombed Bari, a Mediterranean port city central to the Allied war effort, on December 2, 1943, hundreds of sailors sustained horrific injuries. Within days of the attack, writes Jennet Conant in The Great Secret, the wounded started exhibiting unexpected symptoms, including blisters “as big as balloons and heavy with fluid,” in the words of British nurse Gwladys Rees, and intense eye pain. “We began to realize that most of our patients had been contaminated by something beyond all imagination,” Rees later recalled.

American medical officer Stewart Francis Alexander, who’d been called in to investigate the mysterious maladies, soon realized that the sailors had been exposed to mustard gas. Allied leaders were quick to blame the Germans, but Alexander found concrete evidence sourcing the contamination to an Allied shipment of mustard gas struck during the bombing. Though the military covered up its role in the disaster for decades, the attack had at least one positive outcome: While treating patients, Alexander learned that mustard gas rapidly destroyed victims’ blood cells and lymph nodes—a phenomenon with wide-ranging ramifications for cancer treatment. The first chemotherapy based on nitrogen mustard was approved in 1949, and several drugs based on Alexander’s research remain in use today.

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