10 Fun, Juicy, And Random Facts About History I Recently Learned That Are Making Me Want Allllll The Historical Drama
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I am a huge, huge history buff. Really, the main reason I love it is all the messy dramatic content it provides me, but there's also stuff that's just fun and interesting, and I love to share it! So from petty Napoleon Bonaparte to Abe Lincoln and elephants to John Wayne and the KGB, here are 10 historical facts that I just had to share.
1.Teenage Napoleon was apparently SUPER emo and wrote self-insert prose fiction so awful, it butterfly effect–ed him into becoming the commander of the Army of Italy (which, BTW, was a French army despite its confusing name) and eventually emperor of the French.
I am obsessed with history and yet somehow never...really learned about Napoleon in school? Not sure how that happened. So I decided to buy this big-ass book — Napoleon: A Life by Andrew Roberts — and educate myself, and I am literally obsessed. I am voluntarily annotating, you guys.
Anyway — Napoleon "Books Were My Only Friends" Bonaparte wrote a lot of bad fiction, but my favorite is Clisson et Eugénie, a romantic story about a soldier (definitely not based on Napoleon) and his girlfriend (definitely not based on Napoleon's ex), who cheats on him and makes him super depressed (definitely not based on real events). This would be a recurring theme in Napoleon's life.
And guys, he is SO melodramatic. "Their eyes met," he wrote of the, um, imaginary couple. "Their hearts fused, and not many days were to pass before they realized that their hearts were made to love each other ... They felt as if their souls were one."
Later in the book, when our hero is injured, Eugénie just immediately cheats on him. This prompts him to give up on love and sacrifice himself nobly for his army. Nice!
Sooo...Napoleon's failed literary career, plus the fact that everybody in the Paris social scene apparently thought he was a weirdo who had no chance with women, led him to pursue his military career with gusto. By the age of 24, Napoleon was made a general. (At the age of 24, I am a BuzzFeed writer!)
2.The emperor Commodus (of Gladiator fame) honestly rivaled Alexander the Great when it came to naming things after himself. He temporarily renamed Rome "Colonia Commodiana," the Roman Senate the "Commodian Fortunate Senate," and the Roman people themselves "Commodiani." He also attempted to rename the months of the year after himself. None of these names managed to stick.
I mean, he tried to rename "August" "Commodus," which was basically like saying that he was a bigger deal than Augustus. As in Augustus Caesar, the beloved first-ever emperor of Rome. The one who was deified as a god. That Augustus.
TBF, Commodus also "saw himself as a reborn Hercules." King of self-esteem. Here's a statue in which he is cosplaying as him!
3.The Yuan dynasty had passports as far back as the 13th century, and they looked like this:
This one is housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and reads, "By the strength of Eternal Heaven, an edict of the Emperor [Khan]. He who has not respect shall be guilty." The pass basically guaranteed you safe passage — as well as horses, food, and lodging — while within the territory of what would become the Mongol Empire.
Another passport, housed in the Hermitage Museum, reads, "I am the emissary of the Khan. If you defy me, you die," which I absolutely need on my own passport. Or at least on a T-shirt.
4.Historians think there may have been the wife of an emperor of Rome who briefly ruled outright: Ulpia Severina.
Severina was the wife of the emperor Aurelian, who was murdered in the autumn of 275 CE (it happens to the best of us). His successor, Tacitus, only became emperor a few months later...and many (but not all) historians think, due to a crazy number of coins continuing to be minted in her image, that Severina briefly ruled in the interregnum. Cool!
5.Galileo observed the moon in its different phases by telescope and painted his observations in watercolor in the autumn of 1609. These are the first-ever realistic depictions of the moon.
They make me kinda emotional — I think it's so sweet that for all of human history, we've been looking at the same moon, and so cool that we still have our first-ever realistic drawings of it.
Galileo was the person who discovered that the moon wasn't a perfect, pearlescent sphere and actually had imperfect topography, like Earth.
Those pen strokes!
6.Apparently, in 1861, King Mongkut of Thailand (then Siam) generously offered the United States the gift of two elephants, to "be turned out to run wild in some jungle suitable for them." He apparently had the idea that elephants would just be a really cool thing to have populate the continent. Love the vision.
President Abraham Lincoln sensibly and politely declined the gift and wrote back with the convenient excuse that the United States "does not reach a latitude so low as to favor the multiplication of the elephant." How well spoken!
7.Apparently, Joseph Stalin was a John Wayne fan (yes, as in the cowboy-movie guy) and loved his movies, but according to a biography about Wayne, Stalin decided to call for Wayne's assassination because of his staunch anti-communist views. Stalin thought that Wayne's rhetoric was influential enough to threaten the existence of the Soviet Union.
The Telegraph wrote that "Khrushchev recalled how Stalin would ideologically criticize cowboy movies — and then order more." But apparently he thought they were so good that they were a "threat to the cause," and as the credits rolled one day, he simply decided that Wayne should be whacked.
"The FBI had discovered there were [KGB] agents sent to Hollywood to kill John Wayne," said film historian Michael Munn. "John told the FBI to let the men show up and he would deal with them."
This story only gets weirder. Apparently, Wayne had a little group of "loyal stuntmen" who "infiltrated communist cells in America and learned of plots to kill him."
According to the Guardian, "Wayne then apparently hatched a plot with his scriptwriter at the time, Jimmy Grant, to abduct the assassins, drive to a beach and stage a mock execution to frighten them."
8.I recently saw this tweet and was struck by that gorgeous dress, but...reader, I had never heard of Marjorie Merriweather Post. Naturally, I had to know who was wearing something so fabulous, and thus I discovered the woman who was possibly America's most glamorous heiress, and who was apparently the wealthiest woman in America for literally decades.
Post inherited her father's cereal company (which would become General Foods!) in 1914, when it was worth $20 million — which would be about $614 million in 2023. She was 27 years old. 🤠
She's super famous for her art collection, especially her Russian art collection. She was a serious Russophil and was able to purchase a large portion of her Russian art collection because Joseph Stalin started selling off a ton of the Romanovs' shit after the Russian Revolution.
She also had an absolutely wild jewelry collection, which included the Napoleon Diamond Necklace (below) and a ton of exquisite pieces owned by Marie Antoinette. Who is this woman?!
AND she possessed multiple famous mansions, like Mar-a-Lago (which she donated to the US government) and the Hillwood Estate (now a museum in DC).
Since I'm in my little Napoleon phase, I obviously had to go read more about the diamond necklace. And in reading about the necklace, I discovered another piece of jewelry he'd commissioned: the Napoleon Tiara.
9.In 1805, Napoleon gifted this gorgeous tiara to Pope Pius VII...as an insult. The pope couldn't even wear it because it weighed five times more than the previous papal tiara and was also too skinny to even fit on someone's head. And ALSO, do you see that huge chunk of an emerald on the top? Nice, right? Well...
Pope Pius VI, the previous pope, "had been forced to take [it] from his own crown in order to pay the 1797 extortions" imposed by Napoleon. So Napoleon took it from the pope in the first place and then became so powerful that he decided to give it back to the next pope, basically saying, "I'm such a big deal that I don't even need to steal your stupid, giant, glorious jewels." Very petty. Very Napoleon. And in case it wasn't clear that he didn't really care about being friends, four years after he gave Pope Pius this gift, Napoleon invaded the Papal States and kidnapped the pope, apparently telling his generals to "shut [the pope] up." Amazing!
10.And finally...I recently learned about the "Pig War." What's that, you ask? Oh, it's how the US border between Washington and Canada in the San Juan Islands was decided. "We fought a war over that?!" you're probably saying. Well, we didn't fight a war, but we had a war. A bloodless one (except for that of the pig).
In 1859, an American farmer on San Juan Island shot a pig that had been eating his potatoes. (Amazing. Relatable.) He offered to pay a generous 10 bucks to the farmer who owned it, but the farmer (an Irishman who was employed there by the British Hudson's Bay Co.) demanded a hundred bucks (roughly $3,000 today).
The potato guy was like, "Your pig was in my potatoes," and you know what the Irish guy said? "It is up to you to keep your potatoes out of my pig." Said pig now has a statue dedicated to it, pictured above.
Things escalated, the British threatened to arrest Potato Guy, and the Americans "called for US military protection." The British ended up sending five warships. All over a pig.
The US government was like, "This all started over a pig?" And even though the resulting border dispute was debated for 12 years (!), no one ever shot each other, which is great. How did it get resolved, you ask? In the most random way possible.
It was put to a third party: Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany. He simply decided that San Juan Island belonged to the United States. Thanks, Kaiser Wilhelm! It makes so much sense that you would be the one to decide this. And so ended the British-American Pig War.
