Shocking Facts About The US That The Schools Didn't Teach You
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There are many surprising, scary, or shameful facts about the US that aren't taught in schools. But in the age of the internet, that's not gonna keep us ignorant. Here are 12 facts about the US that I am pretty sure your school teacher didn't bother talking about.
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1.Andrew Jackson was the first US President to experience an assassination attempt.
On January 30, 1835, Jackson had gone to the Capitol to attend the funeral of South Carolina Representative Warren Davis. He was interrupted when a man called Richard Lawrence, who had hidden behind a pillar at the entrance to the Capitol Rotunda, pulled out a Derringer pistol and shot at his chest. Lawrence, an unemployed painter, was found wanting in luck as his gun misfired. The president charged at him immediately, and Lawrence produced a second pistol that, too, miraculously misfired.
2.The Haitian Revolution led to the doubling of the US territory.
When Napoleon Bonaparte came to power in France, he tried to revitalize the decaying French empire in the Americas. He got Spain to restore the Louisiana territory to France and then launched an expedition to quell the slave rebellion in St. Domingue (now Haiti) that ultimately failed to recolonize Haiti. Needing money for his European wars and desirous of denying Louisiana territory to the British, he agreed to sell the whole territory to the US for $15 million in 1803.
3.The Salem Witch trials ended when the governor's own wife was accused of witchcraft.
These infamous witch trials, borne out of ignorance and misogyny, were a disgusting part of colonial America. They were conducted by the Court of Oyer and Terminer, established by the governor of Massachusetts, William Phips. The trials were conducted by zealots for whom accusation usually meant conviction and condemned many defenseless, poor, and marginalized women (and men) to death. Phips had had enough when his own wife was accused of witchcraft, and he quickly moved to disband the court in the face of waning public support.
4.The US government continued to pay pensions for the Civil War until 2020.
Although the Civil War had concluded in 1865, the VA kept up the pension payments to the veterans and their dependents until 2020 when the last recipient died. Irene Triplett, the daughter of a Civil War veteran who fought for both sides, used to collect $73.13 from the Department of Veterans Affairs until her death in June 2020.
5.Three US Presidents have won a Grammy.
Three Presidents — Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama — have won this prestigious award. Carter has won it thrice, in the spoken word category, and Clinton has won it twice. First for best-spoken word album for children for Prokofiev: Peter and the Wolf/Beintus: Wolf Tracks, on which he collaborated with former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and Sophia Loren.
Obama, too, has won it twice in the Best Spoken Word Album category, one for the reading of his first book, Dreams From My Father, and another for his second, The Audacity of Hope.
6.The American Civil War resulted in the transformation of Egypt into a cotton superpower.
By mid-19th century, the US had a stranglehold on the global cotton supply. On the eve of the Civil War, "cotton grown in the United States accounted for 77 percent of the 800 million pounds of cotton consumed in Britain. It also accounted for 90 percent of the 192 million pounds used in France, 60 percent of the 115 million pounds spun in the Zollverein, and 92 percent of the 102 million pounds manufactured in Russia."
When hostilities broke out between the North and the South, cotton prices shot up, and soon, the world was faced with a cotton famine. The governor of Egypt Ismāʿīl Pasha saw an opportunity in this crisis. He aggressively expanded the infrastructure-like network of irrigation canals and encouraged rapid adoption of modern technology to enhance cotton production. Soon, Egyptian cotton filled the void created by the loss of Southern cotton. One historian later remarked that had it not been for the Civil War, “it would have taken Egyptian cotton a half-century to achieve the position it had secured by 1865.”
7.Europeans were already aware of the Americas long before Christopher Columbus landed on the shores of what is today the Bahamas.
Christopher Columbus was given myriads of labels like explorer, governor, warrior, conqueror, marauder, slave trader, and more, but the first to reach North America is not one of them. The Vikings beat him to it by around 500 years.
Leif Erikson, aka Leif the Lucky, the second of three sons of the famed Norse explorer Erik the Red, was the first European to reach North American shores. Erikson and his companions established a settlement on Newfoundland that is today known as L’Anse Aux Meadows National Historic Site.
8.Valentine's Day of 1884 was singularly tragic for Theodore Roosevelt.
On the morning of February 14, 1884, Roosevelt's mother died of typhoid. A few hours later, the grieving son also became a grieving husband when his wife bid him eternal adieu, leaving behind a 2-day-old daughter in his arms.
This double tragedy shattered him, and he embarked on a course that would transform him and prepare him for the moments to come in his later life, many of which would go down in history.
9.The Puritans of New England had outlawed Christmas celebrations.
The Puritans were quite opposed to Yuletide festivities. The aversion to Christmas celebrations goes back at least until 1621, and the authorities in Massachusetts made celebrating Christmas punishable by law in 1659. The reason behind this seemingly un-Christian decree was theological as well as social. Some Puritans, like Increase Mather, used to condemn Christmas as "derived from the bacchanalian excesses of the Roman holiday Saturnalia." Another reason was that the Puritans saw Christmas as an excuse “to do what they lust, and to follow what vanity they will.” This stemmed from their own personal experiences in England where Christmas celebrations were synonymous with wild conduct.
10.The US military accidentally introduced a snake to Guam that has eradicated native bird species.
In the post-World War II years, a snake from Papua New Guinea hitched a ride on one of the military's transport planes and reached Guam where it wreaked havoc on the local ecosystem. The brown tree snake (Boiga irregularis) experienced a roaring population explosion as it feasted on helpless native birds, small mammals, and reptiles. By the 1980s, they had wiped out 10 of the 12 forest bird species native to Guam. The loss of fauna is now causing the loss of local flora. The forests are dwindling as the birds who used to disperse the seeds are no longer present; therefore, the seeds aren't growing into new plants and trees.
11.The US gaslighted its own troops into searching for four "lost" hydrogen bombs that gave cancer to most of them.
On January 17, 1966, a B-52 bomber carrying four hydrogen bombs collided with a mid-air refueler while patrolling the Spanish coast and crashed in the village of Palomares, Spain. One bomb crash-landed near the beach while another dropped into the ocean, where it was recovered intact two months later. But the explosives within the other two bombs exploded (no nuclear detonation) on impact spraying the village with a fine dust of plutonium.
The nearest US military base immediately pressed its manpower into the cleanup operation — without any protective gear and by lying to its own soldiers about the dangers due to radiation. People were asked to pick up radioactive material with their bare hands, and despite their reservations, the higher-ups kept telling them that they were totally safe.
12.FDR didn't invite Jesse Owens to the White House to congratulate him.
One of the earliest Black American athlete heroes, Jesse Owens won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. He returned to a hero's welcome, but soon, he realized that his medals didn't change his position in society or the attitudes of others toward him. Owens rued, “I came back to my native country and couldn’t ride in the front of the bus. … I had to go to the back door. I couldn’t live where I wanted. … I wasn’t invited to the White House to shake hands with the president either.”
“Hitler didn’t snub me; it was our president who snubbed me,” Owens lamented later. “The president didn’t even send a telegram.” Owens later received White House recognition in 1976, when Gerald Ford presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest award given to a civilian.
