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.
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.
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.
3.The Yuan dynasty had passports as far back as the 13th century, and they looked like this:
4.Historians think there may have been the wife of an emperor of Rome who briefly ruled outright: Ulpia Severina.
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.
Galileo was the person who discovered that the moon wasn't a perfect, pearlescent sphere and actually had imperfect topography, like Earth.
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.
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 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."
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.
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?!
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...
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).
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.
If there's any dramatic/interesting/cool stuff from history that you think I would love, please, please, please drop stories in the comments! I love to learn about this stuff, and I'm sure other people do too.
