History Memes

I like this one (not mine):

• The samurai were abolished as a caste in Japanese society during the Meiji restoration in 1867
• The first ever fax machine, the "printing telegraph", was invented in 1843
• Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865

=> There was a 22 year window in which samurais could have sent a fax to Abraham Lincoln.

Trees are not that related to each other. Woody plants evolved multiple times over earths history. And while e.g. beeches are closely related to oaks, they are more closely related to strawberries than to e.g. ashes. Black locust tree is more closely related to beans or peas than to birches (which are again related to oaks and beeches). Apples are even more closely related to strawberries than to oaks. That broke my mind during Covid. All conifers are somewhat closely related though.

edit: typo

A few months ago my mother was cleaning the home of grannie who died, and there it was found. An old cookbook, handwritten by grannie, the book it self had a stamp on it (as in caved in leather) that it was made in 1910. from the words of my grandfather this book was given to grandmama by grand grandma.

The mindblowing thing is that this handwriting book which survived both world wars, the fall of communism and the turmoil afterwards, still has easier to follow instructions than most recipes today I see, also no about me and my life section

Here's some wild river history for you:

The great lakes are super big, have huge flow rates, Superior is famously super deep since it's a continental-rift lake that was widened by glacial retreat .... But they only formed like 14,000 years ago when the glaciers retreated...

The river Tyne in England is 30 million years old, just when Antarctica was separating from Australia and South America.

The river Thames is 58 million years old, that's just after the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs.

The Rhine is at least 240 million years old ... From the Triassic era if not earlier.

And then there's 3 rivers in Appalachia that are ~ 320 million years old... The French Broad river, the Susquehanna river, and (ironically) the New river. They've been continuously flowing since the carboniferous period, literally when Pangea first started forming and before any bacteria or enzymes could break down trees (which eventually compacted and became all the coal in the mountains that formed alongside them).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rivers_by_age

Sharks are older than the North Star. (450mya vs. 70mya)

Sharks are older than trees. (450mya vs 390mya)

Prior to their win in 2016, the Chicago Cubs hadn't won a world series since before the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

Columbus' contact resulted in a 92% loss of population in North, Central, and South America. Mexico City area only just re-reached its pre-contact population estimate in the 1960s.

"1491" is a good read.

I once turned down a gangbang that would have been me and 6 girls because I felt a little hung over... That was 25 years ago, and Im still not over how monumentally fucking stupid that was.

The Appalachian Mountains are older than trees, dinosaurs, the Atlantic Ocean, and Pangea

There was a day, 18th April 1930, where the BBC reported no news. It really shocks me because of how different the times are now. I can't imagine there's any minute that doesn't have dozens news stories running

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p010szlg

Men’s clothing keep getting shorter and shorter in the late Middle Ages/early modern period to the point where at court, their dicks could be seen. The solution was cod pieces, some of which were elaborate, bejeweled, erect penises. This trend ended in England when Elizabeth I fully came into her role as “the virgin queen”

And this time period was supposedly The Enlightnement, which jack shit of was taught in the school I went to as a kid. Sounds cool as fuck.

• Coca-Cola: Founded 1888

• Nintendo: Founded 1889

• Dracula, by Bram Stoker: Published 1897

It would have been historically accurate for the vampire hunters who killed Dracula to celebrate by having a Coke and playing Nintendo.

The last American Civil War pensioner passed away in May 2020.

Her father served. He fathered her at 82, in 1930.

Have you heard of the truly ancient - Stone Age, in fact - ruins of what is now called Gobekli Tepe (Potbelly Hill) in Anatolia, Turkey, near the Taurus Mountains, between rivers that converge further downstream to create the Euphrates River.

These long-gone people, hunter/gatherers and slightly later hunter/harvesters (a primitive phase of agriculture), now called Tash Tepeler (in modern Turkic), build stone urban centers on a large scale, were completely unknown before 1992, and let me put it this way, how long ago they were:
Ancient Sumeria, cradle of civilization, where writing was invented, is closer to us than it is to the time when Gobekli Tele was thriving.

Gobekli Tepe is near halfway between the Lascaux and Chauvet cave paintings and us.

Terrorism used to be cool. It wasn't about killing as many people as possible, but was aimed at wealth and wealthy

George Washington's Continental Army had a vaccine mandate.

Heroin was first synthesized in 1874. It's older than 13 US states. Sitting Bull and heroin existed at the same time. In 1898 it was sold by Bayer as a recreational drug under the brand name Heroin. Frederick Nietzsche was around for the heroin trade.

• John Tyler, 10th president of the US (1790-1862), had a grandson, Harrison Ruffin Tyler (Nov, 1928) who just recently died in May of 2025.
• The last survivor from the 1800's was Emma Morano, born 11/29/1899 Civiasco, Italy. Died 04/15/2017 in Verbania, Italy. So most people reading this had a chance to speak to someone born in 1899.
• All of Napoleon Bonaparte's 4 brothers lived into the age of photography (1826) and had their photo taken with a camera. His youngest brother Jérôme sat for many photo sessions. Only one of his 3 sisters, Caroline, lived into the era but never had a photo taken. Napoleon Bonaparte (08/15/1769 - 05/05/1821), didn't live into the age of photography.
• Humans are the only animals capable of appreciating art. Yes, chimps and elephants can make their own art, but they have no interest in it after they're done with it.

Paramount Pictures was created 1 month before Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated.

• Scotland's first railway, the Cockenzie and Tranent waggonway, played a role in the Battle of Prestonpans (1745). The final piece of the line went out of use in the 1960s.

• The Last Stand by Sabaton was describing an event that happened in 1527, the year Henry VIII was trying to get an annulment. The events of The last stand played a role in the founding of the church of England.

• San Marino is so old it was founded before The Council of Nicea.

• The oldest Evidence in the archeological record we have of transgender individuals is older than the oldest archaeological evidence for gay couples.

• The first use of "OMG" was on a memo sent to Winston Churchill in 1917.

• India and Sri Lanka were connected by a land bridge until the 1500s. The remains of which are still a tourist attraction.

• The first scientific study into transgender people was published in 1896 and studies about transgender people were burnt by the Nazis. Don't ever let people say transgender people are a recent thing.

• The Romance languages have been written down for so long that we can basically watch the evolution of multiple languages in real time through texts.

• Oxford university was founded before what would become the Maori settled in New Zealand.

• One of the last people born into (legal) Slavery in the USA died after being hit by a car in the 1970s.

• It's possible that former Samurai lived to see the 20th century.

In 1913, Stalin, Hitler and Sigmund Freud all lived in the central part of Vienna.

Greenland sharks have incredibly long lifespans due to their large size (6m+), environment, and very slow metabolism estimated up to 500 years. There could be a shark that is still alive today that was alive during Shakespeare's life and the switch to the Gregorian calendar.

Fun fact II: there was a period of earth's infancy where the seas were full of iron. Green in colour, mostly from volcanic activity.

Then up pop some photosynthetic bacteria who start farting out oxygen. The oceans start to rust. The rust falls to sediment and the farting contines. The ocean depletes of iron and the farting contines. The oxygen starts to fill up the sky and the farting continues. Some say it still goes on to this day. But what happened to the iron?

Well not uluru specifically but that's what Australia's distinctive colouration is. Ancient fart rusted sea iron

Isaac Newton was the Master of the Mint. Back then, issues with counterfeiting or diluting the coinage was an issue. He personally went in disguise to bars to track down these counterfeiters. Who were then executed.

Walgreens the pharmacy that was ran by the family of the same name made their fortune selling Alcohol during the prohibition era. If you were well off your doctor would write you a prescription for booze which they would happily fill. They grew over thirty times their original size during this time.

Europeans used to make a drink out of Egyptian mummies.

Here's some more information on it:

https://historycanthide.substack.com/p/europeans-ate-egyptian-mummies-for

During the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864, friendly Native American tribes gathered upon request, hoisted american flags, and waved white flags as volunteer cavalry gunned them down leaving not even women or children alive. Chief Black Kettle, a prominent "Peace Chief" had managed to secure multiple treaties before this point and worked towards coexistence, and his efforts were repaid with blood as his people were killed in front of him after almost 20 years of dedicating himself to diplomacy. He survived only to die at yet another massacre in 1868.

During the same time period was the US Civil War from 1861 to 1865, except that's wrong! The US Civil War dated back to the Bleeding Kansas period of the 1850s, with the Kansas Nebraska Act establising two new territories and invalidating the Missouri Compromise that didn't allow slavery below a line of latitude, as well as the creation of "popular sovereignty" to allow the residents to vote on whether or not to allow Slavery, which led to antiracist freestaters and "Jayhawkers" being brought in by the Emigrant Aid Co. to fight slavery, followed by racist "Bushwackers" being brought in by former Senator Atchinson to shift the political landscape, as well as siege towns, kill abolitionists, and cause general chaos. While neither side was officially a state with an army, you can see how these battles that destroyed towns easily continued into the civil war period.

Vikings generally did a lot of trading and in some cases just kinda started to focus on trade instead of raiding taking advantage of the width and breadth of the Norse world. It wouldn't be impossible for goods from North America to be sold in a Syrian market, though I don't know if that did happen but we have found Norse Chainmail in an Inuit grave cache.

there actually is a reference to "Kodak pictures" in Dracula

Custer's Last Stand happened while the Brooklyn Bridge was being built.

Construction for the bridge occured between 1869-1883.

Custers last stand happened 1876.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooklyn_Bridge?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Little_Bighorn?wprov=sfla1

Some other stuff: Mamoths were still alive when the Pyramids were being built.

The Battle of Thermopylae where king Leonidus and his "300 spartans" (it was actually a few thousand of a coalition force) held off the Persian invasion of Greece.

The plan was to use the narrow mountain path to pit a few of tgeir well trained soldiers against a few of Persias rank and file. The idea being a few well trained soldiers could take out a lot more rank and file if they didnt have battle tactics to worry about.

What caused Leonidus to lose that battle is an alternate route through the mountains that let the Persians flank the Spartans and probably totally destroy them.

What's mind blowing is this was hundreds year old history when Rome tried the same thing.

This one spot is famous for losing battles and ancient people loved choosing this battleground and then losing

This is more of a hypothesis than a fact, but there are credible claims that Henry VIII suffered from the so-called McLeod syndrome and the associated Kell-positive blood type, which is a rare recessive genetic variant affecting the X gene and which he may have inherited from his maternal great grandmother (Jaquetta of Luxemburg) who may have carried this gene. The syndrome would explain both the high mortality among the second-born children that Henry VIII had with his many wives (and similar issues of other male relatives of Jaquetta) and whose pregnancies often ended in miscarriage and (male) children who did not survive infancy, as well as Henry VIII's early mental decline.

Perhaps not really mind blowing, but I think it's crazy that the historical events of that time and the "Elizabethan era" that followed might have been shaped in this way by a single occurrence of a specific genetic disorder.

Hildegard von Bingen was a nun in medieval times that used nature to heal. We are still studying and rework her book on natural plants and how to heal with them. It seems like some plants dont exist anymore

Edit: she also was the first abbess leading the first female only monestary that took in especially girls from poor peasents who would otherwise only ended up with a force marriage or rape

Humans got to Tasmania, Australia 20 000 years before they got to Scotland despite it being 3x the distance and featured the first time humans journeyed over the ocean.

Bananas were domesticated in New Guinea

The Maori beat Europeans to new Zealand by roughly 500 years