20 Historical Facts More People Should Know

Every subject has its core principles that everyone learns: the powerhouse of the cell, Aunt Sally and all of her bullshit excuses, Dickens invented orphans, etc. Of course, that’s true of history as well. Everyone knows about Genghis Khan, the French Revolution and the World War and its sequel. Most people graduate high school with those basics under their brain belt and never give it another thought, going on to study something practical in college and/or get some kind of real job where nobody cares if you know Lincoln’s shoe size. (It was 14. Dude could dunk on all of us.)

Then there are those of us who fall down nightly Wikipedia holes and don’t emerge until the functional people are waking up. We troves of pointless trivia aren’t very useful, but at least we’re also not productive. That’s not to say you couldn’t learn from us. Some of the littlest known historical facts are super interesting. When user Turret_Cube asked r/AskReddit, “Historians of Reddit, what is one cool history fact that people barely know about?” Reddit’s gnomes of the nonfiction section proved that in droves.