Questions tagged [history]
Use this tag for questions that pertain to historical events, or claim whose evidence is historical in nature.
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Is yellow safer than white for center line road markings?
The Random Fact Generator website told me:
By 1955, forty-nine of the U.S. states agreed that state highways should have a white stripe down the middle between cars going in different directions. The ...
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Did John Tesh win 6 Emmys and an AP award for investigative journalism?
The Wikipedia page for John Tesh lists him as having won 6 Emmy's and an "AP award for investigative journalism". This claim is repeated on numerous sites. I cannot find a primary source for ...
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Was the ELIZA effect real?
ELIZA is an oft referenced early chatbot developed in the 1960's. The legend behind it is that the simplistic chatbot was so convincingly human to early users that they supposedly forgot it was a ...
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Is there any historical basis to the four Toltec agreements?
Mexican author Miguel Ruiz published a best-selling self-help book called The Four Agreements, claiming to be based on ancient Toltec wisdom. The four agreements are as follows:
Be Impeccable With ...
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Did Napoléon Bonaparte ask his wife Josephine not to bathe for several days in a letter before his arrival?
According to British historian Andrew Roberts, Napoléon Bonaparte wrote a letter to his wife Joséphine, in which he wrote "to her, ‘don’t wash for three days’" to spice up their reunion. ...
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Did one of the 9/11 hijackers use a Conch Republic passport to enter the United States?
I read:
Anderson, who resumed the running of the Conch Republic souvenir business and the official Conch Republic Days festival until his death in 2014, was subjected to an FBI inquiry after reports ...
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Was "red, gold, and green" used to display gay pride?
Several websites claim that the line "red, gold, and green" in the 1983 song Karma Chameleon by Culture Club refers to the colors of gay pride. For example, Genius:
Before the rainbow was ...
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Did "MP3" surpass "sex" as the most-searched term online in 1999?
In MP3: The Definitive Guide by Scot Hacker, published by O'Reilly in 2000, the author claims:
In April of 1999, the term "MP3" surpassed "sex" as the most-searched-on term at ...
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Did Brazilian football fans take their own lives inside the stadium after the loss to Uruguay in 1950?
An oft-repeated claim about the Uruguay v Brazil 1950 World Cup match is that upon the blowing of the final whistle, several Brazilian fans took their own lives inside the stadium.
The LA Times says ...
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Did Jean-Baptiste Mouron serve 100 years of jail time — and live to be free again?
I've came across a ~2005 email thread with "life curiosities" that stated:
Jean-Baptiste Mouron, de 17 años de edad, fue acusado de
incendiario y condenado a galeras durante cien años y un ...
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Do graffiti from travelers at the Abu Simbel temple prove that the temple was only built in the 19th century?
Whilst browsing on the notoriously pseudo historical subreddit called r/CulturalLayer I came across this post, that leads to another post on a popular Russian blogging website called livejournal.
...
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Did Voltaire drink 40-50 cups of coffee a day?
From 9 Famous Geniuses Who Were Also Huge Coffee Addicts:
Voltaire is said to have drunk 40-50 cups of coffee a day.
Elsewhere, from Did Voltaire really drink 40 to 50 cups of coffee a day? Stephen ...
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Were more Indian freedom fighters killed Muslims than any other religion/caste?
I saw this picture which was shared by my Indian friend online for 75th Indian Independence Day:
India Gate - New Delhi Freedom Fighters
95,300 names of freedom fighters are inscribed at India Gate, ...
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Did the medieval church ban geography as an offence against the Bible?
According to the columnist Simon Jenkins (Our fixation with maths doesn't add up):
When the medieval church banned geography as an offence against the Bible, what had been the queen of the sciences ...
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Did Alexander Graham Bell suggest that “Ahoy!” (or some variation of it) be the standard telephone greeting?
This claim is found all over the place. Sometimes the phrase is “Ahoy-hoy!”, sometimes simply “Ahoy!”. In Wikipedia's article about “Ahoy”:
Alexander Graham Bell initially suggested that the standard ...
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Do most scholars agree upon four historical facts about Jesus of Nazareth?
In this article, William Lane Craig claims:
Fortunately, Christianity, as a religion rooted in history, makes claims that can in important measure be investigated historically. Suppose, then, that we ...
user56618
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Did Gustavus Doane participate in and brag about participating in the Marias Massacre?
An NPR article from yesterday claims that Gustavus Doane (the former namesake of Mount Doane, now First People's Mountain) participated in and bragged about participating in the Marias Massacre.
There ...
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Did Peter the Great just "return" lands that "belonged to Russia", in the Great Northern War?
According to the Guardian, in a recent speech/interview Putin said
“Peter the Great waged the great northern war for 21 years. It would seem that he was at war with Sweden, he took something from ...
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Has a weapon functionally equivalent to the AR-15 been available for U.S. civilian purchase since 1907?
According to a (since-deleted) widely shared LinkedIn post (emphasis added):
A hundred and twelve years ago, in 1907...our great grandparents were first able to buy the rifle pictured. The semi-auto ...
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Did the percent of humans living on < $2/day drop from 94% to 8.6% since 1820?
In a recent Vox article, the author claims (without citation):
In 1820, some 94 percent of humans lived on less than $2 a day. Over the next two centuries, extreme poverty fell dramatically; in 2018, ...
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Are dates of historical events systematically inaccurate prior to the 17th Century?
In 2007, Vyacheslav Alekseevich Lopatin wrote The Scaliger Matrix [Russian]. (Full Russian title: Вячеслав Алексеевич Лопатин: Матрица Скалигера. Вся мировая история насквозь фальшивая! [On the book ...
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Did the ten plagues take place in Ancient Egypt?
Inspired by this question.
Is there any extrabiblical evidence that any or all of the ten plagues occurred as outlined in Exodus 7:14-11:10? Particularly, any evidence in Ancient Egyptian records?
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Did vehicle registration occur before automobiles?
I found an article online that makes the claim: "... registration plates having been used on carriages and wagons in the U.S. as far back as the early 1800s." The article can be found here: ...
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In 1936, did brothers Mark and David Ferrow transition?
The story of transgender brothers Mark and David Ferrow has become popular on Tumblr and Twitter in recent weeks. It claims
In 1934-1936, trans brothers Mark and David Ferrow of Yarmouth, UK both ...
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Did Percy Bysshe Shelley take credit for work done by Mary Shelley?
This is going to be a rather unorthodox question by me, as I can't fully legitimize the claim about to be questioned, but today, in conversing with a colleague of mine, the Shelleys popped up in ...
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Is it true that the Bennington College endowment is low because they declined donations to maintain academic independence?
Some (possibly dubious) college Q&A web sites (e.g. this one) make the claim that
Bennington has a paltry endowment of $3.5 million, the result of a historical philosophy - now recognized by its ...
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Have there been more books written about Napoleon Bonaparte than days have passed since his death?
Searching for more books on Napoleon than days since his death on Google shows a few websites that make this claim. Note that Napoleon Bonaparte died roughly 200 years ago, or about 73.000 days ago.
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Have about 170 million people been killed in the name of Allah?
In a question recently asked on the Christianity site, namely, Why don’t Christians accept Muhammad as the true prophet?, an answer quoted this article:
“Beware of false prophets who … inwardly are ...
user56618
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Did Rudolf Steiner prove the contagiousness of varicella in 1875?
Pages like those from the National Vaccine Information Center NVIC or the Centers for Disease Control CDC make the following claim:
In 1875, Rudolf Steiner discovered that chickenpox was infectious ...
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Were 1 in 6 protesters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention FBI agents?
At a press conference today, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene made this claim:
In 1968 at the Democratic National Convention where there were 10,000 protestors. One out of six were federal ...
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Are the British to blame for Israel's stray cat problem? [closed]
Stray cats are extremely common in Israel and there is a common urban legend that they were imported by the British during the mandate period to combat a rat problem.
For example, you can see this ...
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Could the diphtheria antitoxin (vaccine) have been flown into Nome, Alaska in 1925, but was chosen not to?
I just finished watching Togo on Disney+ last night, where the plot of the story is centered around a musher, Leonhard Seppala, and his lead sled dog, Togo. They make a very long trek across the ...
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Is this the sound of the 1883 Krakatoa eruption?
This widely watched video claims to be audio from the infamous Krakatoa explosion. Is it authentic?
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Has LSD 'been widely used in hospitals for the treatment of mental disorders'?
Operation Moneybags is a video purporting to be a documentary covering medical experiments on British troops,
The film has an opening card (27 seconds in) stating:
This film was made during the ...
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Is this quote from Lenin: "Make them swallow the word, they will swallow the thing"?
Éric Zemmour, the far-right probable candidate for the 2022 French presidential election said (in his book La France n'a pas dit son dernier mot but also in many meetings, example) that Lenin has ...
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Is there another period of history in rest of world as detailed as Islamic history? [closed]
There so many hadiths (quotes) and riwayahs (anecdotes) about the life of Muhammad the prophet or messenger who brought Islam.
I have heard more than 200,000 hadiths exist, sahih(authentic) and not ...
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Did some men in the Middle Ages remove their left testicle in an effort of having a son?
As mentioned here:
During the middle ages, it was believed that sperm produced by the left testicle produced girls. To ensure having a son, men would have it removed.
I have not heard about this ...
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Did stock trader, Mark Minervini, make 33,554% from 1994-1999 years?
This 2020 Business Insider article claims that author and stock-trader, Mark Minervini made a
compounded total return of 33,554% from 1994 to 1999, which equates to roughly 220% a year
This seems ...
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Was heroin originally developed as a cure for morphine addiction?
The video What Does Heroin Do To Your Body? claims that heroin was originally developed by the Bayer pharmaceutical company as a treatment for tuberculosis and morphine addiction. Is this true?
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Did a turkish man invent a steam engine 200 years before the industrial revolution and only made it to spin doner kebab? [closed]
I've seen this picture being reposted in many different places recently:
Is it true? Where can this machine be seen? What is it if it's not a steam engine?
Update: The pictures posted above show ...
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Did China lose a submarine (possibly a Xia class SSBN) with all hands on board in 1983-1985?
It's been claimed a video by a US submariner that the Soviet submarine K-10 collided with an unknown submarine in 1983 and this likely was a Chinese one ... because two years later the Chinese press ...
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At Chernobyl, did someone see the fuel channel caps bounce shortly before the explosion?
The well known 2019 show Chernobyl mentions an operator who happened to walk through the reactor hall of Unit 4 seconds before the reactor exploded. He allegedly saw this:
If this story seems ...
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Is the Kabul evacuation "the largest airlift of people in history"?
As quoted here in an August 21 news piece:
“The President noted that this is the largest airlift of people in history and that it would not have been possible without the early support from Qatar to ...
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Is wisdom tooth impaction causally linked to soft, processed foods?
In a book by an anthropologist at Ohio State, it is claimed that (1) third molar impactions dectupled after the Industrial Revolution, and (2) this was due to a new abundance of soft, processed food.
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Did ancient Hindu texts describe the existence of photons as early as 3100 BCE?
BooksFact.com is a popular Vedic blog (17K YouTube followed, 3K FB followers). In 2014, they published an article that claims that the Bhagavata_Purana was written 5100 years and contains a ...
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Secret instructions for the German submarines for the cruise to Agartha, a hidden land in the Antarctic. Are they authentic?
I saw this document posted on several websites about forgotten continents. They detail the maneuvers that a submarine must take to make it through the Antarctic to the other side.
Is there anything ...
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Did "the" London Agreement of 1945 bind the Soviets in writing to provide air access to [West] Berlin?
One Australian Airforce page offers this nutshell version of why the Soviets agreed to air corridors but shut down land access to West Berlin in the late 1940s.
Berlin was in the centre of the Soviet ...
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Did Wild West outlaws regularly wear face masks?
An article ("Westerners used to wear masks" by Andrew Gulliford, June 13, 2020) in The Journal of Cortez, Colorado, claims that it was a regular practice of bandits in the "Wild West&...
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Did Newton "invent" Physics to perform better spells? [closed]
I know Atomic Robo is not exactly an authority on real history, but there's also some truth and interesting details intermingled. How true is the statement "Newton invented Physics so he could ...
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Was it ever common in the USA for women to use their husbands' Social Security Numbers as their own?
The December 2015 Uniform Assessment Instrument of Virginia's Department for Aging and Rehabilitative Services (an instruction manual for administration of certain public social services) contains the ...
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