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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Were postal pneumatic tubes in Berlin (Rohrpost) cleared with wine?
According to “A Series of Tubes” by Molly Wright Steenson:
If a pneumatic canister got stuck and couldn’t be cleared by reversing airflow, there was another solution: firing a pistol into the tube ...
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Did US president Theodore Roosevelt call Democrats "prison vermin"?
According to two very non-primary references, the President called Democrats "prison vermin".
The first is the 1902 Political X-rays, saying that it is quoting from an 8 November 1901 letter ...
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Would US president Theodore Roosevelt refer to his political enemies as "vermin"?
A publication of the Library of Congress says:
Mr. Foulke in his letters reveals an unusual frankness in letting President Roosevelt know of the attitudes of his political enemies -- "small ...
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Was whaling the biggest industry in 1903?
In a podcast with Joe Rogan, Jimmy Carr made the claim that:
Whaling was the biggest industry in the world in 1903.
However, some people in the comment section dispute this, claiming that Carr meant ...
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Was the Israeli interception of a missile (from Yemen) recently "the first combat ever to take place in space", 62 miles high?
Claim in The Telegraph on Nov 5:
Israel this week used its Arrow missile-defence system to shoot down a ballistic missile outside of Earth’s atmosphere, in what is believed to be the first combat ...
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Is this the Oath to become a Master Mason?
In Freemasonry, the third degree that one may obtain is called Master Mason. I found a book claiming to contain the rituals and oath that the Mason has to perform. The book is called "Duncan's ...
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Were the Finns ever considered as the Negroes of the North?
The Finnish member of parliament Teemu Keskisarja recently made headlines by claiming in a parliament speech:
Suomen rasismihistorian lyhyt tiedonanto:
...Esivanhempamme eli Pohjolan neekerit olivat ...
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Did Mongolian president Ochirbat Punsalmaa make a funny remark about a snoring bodyguard to Queen Elizabeth II on a visit to the UK in 1996?
According to this widely shared Quora answer, the following interesting story took place when the Mongolian president visited the UK in 1996:
In 1996, Mongolia's first president, Ochirbat Punsalmaa, ...
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Did Voltaire say/write "Everything you say should be true, but not everything true should be said."?
There is a popular saying:
Everything you say should be true, but not everything true should be
said.
On the internet, many pages attribute this quote to Voltaire - however, I could not find any ...
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Did Emperor Norton ever kneel in defiance of racist mobs?
There is a rumour on the Chinese internet that during one of the anti-Chinese riots in the 1860s, Norton stood in front of the Chinese migrants, and, facing the rabid racist mobs, kneeled down and ...
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Did Zhang Zongchang order each player in a basketball game be given their own ball?
There is a claim that Chinese warlord, Zhang Zongchang was confused by the sport of basketball:
iFunny
After seeing a basketball game for the first time, he allegedly asked "Why the hell are ...
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Is this infographic about Palestinian loss of land since 1947 accurate? [duplicate]
I've come across this infographic a few times on social media, most recently in this widely shared Facebook post:
Here is a larger version of the infographic:
Are the borders in it largely accurate?
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Did Minecraft sell 600 million copies?
According to this website and this one, Minecraft has sold over 600 million copies. However, in a 2021 Gamespot article it says that only 238 million copies had been sold at that point. Have there ...
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Did Andrew Tate claim his job was to seduce women and get them on a webcam?
Andrew Tate is a social media personality who was recently charged with rape and human trafficking offences.
There are screenshots available of Andrew Tate's website cobratate.com, on which it says:
...
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Did Tsar Nicholas II really call for a "short, victorious war"?
Back in 2018, an article in the Political Studies Association blog quoted Tsar Nicholas II as saying that what his people needed was a "short, victorious war" prior to the Russo-Japanese War ...
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Was the flawless execution of code used as motivation for moonlanding denial?
In this video around 2:25 on programmer stereotypes it is mentioned in the part named female programmers that the code Margaret Hamilton wrote for the Apollo mission was so flawless that some use it ...
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Were South Korean workers forcibly injected with amphetamines?
In a biographical article about the life of Jeon Tae-il, Wikipedia states that
As a tailor, Jeon witnessed the horrendous working conditions in the
Seoul Peace Market... Such conditions included ...
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Did the Joint Intelligence Staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff claim the USSR would convince all Japanese?
An opinion piece posted on 10.05.2016 08:46 by Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey on Pravda states that Peter Kuznick claimed:
The Japanese leaders did not know that at Yalta Stalin had agreed to
come into the ...
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Was there a pattern of women in Middle Ages Europe poisoning their husbands to keep them close?
There's a claim doing the rounds on social media, that women in the Middle Ages would poison their husbands, and then administer an antidote on their arrival home. The implication is that this would &...
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Did Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird ignore direct orders from Nixon during the EC-121 crisis, as Henry Kissinger alleged?
It's mentioned in a paper on the Vietnam war that (contemporaneously):
When [... in 1969] a North Korean jet shot down a U.S. EC-121
surveillance plane, Laird again acted on his own as he ignored a ...
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Did the Golden Gate Bridge 'flatten' under the weight of 300,000 people in 1987?
According to SFGate (and many other sources):
The May 24, 1987 event celebrating the bridge's 50th anniversary was
organized by the "Friends of the Golden Gate Bridge," a group made up
of ...
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Was "L" placed at the beginning of the LGBT acronym because of the AIDS crisis?
Seen in various LGBT documentation spaces online:
This history of the acronym goes back to the last sustained trauma in the LGBT world: the AIDS pandemic of the 1980s and 1990s. ... a more ...
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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 ...
user62611
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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