Questions tagged [history]
Use this tag for questions that pertain to historical events, or claim whose evidence is historical in nature.
753
questions
8
votes
1answer
669 views
Were slaves involved in the building of the Pyramids of Giza?
The claim: Paid, skilled workers built the pyramids without the use of slave labor.
Relevant links:
Hawass: ‘The Great Pyramids were not built by slaves’
“Linking building the Great Pyramids to ...
49
votes
1answer
8k views
Is this colour footage of Breslau in 1939 authentic?
This 7 minutes footage on youtube purports to be from 1939 in Breslau, Germany (today Wrocław, Poland). In it we can see
The banks of the Oder/Odra
A random boy cycling in the streets
Some military ...
12
votes
1answer
657 views
Did some people claim in the 1970s that metric road signs would facilitate a ‘Russian invasion’?
According to Why Hasn't the U.S. Gone Metric?:
In the 1970s, some opponents suggested that metric road signs would facilitate a Russian invasion.
This ("... some opponents suggested...") ...
6
votes
1answer
503 views
Was there a group of 'wealthy anti-Christian abolitionists', who funded John Brown?
Thomas DiLorenzo is a American economics professor who writes about Abraham Lincoln and the US Civil War.
In a recent opinion piece for LewRockwell.com, A Disease in the Public Mind, Part II?, ...
77
votes
2answers
12k views
Was the Roman knowledge of how to build aqueducts lost?
In a TED interview, Elon Musk stated:
People are mistaken when they think that technology just automatically improves. It does not automatically improve. It only improves if a lot of people work very ...
5
votes
1answer
531 views
Did Mao Zedong have a person executed for saying his mangoes looked like a sweet potato?
This video entitled Mao's Miraculous Mangoes! is a bit satirical, but the one claim that somebody got executed during the cultural revolution for saying a mango looked like a sweet potato, is just ...
6
votes
1answer
300 views
Did David Ricardo make £1M from the Battle of Waterloo?
Mark Skousen (2008):
He was a speculator par excellence, allegedly making a million pounds sterling in 1 day following the Battle of Waterloo.
Madsen Pirie:
He went into a banking house and made a ...
55
votes
3answers
9k views
Did Neil Armstrong write such a letter to a skeptic?
Today, I saw a tweet with an image that claims to contain the answer of Neil Armstrong to a teacher that was skeptical of the moon landing (see below).
Of course it's not the image of a real letter, ...
76
votes
2answers
16k views
Did Euler make the elementary mistake √-2 √-3 = √6?
The following extract is from Tristan Needham's Visual Complex Analysis,
Even in 1770 the situation was still sufficiently confused that it was possible for so great a mathematician as Euler to ...
18
votes
1answer
443 views
Were Boundary Streets in Queensland named as boundaries that Indigenous Australians were not allowed to cross?
This Facebook post has been shared over 7000 times:
Do you know the history of the many Boundary Streets around Qld?
It was the boundary of where Indigenous Australians were not allowed to cross ...
20
votes
1answer
6k views
Were more whites slaves brought to North Africa than black slaves were brought to the United States?
This quotation is attributed to Thomas Sowell
"More whites were brought as slaves to North Africa than blacks brought as slaves to the United States or to the 13 colonies from which it was formed. ...
8
votes
1answer
470 views
Could 10-15 million Congolese people have died during the reign of Leopold II?
I was listening to No Agenda today and they were talking about the toppling of the Leopold II statue in Belgium, ascribing it to his genocide waged against the Congolese people. John Dvorak stated he ...
7
votes
2answers
710 views
Did the Catholic church prosecute Galileo because he was teaching unproven ideas?
There is a popular Youtube video, *Priest Debunks Common Catholic Myths, in which Casey Cole, a Catholic and Franciscan, "debunks" the idea that the church wrongly tried Galileo.
The Church ...
3
votes
1answer
353 views
Was Thales the first to show that the year contained 365 days?
The philosopher Sir Anthony Kenny, in his 2004 book A New History of Western Philosophy v. 1, Ancient Philosophy claims that Thales of Miletus, an ancient Greek astronomer, was
the first to show ...
13
votes
0answers
398 views
Was the crew dropping the “Tsar Bomba” nuclear bomb given only a 50% chance to survive?
Background
The Tsar Bomba was the most powerful nuclear weapon ever created. On 30 October 1961 the Soviet Union experimentally detonated the bomb after dropping it from a plane above Nova Zembla. A ...
11
votes
2answers
1k views
Was the Nazi Hakenkreuz logo based on the Indic swastika?
"Swastika" is sanskrit word for an ancient geometrical symbol, broadly used in Indic cultures. Amongst countries that were involved with World War II, it is associated with the Nazi flag, designed by ...
2
votes
1answer
738 views
Could the Ark of the Covenant have killed by acting as a capacitor?
In the biblical account of Uzzah, he touches the Ark of the Covenant on the road from Gibeah to Jerusalem; this irks the god of Israel, who knocks him out on the spot.
A 2014 Gizmodo article quotes ...
37
votes
1answer
10k views
Did the Soviet Union murder over 20M people under its control after the war?
Richard Rumelt (business professor at UCLA, 2011):
During the whole post-WWII period, the Soviet Union murdered upward of 20 million people, its own citizens and others under its control
True?
3
votes
2answers
242 views
Was the yellow fever virus a past standardized biological weapon in the US Army?
Dany Shoham writes in a 2012 paper [full text, paywalled]:
The yellow fever virus – a past standardized BW in the US Army, then carried by infected Aedes mosquitoes as vectors – was thus genetically ...
9
votes
3answers
7k views
Is this letter from Madame de Sévigné authentic?
According to this webpage, Madame de Sévigné wrote the following letter to her daughter (Madame de Grignan).
Surtout, ma chère enfant, ne venez point à Paris !
Plus personne ne sort de peur de ...
1
vote
0answers
71 views
Did de Gaulle Machiavellianly “cultivate” the Algerian junta but condemned it after taking power in 1958?
The New Yorker writes about the 1958 events in France:
Then, in June of 1958, a group of right-wing French military men, alarmed by the Fourth Republic’s failure to defeat the ongoing rebellion in ...
72
votes
3answers
12k views
Has a virus ever escaped a high-level virus lab?
As somewhat unclearly related in the Daily Mail:
Dr Keusch, Professor of Medicine and International Health at Boston University's Schools of Medicine and Public Health, stressed that no release of ...
8
votes
1answer
497 views
Were flight reservations centrally managed on wall boards in huge halls in the pre-computer era?
For the first fifty years of scheudled air travel, agents' bookings were done over the telephone. At first, charts recording space on particular flights were sheets of paper. Eventually, for large ...
1
vote
0answers
206 views
Did a ruler/army accept baptism with one hand unbaptized
There are a number of variations of a story on the internet mentioning how a ruler/an army accepted Christian baptism except they held their sword arm and sword out of the water, rejecting any ...
7
votes
1answer
384 views
Did William Pitt the Younger say, “We must yoke up the children to work in the factories”?
Purdy (2016):
skilled adult labour was in such short supply that when his Chancellor of the Exchequer warned Prime Minister William Pitt that businesses were becoming unable to pay their taxes to ...
15
votes
3answers
622 views
In the 1910s and 1920s in the US, did some people face death by government officials for challenging “industrial capitalism in American society”?
The Wikipedia article for criminal syndicalism (during World War I; see also the Sedition Act of 1918) writes:
Government officials on the state and federal level ordered arrests, imprisonments and ...
1
vote
0answers
237 views
Was the 1952 Washington DC UFO wave caused by temperature inversions? [duplicate]
The 1952 Washington, D.C. UFO incident, a.k.a. the "Invasion of Washington", was a series of UFO reports from the 12th to the 29th July 1952 over Washington DC.
At 11:40 p.m. on Saturday, ...
52
votes
1answer
9k views
Did Roman jurists rule that “to learn the art of geometry and to take part in public exercises, an art as damnable as mathematics, are forbidden”?
According to Morris Kline (Mathematics for the Nonmathematician, 1967):
Roman jurists ruled, under the Code of Mathematicians and Evil-Doers, that "to learn the art of geometry and to take part in ...
15
votes
2answers
5k views
Have Jews been kicked out of countries 109 times?
Several years ago in Australia, anti-Jewish fliers were distributed.
One of the claims that appears on the fliers is:
Jews have been kicked out of countries 109 times in history.
I've seen this ...
81
votes
1answer
17k views
Did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle prank 12 men into fleeing their countries?
Purportedly, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle — creator and author of Sherlock Holmes series — sent a telegram to 12 men “…of great virtue and respected in society.” The telegram read “Flee! All has been ...
8
votes
1answer
652 views
Was the 1971 Pakistani surrender in Bangladesh the first public surrender in history?
In 1971 India invaded east Pakistan, which ended in the "public surrender" of the Pakistani military on the 16th of December, and modern day Bangladesh is the result. Many of the articles and videos ...
8
votes
0answers
288 views
Did Lyndon Johnson spy on Barry Goldwater's 1964 campaign using CIA and FBI assets?
An article by Lee Edwards on the Heritage Foundation website claims so with quite some level of detail, e.g.
In the fall of 1964, the White House turned to the CIA to get advance inside information ...
-2
votes
1answer
376 views
Do the U.S. interstate numbers correspond to land area?
This question is about the numbering scheme of U.S. interstate highways. Wikipedia says:
In the numbering scheme for the primary routes, east–west highways are assigned even numbers and north–south ...
20
votes
1answer
5k views
Did (former) German Minister Manfred Lahnstein admit that Germany wanted the EMS in order to get a competitive edge over other European countries?
A 2017 article about the European Monetary System (EMS) in Foreign Policy relates this story:
But there was always a suspicion that Germany was trying to get long-term trade advantages from linking ...
14
votes
1answer
1k views
Did silver mostly not tarnish before the Industrial Revolution?
Theodore Gray wrote an article about silver bullets in Popular Science and mentions in it that silver mostly did not tarnish before the Industrial Revolution.
But today silver is far more common, ...
3
votes
1answer
842 views
Was the EU created or supported by Nazis? [closed]
My dad has started preaching from this self published book (Indisputable Evidence Proving the EU Was Created by Nazis, by Jack King) which claims the European Union was both wanted and created by ...
16
votes
4answers
1k views
Did Lenin say “destroy the family, you destroy the country”, and if so in what context?
Various publications e.g. "The Parent Care Conversation" (which seems to be a religiously inspired book in some parts at least) attribute the saying "destroy the family, you destroy the country" to ...
57
votes
2answers
8k views
Was the Berlin Wall Breached Based upon an Erroneous Declaration?
In "Beyond the Ideological Lie: The Revolution of 1989 Thirty Years Later", Daniel J. Mahoney goes to great lengths to put this event in question in context to not down play the significance of world ...
7
votes
0answers
486 views
Were these the last words of Trotsky's assasin?
Ramon Mercader assassinated Leon Trotsky on August 20th 1940. Ramon was jailed by the Mexican government, but was released in 1961. He died in Cuba of lung cancer in 1978. Wikipedia claims his last ...
2
votes
0answers
153 views
Did Turkey use poison gas against the Kurds in 1937-38?
Baki Tezcan
writes in an LA Times opinion piece:
In the 1920s and ’30s, Kurdish citizens of Turkey were brutally massacred in military responses to rebellions. Those uprisings were also ...
5
votes
1answer
848 views
Does the USA have the highest cumulative CO2 emissions since 1750?
Vox has posted a cumulative graph of CO2 emissions since 1750. And the USA is flagged as the chief culprit. The actual title of the Vox article is:
Why the US bears the most responsibility for ...
10
votes
1answer
697 views
Are there records of girls born with enlarged clitoris mistaken - and raised - as boys?
In a popular-science Polish magazine Focus EKSTRA, special issue 5/2004*, page 39, there's a paragraph that says
(in original Polish, emphasis mine:)
Jak duża może być łechtaczka?
Największe bywają ...
44
votes
2answers
9k views
Was there a trial by combat between a man and a dog in medieval France?
This website makes the claim that in 1400 a man by the name of "Chevalier Maquer" fought in a judicial duel against a greyhound, after it was suspected that Maquer had killed the greyhound's owner.
...
8
votes
1answer
3k views
Is the pope's headgear adopted directly from a Mesopotamian hat, symbol of worshipping Dagon, as seen in his fish mouth looking mitre?
The Roman bishop of the Catholic church is often wearing a mitre. Countless sites, 'that really know the hidden truth and tell it', make the connection of 'fish mouth' and 'Dagon priest', claiming ...
1
vote
1answer
377 views
Has no UK party won a majority of seats with around 35% of the popular vote?
In Yahoo news from today, it is said that despite the Conservative party's lead in opinion polls, it is headed for a hung Parliament. One of the arguments is that
“No party has ever won a majority ...
6
votes
1answer
896 views
Did Lenin ever say that you could “destroy society through music”?
I've seen the quote:
"One quick way to destroy a society is through its music."
Vladimir Lenin
on (Russian?) Facebook:
Spanish Twitter:
and is also mentioned in the book The Authentic ...
8
votes
2answers
1k views
Is the Great Wall of China visible from space?
Is the Great Wall of China visible from space?
This is quoted every now and then in film and television (e.g. The Truman Show), purportedly placing it among a rare class of single object that are ...
56
votes
2answers
13k views
Did the British navy fail to take into account the ballistics correction due to Coriolis force during WW1 Falkland Islands battle?
In Natural History magazine article, Neil DeGrasse Tyson claims the following:
The military normally knows all about the Coriolis force and thus introduces the appropriate correction to all missile ...
-7
votes
1answer
327 views
What are the basis to claim the Easter Island statues as soul? [closed]
In this article, speeches from the governor of Easter Island are mentionned. She said, mentionning the statues on the Easter Island in the British Museum:
"You have our soul"
However I am surprised ...
2
votes
1answer
551 views
Were the Schutzmannschaft members mostly allowed to return to their former lives?
The Schutzmannschaft (Auxiliary Police) were batallions of local and German units in German-occupied Eastern Europe, that participated in the Holocaust in World War II.
According to the Wikipedia ...
