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 the handprint on the Carbon County jail wall uneraseable?
The Old Jail Museum in Jim Thorpe, PA, formerly the Carbon County Jail has one cell with a handprint on the wall. According to legend (emphasis mine):
Before their hanging, the men proclaimed ...
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Was the North Korean leader, Kim Il-Sung, an imposter?
Some claim the founder of North Korea, Kim Il-Sung, was an imposter who adopted the name of another leader.
Article from globalsecurity
South Korea claims that the present-day ruler of North Korea ...
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Did Incas use potatoes as a measure of time?
I'm currently completing a corporate challenge where you count steps and head to different world destinations to find out interesting "facts".
Today we had a fact or fiction quiz at Machu Picchu, ...
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Did President Richard Nixon say that the Warren Report was a hoax?
David Talbot writes in The mother of all coverups:
On a White House tape recording, President Nixon is heard telling
aides that the Warren Report "was the greatest hoax that has ever been
...
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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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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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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 Confucius punish a correct student for arguing with an incorrect one?
In Indonesia there are various variants of a popular story where two students are arguing over a simple mathematics - like whether 1+1 = 2.
The incorrect student says he will kill himself if he's ...
user4951
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Were there bears at the Treblinka Zoo?
I am doing a history project on the Treblinka extermination camp for school, and learnt about the zoo
Investigating further I found that the zoo contained at least four foxes, two peacocks and a roe ...
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Did Tecumseh Predict the New Madrid Earthquakes of 1811-1812?
Tecumseh was the leader of a confederacy of Native Americans that fought against the United States in the early 1800s.
Several years ago, I read The Frontiersmen, a "narrative biography" by Allan W. ...
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Did Thomas Edison kill elephant Topsy?
It is largely believed that Edison electrocuted lot of animals to prove that AC current was dangerous. There is a video on youtube that goes to show that Edison killed Topsy.
But in Wikipedia I found ...
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Did the Roman army have more servants than soldiers?
In one of his essays Joel Spolsky (co-founder of Stack Exchange) wrote:
[...] the Roman army had a ratio of four
servants for every soldier.
Is this true?
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How correct are some dramatized documentaries about proto-humans?
There are some documentaries, e.g. by David Attenborough, that dramatize the life of proto-humans (e.g. Neanderthals, etc..)
Some of these documentaries show/dramatize the proto-humans communicating ...
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Did Daniel Ekechukwu resurrect from the dead?
According to this four-part report, a man named Daniel Ekechukwu, a resident of Nigera, died November 30, 2001 and came back to life December 2, 2001. A literal and modern resurrection. The same story ...
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Was a Mossad impostor hanged instead of Saddam Hussein?
So a colleague has shown me this story: "Fake Saddam Sentenced to Death", in which it is claimed that the man who was said to be Saddam Hussein in his court-case was an impostor.
Can anyone shed some ...
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Did Whiskey taxation make up 30%-50% of England's revenue?
In this article it is claimed that (1st paragraph):
Especially in England and Ireland, it became the drink of choice, and through taxation, came to contribute 30%-50% of the nation’s revenue.
This ...
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Was SS Californian intended to be a rescue vehicle for the passengers of a deliberately-sunk Titanic?
I keep running into a (quite frankly daft) conspiracy theory regarding the sinking of the Titanic. It posits that the RMS Olympic was secretly swapped in to replace the RMS Titanic and was ...
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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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Did Emperor Nero burn Frankincense equal to Oman's annual production at his wife's funeral?
In a documentary about Oman -The Paradoxical Life In Muscat - Magnificent Megacities it is narrated that -
According to the legend, Emperor Nero burned the whole of Oman's annual production ...
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Is this "the largest single donation to Oxford University since the Renaissance"?
The University of Oxford recently announced a £150 million donation from Stephen Schwartzmann, which their press release (PDF) prominently calls "the largest single donation to Oxford University since ...
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Did "ancient people who spoke languages that didn't have words for numbers greater than three" keep track of sheep using stones?
In the TED-Ed video "How big is infinity?" Dennis Wildfogel says (at the 50 second mark) this about "matching being more fundamental than counting":
In fact, we think that some ancient people who ...
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Did commerical flag makers catalog and sell the second Confederate national flag as "whiteman's flag"?
According to the 1957 Stevens-Davis and allied families: a memorial volume of history , biography, and genealogy :
Commercially, this design is called the "Whiteman flag" or "White-man design", ...
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Did György Sherfezi fall from the 10th floor on a passing Laszlo Karvasha and both survived?
Some researchers of Coincidence insist on the veracity of the story:
"A resident of Budapest György Sherfezi fell out of the 10th floor
window and landed on a passing Laszlo Karvasha. Exactly one ...
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Was the Cubs World Series celebration the 7th largest gathering in human history?
This news page claims that the Cubs World Series celebration ranks as 7th largest gathering in human history. Is this statement true? Wikipedia has a list that would place it as 18th.
There are ...
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Did Ancient Roman bureaucrats file data only by year?
In an aside in an article about the greatest human innovations where he proposes the relational database as a candidate, Tim Worstall quotes the following comment about the Roman Empire:
Finding ...
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Did women in New York textile factories strike on March 8, 1857?
Some websites claim that Internation Women's Day in on March 8th to celebrate a famous strike by female textile workers in New York.
e.g.: Woman Aid:
1857
The first recorded organised action by ...
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Was the Meridian of Antwerp indeed the prime meridian of Mercator's Theatrum Orbis Terrarum?
On Wikipedia it is stated that
The meridan of Antwerp is one of several prime meridians that have been used for geographic referencing. It is running through the city of Antwerp, in Flanders, ...
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Did Choi Sung-Bong run away from an orphanage at the age of 5?
In this viral video, Choi Sung-Bong, a finalist on Korea's Got Talent gives a background story that is astonishing.
His story is generally accepted as factual even without references (for instance, ...
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Did Jamal Husseini say "The blood will flow like rivers in the Middle East"?
On page 50 of his 2008 book 1948: A History of the First Arab–Israeli War, Benny Morris wrote:
The Arab reaction was just as predictable: “The blood will flow like rivers in the Middle East,” ...
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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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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 ...
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Did Theodor Herzl adhere to Spinozism?
The following are found among a list of Theodor Herzl quotes on the Web site of the World Zionist Organisation:
When I say God I do not mean to offend the freethinkers. For my part
they can say ...
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Did the Soyuz 1 mission fail because of an ignored decimal point?
I am from an Eastern bloc nation. In my childhood I was taught that the Soyuz 1 mission failed because a decimal point was ignored during the pre-flight check, which was the cause of the parachute ...
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Was a practice of making non-Muslims wear special markings introduced by Umar II?
The Wikipedia page Yellow badge says:
The practice of wearing special markings in order to distinguish Jews
and other non-Muslims (Dhimmis) in Muslim-dominated countries seems to
have been ...
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Was it common among soldiers to put boot blacking on other soldiers' private parts during WW I?
The claim is hidden in a long article about some other ... uhm delicate ... myths surrounding Hitler here:
according to a former comrade of Hitler's from the trenches, Hans
Mend, his comrades ...
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Were the terms "Dilscoop" and "Carrom ball" coined by Mahendra Mapagunaratne?
This web article claims that the terms were coined by Mahendra Mapagunaratne.
The neologism Josephian Mafia is thought to be coined by Mahendra
Mapagunaratne - a Sri Lankan cricket connoisseur ...
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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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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 ...
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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 ...
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What is the origin of this quote: "Humans live on one-quarter of what they eat; on the other three-quarters lives their doctor."
There is a website about fasting that claims that this quote has been found on an "Egyptian pyramid inscription" in "3800 BC". This makes it extremely dubious: at that time the Egyptians have not yet ...
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Did Neanderthals keep Cro-Magnons as sex-slaves?
Some time ago, it was thought that modern people came from Cro-Magnons, and Neanderthals became extinct. But after the Neanderthal genome project, we found that modern people have from 1% to 4% of ...
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Was swastika a popular symbol among Slavs and/or Proto-Indo-Europeans?
It seems to me that many Russian nationalists and neo-paganists currently believe that swastika was a Solar symbol or a symbol of fortune in ancient Slavic folklore.
There are multiple paintings by ...
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Was Edgar Cayce visited by Rockefeller and other important figures from that era?
Edgar Cayce was an American psychic who was famous during the early 20th century. He was notorious for giving readings during an alleged trance state he entered while sleeping. There’s a foundation ...
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