Most interesting historical facts of your country?

[aVocado]

Smogon has people from all over the globe, and I'm pretty sure a lot of countries out there (even big/popular ones like the US and UK) have a lot of interesting historical facts. I didn't study much history (or at all) besides Kuwait's history and the islamic history, so sometimes seeing some cool facts really fascinates me.

Kuwait is where I come from, and the most interesting fact to be honest is an incident in 1892, which, for lack of a better word, is Game of Thrones-esque lol. The then ruler of Kuwait, Jarrah Al-Sabah, as well as Muhammad Al-Sabah, were both killed by their brother, Mubarak Al-Sabah. The story is that Mubarak and his loyal men assassinated both Muhammand and Jarrah in the night. The reason behind the assassination however, is varied. The most common one among the Kuwaiti people is that he simply killed them to rule, especially because Jarrah was seen as a "weak" leader and was unpopular and unfavoured by the society back then. This incident is often hidden and not included in historical books though, for some reason.

A TV show was shot based on that incident and Mubarak's life, but it was blocked from being aired.

So, what are some cool historical facts from where you come from?

 

[GlassGlaceon]

freakin murica

Although Ohio is listed as the 17th state in the U.S., it is technically 47th because Congress forgot to vote on a resolution to admit it to the Union until 1953.

 

[Danmire]

1998 Pope John Paul II becomes the first Pope to visit Cuba

que bola asere

 

[Cresselia~~]

Chinese were not allowed to upper decks of ferries or to shops with no visible Chinese name or into certain posh areas of Hong Kong.

(But Japanese were allowed, along with all whites)

 

[v]

H. H. Holmes, real name Herman Mudgett, killed a number of people over the course of the 1904 1893 world fair. he killed them in a hotel of his own design, often called the murder castle. while only 4 of his kills are confirmed, as many as 400 deaths have been attributed to him. holmes would first take out a life insurance policy on his victims then would occasionally sell the cadavers to nearby universities. he was caught by the pinkertons after failing to make some of his insurance payments. he successfully fled, but was located after taking out life insurance on his only close friend and confidant, as well as said friend's children, and murdering them to collect on it.

"I was born with the devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing -- I was born with the "Evil One" standing as my sponsor beside the bed where I was ushered into the world, and he has been with me since."
-Doctor H. H. Holmes

 

[horyzhnz]

The second explorer to set foot in Australia nailed a dinner plate to a post with his name on it. 81 years later, another explorer landed at the same spot and decided to replace the plate with a new one, so he carved the names of both of them into a new dinner plate and nailed it on a new post in the exact same spot. 104 years later, yet another explorer landed at the same spot, who then also decided to place his own dinner plate right next to the old one, once he built new posts for the two of them. 17 years after that, a crew member on the last explorer's ship got his own ship and went ashore at the same spot, swapping his captain's plate for his own. His own plate was never found, while all of the earlier plates have been recovered and are now sitting in museums in Australia and the Netherlands.

Also our most famous bushranger (Australian version of a highway robber), Ned Kelly, wore armour made out of metal buckets and pieces of scrap metal. The police at the time actually had no idea how to stop him as he seemed to be invincible, but then they shot him in the legs. He was shot in the left foot, left leg, right hand, left arm, and twice in the region of the groin, but none of the bullets had actually pierced the metal. World's first bulletproof vest.

 

[moonbound]

Due to a tumultuous history, anyone being sworn in to any public office in Kentucky (including but not limited to the Governor himself), must swear “Since the adoption of the present (Kentucky) Constitution, I, being a citizen of this state, have not fought a duel with deadly weapons within this state nor out of it, nor have I sent or accepted a challenge to fight a duel with deadly weapons, nor have I acted as a second in carrying a challenge, nor aided or assisted any person thus offending, so help me God.”

 

[DarkMilotic]

Well, since little is known about Wales I'll start with this opening fact. Saint Patrick was Welsh! Not Irish. However, he was the patron saint of Ireland and therefore it became a thing and people still think he's Irish. He's Welsh :)

America and Wales?

Also, there's been so much debate as of late about who actually discovered America. There's been evidence for the Vikings, Norse, etc. But one person is rarely mentioned well... ever. Prince Madog ab Owain Gwynedd. Some people around here (mostly scholars and historians, and rarely those under the age of 60) believe that he discovered America. This was based off of a Poem, a Ballad, and a story used by Queen Elizabeth I to convince the English to explore for themselves. There's been evidence of Welsh influence on the Native Indians, and armour had been found there as well bearing the Welsh coat of arms. This being said, it's basically just a rumour as far as I'm concerned!

Calan Awst

Actual Welsh history has to do with one of my favorite holidays of all time. Calan Awst is essentially the first day of Autumn and it's one big festival with drinking and fun :)) In different shires/counties it's different, but in Caerphilly it's pretty much just a day to get really fucking wasted. Go Wales!

This is the strangest thing about Wales, and it's our history for shagging sheep. This really didn't happen all that often, except in the country. Never call a Welsh person a sheep shagger unless you want to get fined £150. Seriously. Although, some farmers when we first joined the UK found out that the fine was lower for having intercourse with a sheep that it was for stealing it. So.. they shagged it and then stole it. Ladies and gentlemen, Wales.

 

[Swede]

I live in the US, but I decided to post a fact about one of my other national countries instead.

The country Ecuador fought its neighbor Peru for about 150 years in the Western Hemisphere’s longest-running territorial (and international and armed) dispute, over control of its Amazon areas. It finally ended in 1999.

http://snarkynomad.com/fun-facts-about-ecuador/
http://www.historyguy.com/hgnews_ecuador-peru.html

 

[Lasagne]

alright this is more maori legend than actual fact, and this is all off the top of my head so i might get some wrong but here we go:

basically there was a massive maori god, and he used the south island of new zealand as a waka (kayak/canoe thing). he went fishing and one day fished up the north island so it started existing. stewart island is where he planted his anchor. i love maori legends

 

[Codraroll]

Cool historical fact about Norway?

Umm... really, it's been a country as poor as it's been desolate for most of its existence, so not much exciting has happened here. But we bear the distinction of being the only country Stalin voluntarily pulled out of after WWII.
Due to a long seafaring tradition, we've also acquired the most remote, weathered, boring little island in the world, Bouvet Island, somewhere in the Antarctic. Being located at 54 degrees South, the island is actually the piece of Norwegian territory located closest to the Equator. The little rock actually has its own Internet domain, .bv, which to my knowledge has never been used for anything.

 

[Zukai]

In 1934, july 12 Boris Skossyreff declared him self King of Andorra and declared war on the Bishop of Urgell. He was arrested on the 20th of July.
Andorra was also the last country taking part in WW1 as it declared war on Germany but wasn't at the treaty of Versailles so Andorra was at war with Germany until 1939

 

[bb skarm]

Lebanon's capital, Beirut, has been destroyed and rebuilt 9 times.

 

[Isa]

Every Christmas, roughly a third of Sweden sits down with their families to watch Donald Duck

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_All_of_Us_to_All_of_You#Sweden

 

[Cresselia~~]

They didn't use nails or glue for building the Great Wall.
They used a paste prepared with sticky rice. Dries very very hard, and no insects can bite it.

 

[Karxrida]

For California:

• Our famous Gold Rush that started in 1848 stimulated the economies of other countries like Britain and China.
  
• There are no known successful attempts to escape Alcatraz Island. The escape in June 1962 is the most famous one and the closest anyone got, as the escapees actually got of the island but are believed to have drowned. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_1962_Alcatraz_escape
  
• The Golden Gate Bridge was completed under budget, with $1.3 million to spare.
• Our state flag, the Bear Flag, was inspired by a failed revolution during the time California was owned by Mexico.
• The Bear itself was based on the last grizzly bear that was being held in captivity, named Monarch.
• We actually had a wave of the Bubonic Plague (yes, that Bubonic Plague) from 1900 to 1904. It originated in Chinatown. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_plague_of_1900–04
• Richard Nixon was born in Orange County, the same place I'm from.
• The trees in White Mountains are among the oldest in the world; one's about 5,000 in age!
• If California was its own country, it would be the 35th most populated one in the world.

 

[Chou Toshio]

Mosquitos would not exist in Hawaii if it weren't for captain cook purposefully introducing them as a van d'état against the natives by ordering his men to dump some of their water barrels.

I hear the Australians admire him, but in Hawaii he's eternally labeled a royal douchebag.

 

[Trax]

Mosquitos would not exist in Hawaii if it weren't for captain cook purposefully introducing them as a van d'état against the natives by ordering his men to dump some of their water barrels.

I hear the Australians admire him, but in Hawaii he's eternally labeled a royal douchebag.

Australians don't think much about him beyond he was the first person to find a part of Australia that looked habitable to western sensibilities. That and he was a damn good navigator. Very little beyond that is really thought about the man.

 

[EvilOrange76]

Canada once into a military law over a terrorist situation in Quebec. Only one person was injured I think.

 

[Joltik]

During WW1 British spies used semen as invisible ink.

Pretty nasty, but yeah.

 

[The Quasar]

I'm italian and Italy IS the story. If you want I could write sometimes about.

 

[Ares]

So I used to live in New Mexico and there is a town there called Roswell that is famous for sighting UFOs, I've been there and pretty much the entire town is focused on aliens. However recently I read a book on Area 51 history and what not and it mentioned a brief account of the events related to Roswell. Pretty much what happened was after WW2 the US and Russia went in and recruited a bunch of German scientists to come back to both countries and create military weapons. We went after the scientists relating to nuclear warfare and we skipped over a pair of brothers called Walter and Reimar Horten who developed a type of aircraft that could hover. So moving on in history a bit, after we took these scientists the Cold War began to happen in full tilt and we were busy building up our military options. Russia and the US were trying to muscle each other out of the way and Stalin thought that the key to destroying the US lay in panicing the public. The reason he thought this was because of the legendary broadcast of the War of the Worlds that paniced multiple towns before people realized that it was just a book being broadcasted on the radio. Stalin's plan to panic the US public was to send what appeared to be UFO's over portions of the US and frighten the public so that the US government would be busy dealing with the public instead of Russia (or something along those lines lol). He had the brothers develop their planes that could seemingly hover and then he had a scientist named Josef Mengele (i think I got the name right) who had done multiple experiments on human people. Stalin offered him safe passage to Buenos Ares to live out his life if he created small alien looking people. This explains the alien looking bodies that were found with the crashed hovercraft. Multiple flights of the blackbird spyplanes added on to the myth because the planes were so unlike any air plane at the time so people chalked them up to UFOs. Pretty much the whole alien and UFO myth in the midwest was Stalin trying to panic the public.

A smaller cool fact is that the iconic SR-71 Blackbird (probably known to most through COD Black Ops) was actually originally named the RS-71 (Reconissance Stealth and that it was accidentally mixed up in a speech President Johnson gave so to save the President an embarrassment of having "misread" it they just switched around the RS to SR.

 

[The Quasar]

I don't know this anecdote, despite I have a good interest in UFO and story. Mengele was "famous" (Todesengel aka Angel of Death as macabre nickname). He was notorious for the selection of victims to be killed in the gas chambers and for performing unscientific and often deadly human experiments on prisoners. His "obsession" was twins. If i can suggest you a film real interesting (with Sci-FI and story mixed) that's "The boys from Brazil". If you haven't seen it, I think you have to do that :;

 

[Ares]

I don't know this anecdote, despite I have a good interest in UFO and story. Mengele was "famous" (Todesengel aka Death Angel was his macabre nickname). He was notorious for the selection of victims to be killed in the gas chambers and for performing unscientific and often deadly human experiments on prisoners. His "obsession" was twins. If i can suggest you a film real interesting

yeah he was quite famous for the atrocities he committed during the war, if you've watched the sherlock holmes movie where they altered a person to look like someone else that is sort of what I was referring to what Mengele did for Stalin.

 

[HanPyol]

South Korean dictator Park Chung-hee ruled South Korea from 1963 to 1979. During his regime, there were regulations over woman's clothing. It was illegal for women to wear skirts ending twenty centimeters above the knee or higher, and schools strictly enforced the law by having teachers measure skirts before classes. Women's hair length was also regulated.