1.
In 1933, a conspiracy now known as “The Business Plot” or “The Wall Street Putsch” sought to overthrow US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and install a dictator and fascist government in his place. According to NPR, “Critics on the right worried that Roosevelt was a Communist, a socialist or the tool of a Jewish conspiracy.”
In his 1973 book The Plot to Seize the White House, author Jules Archer wrote, “if we remember Major General Smedley Darlington Butler for nothing else, we owe him an eternal debt of gratitude for spurning the chance to become dictator of the United States — and for making damned sure no one else did either.”
2.
In the early 1930s, farmers in Western Australia were facing a peculiar plight: emus were destroying significant amounts of their crops. The short-lived, probably poorly thought-out solution to the problem, wherein “three members of the Royal Australian Artillery were assigned to cull roughly 20,000 emus using machine guns,” has become known as the Emu War. Fortunately for the emus, but unfortunately for the pride of the service members, fewer than 1,000 emus were killed over a period of two months. Australians declared war on emus — and lost.
3.
In 1943, at the height of WWII, British Intelligence launched a far-fetched mission to trick the Germans, and it worked. The deception was called Operation Mincemeat. It involved planting false “secret” documents on a corpse, which was then planted off the coast of Spain for the Germans to discover.
The corpse was given the convincing false identity of Major William Martin of the Royal Marines, and his documents “revealed” that the Allied Powers would soon be invading Greece and Sardinia; in fact, they would be invading Sicily. The Germans fell for the ruse, “doubling the number of troops sent to Sardinia” and sending additional troops to Greece. After the Allied invasion of Sicily began in July 1943, the Allies took just over a month to gain control of the island.
4.
At the age of 12, Sacagawea, born a Shoshone, was taken captive and made a slave to the Hidatsa. Through either “a trade, gambling payoff or purchase,” she became the “property” of Toussaint Charbonneau, a French-Canadian fur trader who joined the Lewis and Clark expedition.
In August 1805, the expedition made contact with the Shoshone tribe. Sacagawea, for whom Shoshone was a mother tongue, served as the translator for Lewis and Clark’s meeting with the Shoshone chief, Cameahwait. Apparently, when the two got to talking, they came to a shocking realization: the chief was, in fact, her own brother. The two shared an emotional reunion, and tears were shed.
5.
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the first named cat in recorded history lived during the reign of Thutmose III, at the beginning of Egypt’s New Kingdom, in the 15th century BCE. The cat’s name was Nedjem, which meant “sweet,” or “pleasant.”
“I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping,” Lincoln reportedly said. He recounted walking through an empty White House, where he kept hearing mourners but couldn’t see anybody. Finally, he entered the East Room; and reportedly said, “There I met with a sickening surprise.”
“Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse with funeral vestments,” Lamon recalled Lincoln saying. “Around it were soldiers who were stationed acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, some gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. ‘Who is dead in the White House?’ I demanded one of the soldiers. ‘The President,’ was his answer; ‘he was killed by an assassin!'”
7.
In the late 1400s, noblewoman Caterina Sforza was the ruler of both Imola and Forlì in central Italy. When Cesare Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI, laid siege to the fortress at Forlì, Sforza barricaded her troops and herself inside. After failed attempts to breach the fortress, her enemies paraded out her hostage children and threatened to kill them.
Sforza apparently remained unfazed. Niccolo Machiavelli reported that she showed no fear, even daring her foes to go ahead and do it; he wrote that she shouted, “Do it, if you want to: hang them even in front of me,” and then, lifting her skirt, declared, “here I have what’s needed to make others!”
…It’s improbable that it happened exactly as Machiavelli recorded, but it makes for a great story. And Sforza, nicknamed “The Tiger,” was certainly a formidable force.
8.
On March 17, 1905, Franklin Delano Roosevelt married Eleanor Roosevelt, née Roosevelt. They both bore the last name “Roosevelt” because they were, in fact, cousins — fifth cousins!
9.
Most, if not all, of the astronauts on board the Challenger would have survived the initial explosion of the shuttle; it wasn’t the explosion, but the 200-mile-per-hour crash into the Atlantic that killed them. Most likely, though, the crew would not have been conscious of the disaster, as the rapid depressurization of the cabin would have caused them to lose consciousness.
According to the Gallery of Lost Art, the portrait “is known to have deeply mortified Churchil”; apparently, Winston Churchil and his wife were both extremely upset by the picture, and “were hurt that Sutherland had seen Churchill as ‘a gross and cruel monster.'”
The Telegraph writes that “the painting was taken out in the dead of night by Lady Churchill’s loyal private secretary, driven by her older brother to a country house and burned so far away from the road that nobody ever noticed.”
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