During prohibition, grape concentrate bricks called Vine-Glo were sold.

On the packaging, it included a very specific warning: "After dissolving the brick in a gallon of water, do not place the liquid in a jug away in the cupboard for twenty days, because then it would turn into wine.".

Cassereddit Report

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During the Irish famine the Choctaw Nation from the USA sent financial aid to them and while a small amount at the time it was seen as a great gesture in return during Covid many Irish people donated money to the Navajo Nation to help them. There’s a statue in County Cork to commemorate it as well.

here is one source

and another

Genybear12 Report

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The Netherlands sends Canada 20,000 tulips every year for liberating them during WW2. The Netherlands also has a cemetery dedicated to Canadian fallen troops.

Source

redman9000 Report

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Humans developed agriculture around 12000 years ago. By storing grain, huge numbers of rodents flourished. Cats showed up to eat the rodents, and humans learned that if they took care of the cats, the cats would control the rodents. Therefore, it was the invention of agriculture that led to the domestication of the house cat.

redvariation Report

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Mongolian invasion of Japan was stopped by a typhoon. When they tried again, they were stopped by another typhoon. To this day these were the only two typhoons recorded in that place.

treearemadeofbark Report

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Abraham Lincoln's son (Robert Todd Lincoln) was present at three different presidential assassinations. After McKinley, he decided not to accept any more invitations.

Remote-Building3208 Report

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The Canadian-Denmark whiskey war was probably the most polite war ever. It involved a small island off the coast of Greenland. The Canadians claimed it by putting the Canadian flag and bottles of Canadian whiskey on the rock, and the Danes would replace it with schnapps and the Danish flag. Both sides reached an agreement to split the island in 2022. I'm guessing this is more well known to Canadians and Danes than some of the rest of us.

censorized Report

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Ancient Romans would put sandals on the hands of sleeping people then tickle their face so they would slap themselves.

WhimsicalWhispere Report

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Portugal had a Death Queen and it is an insane real love story.

If you like Romeo& Juliette, search for the story of Dom Pedro and Dona Inês for the real life version of it.

Long story short: Dom Pedro was 1st in line to be the next king of Portugal so his father, the King, arranged a marriage suited for his position with a Spanish noble lady. But the future King fell in love with one of the ladies in waiting of his bride, Dona Inês.

They got married in secret and had a bunch of kids. The King didn't like that and sent his Knights to kill her. Dom Pedro went bat s**t crazy, found the Knights and killed them and ripped of the heart of one of the Knights.

Then he got the corpse of Dona Inês, put it on the throne and made the nobles pay allegiance to her by kissing her hand.

He still became King in the end. There is a lot more too this story but all of it is crazy but true facts. Portuguese Royals history is full of stuff that could be part of Game of Thrones.

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The Great Emu War in Australia (1932) - soldiers armed with machine guns fought emus to protect crops. The emus won.

RadiantRapturreee Report

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For Americans: the Coal Wars were a series of armed conflicts from the 1890s to the 1930s in which the exploitation of mining workers led to riots and then outright battles between the workers and the armed mercenaries hired by mining companies to terrorize and kill them. It culminated in the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921, which ended when the United States Army was deployed on domestic soil to eliminate the strikers.

And then our nation collectively memory holed it because we wouldn’t want other exploited workers to get ideas.

TimeViking Report

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The Chinese sparrow hunt in 1960. It was to protect crops but it allowed invasions of locusts that no longer had a predator and this caused the great Chinese famine.

NismanNoMurio Report

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The reason we have coal is because trees weren't biodegradable back then, so it just underwent the geological proces and formed underground under pressure and high temperatures.

The fungus that breaks down trees, only evolved 40 million years ago.

SpidermanBread Report

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Richard Nixon conspired with Saigon to win the 1968 presidential election. He interfered with the Johnson administration’s attempt at a peace treaty. This was literal treason and I feel that very few people know about it. The NYT wrote a piece about it in 2017.

AlertOtter58 Report

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Morocco was the first country to recognize the United States of America as an independent country.

prosperosniece Report

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A very recent historical fact that is weirdly not talked about as much as it should be -- Microsoft had accumulated such a big monopoly over the personal computer market through the 80s and 90s that in 1997 Microsoft was nearly broken apart by the US government. In an attempt to avoid an investigation, Microsoft invested nearly $150 million into a then-failing Apple Computer to give the US government less ammunition in a potential anti-trust case. This saved Apple from bankruptcy and helped them to become one of the biggest tech companies in history. Microsoft, however, profited off of this investment. In 2003, Microsoft sold their shares in Apple for nearly $600 million.

bbbbbthatsfivebees Report

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In general, most of the "peaceful" movements that resulted in freedoms we enjoy today (civil rights, labor organizing, anti-war protests, the anti-colonialist movements led by Gandhi and Mandela, etc), required **significant** direct action and targeted political violence in order to succeed.

kit_mitts Report

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Stegasaurous died out 145 million years ago, T Rex 72-65 million years ago, the Stegasaurous was as old to the T-Rex as the T-Rex is to us. 


Grasses evolved about 70 Mya.

Ok-disaster2022 Report

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Many people know about Neanderthals, but there were also other human species as well. Homo heidelbergensis and Denisovans the other ones that we know of that existed in the time of Homo Sapiens.

space_llama_karma Report

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Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on the same day.

Idea_not_loading Report

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The Pony Express lasted only a year and a half.

TheAndrewBrown: It does seem to have been marketed heavily, but it was also one of the first ways to communicate across the country. It also went bankrupt because the telegraph was invented and made it obsolete, which led to it being romanticized like a lot of other “old west” stuff was that got replaced by newer technology. But it was a huge deal during that year and a half

Civil-Resolution3662 Report

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The tale of the dancing plague of 1518. In Strasbourg (modern-day France), a woman named Frau Troffea began dancing uncontrollably in the streets. Within a month, about 400 people had joined her. The phenomenon, now believed to be a case of mass hysteria or ergot poisoning, resulted in several deaths from heart attack, stroke, or exhaustion.

InterestingAsian9742 Report

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Humanity was likely nearly wiped out about 900,000 years ago when our ancestors were reduced to about 1280 breeding individuals and stayed around that many for 117,000 years.

limbodog Report

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In the 1920s Liberia had a general election, which the True Whig party won with 243,000 votes.
There were 15,000 registered voters for the election.

Aardvark_Man Report

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Bicycle face.

"In the 19th century, a mysterious condition called "bicycle face" was created to scare women from riding bicycles - **flushed cheeks, hard clenched jaw, bulging eyes** are just some of the symptoms".

Few_Valuable2654 Report

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Coca Cola still uses coca leaves in their formula but just for the flavor. They are the only US company that is legally allowed to import coca leaves. The processed leaves are then sold to a pharmaceutical company.

sn0m0ns Report

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More people died during the production of the V2 rocket than were killed by it as a weapon of war.

tim_to_tourach Report

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Thomas Jefferson created his own version of the Bible by hand that removed the whole first testament and any and all mentions and references to miracles and the supernatural. It’s called a Jefferson Bible and you can still get them.

Vulcan_Jedi Report

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The magician Harry Houdini hated people who claimed to be psychics and clairvoyants so much that he once testified before congress in an attempt to get fortune readings and things like that made illegal.

realfakejames Report

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In the early 1900s, the Tennessee Children’s Home Society was an illegal orphanage that kidnapped babies from poor households and sold them.

If you're interested, read the book Before We Were Yours.

Reach-for-the-sky_15 Report

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