To be fair, there are only so many things teachers can get into during a school year, so unless you decided to dedicate yourself to the study of history, there are a great many things you’ll never hear about unless you stumble across them on accident.
Even if you do decide to dedicate your life to studying history, your focus will likely have to be so narrow that there will be many, many things outside your purview.
So, for all of us, here are 16 things that – for varying reasons – no teacher is probably going to bring up.
16. I knew this but it still blows me away.
Native Americans weren’t granted citizenship until the 1920s.
Aboriginals, the native owners of Australia were not even considered human until 1967.
It was 1947 for natives in Canada.
15. That’s a man I could work for!
Captain Bartholomew Roberts the pirate gave his pirate crew a bedtime.
Gotta have your eight hours so you can make that pillaging tomorrow!
14. This is one of my favorite things about history.
How much in common we have with people of the past.
Pictures, sculptures and carvings going all the way back showing sex, drugs, drinking, partying and graffiti that you would see on an abandoned building or train today. The plight of the middle class and class struggles vs the upper class is the same today as for thousands of years. If we could listen to a court jester, their jokes would ring true today more than likely. Outside of technology making things faster/easier in a sense, were still doing/enjoying/complaining about most of the same things we have been for millennia.
“Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it” and “theres nothing new under the sun” is real.
13. I mean. I’m glad we have bananas?
The US government went to war in Guatemala over bananas.
12. They really don’t teach you about this in school.
How bad the rape of Nanking was.
11. I had no idea!
Hitler’s nephew served for the US in WW2.
10. We don’t like to talk about it.
It took me an anthropology class in college to learn about human zoos.
That is zoos where white people paid money to see aboriginal people from various regions in cages. It happened all over the world, including in the bronx zoo in, like, the 1920’s. I had never heard about anything like that in any schooling before that, and I doubt most people have.
9. Sometimes movies can teach us things, too!
Well, until I saw Lincoln, I had never heard of Thaddeus Stevens, who seems to be a much greater believer in the equality of men than many.
8. The good old days?
The Tulsa Race Massacre.
In the early 1920s Tulsa Oklahoma had a very affluent black neighborhood called black wall street. Basically many African Americans were doing better financially than whites. White folks were angry about their success and wanted their land. An African American was wrongly accused of assault by a white girl and the whites used this as an excuse to attack the neighborhood including dropping bombs from WWI era planes.
Many were killed and beaten. Over 10,000 people were left homeless due to houses and businesses being burned down.
This is the greatest single incident of racial violence in US history.
7. We already knew he was a d*ck, but…
Stalin son killed himself in a concentration camp yet Stalin mocked him until his death.
6. Men really don’t deserve to run anything.
The Japanese military kidnapped hundreds (if not thousands) of Korean and Chinese women during WWII and forced them to be sex workers for the Japanese military.
Some Japanese women were even drafted to be comfort women, but they didn’t know what they were being drafted for until they were there. It’s actually a pretty common thing in many wars, because the military wants to keep the soldiers “pure”. By kidnapping these women, they know that they aren’t riddled with STD’s. It’s very sad, especially because when the war is over, many of the camps are cleared and these women are forced to find their way back home, without even knowing the war is over.
If they aren’t too afraid or ashamed to go back home, they’re usually turned away from their families because they are so ashamed of what happened.
5. Way too many stories like this from all over the world.
About the Lost children of Francoism.
These children were abducted from Republican parents who were either in jail or had been assassinated by Nationalist troops during the Spanish Civil War and Francoist Spain. These children were then given to families that would practice Catholicism and nationalism. However this lasted after 1975, when Franco died. By then this practice was already a trafficking business run by nuns, doctors and nurses.
My mum is a Lost children and she has told me that almost anyone has found their parents.
4. So much awful out there we’re never taught.
Turkey genocided Armenians.
Those stats just kinda get tossed in with WW1, so they don’t really stand out. Until you look and see that it didn’t have anything to do with the actual war. ” Hey everyone is pretty busy with the Germans, let’s get rid of these Armenians.”
3. I have no idea why humans can be so horrible.
That Argentina pretty much eliminated the black race.
They had ways to get rid of the men first. Not as much for the women though. Once the male to female ratio drastically dropped (Black population) the women were pretty much forced to sleep with white men, in order to wash out the “Black”. The Black population was so low, the Argentine government pretty much removed the “Black” option as a race. Crazy how they succeed.
2. Uncomfortable to think about, really.
If you go back far enough, everyone’s ancestry contains rape at some point.
1. Not surprised.
Central Park, in New York, was created under eminent domain and razed a predominantly black and Irish community called Seneca Village. Most of the inhabitants were compensated but many felt they did not receive fair market value.
According to the Louise Chipley Slavicek, author of New York’s Central Park, the pro-park lobby were largely “affluent merchants, bankers and landowners”, who wanted a “fashionable and safe public place where they and their families could mingle and promenade”.
It took me forever to write this article because I was off Googling details for some of these!
Were these surprises to you? Did you already know about some of them?
I’m always fascinated to learn about everything I don’t know!
