49 Fun Facts About Funny History

In 1932 the Australian Army went to war against which animal, and lost?

Emus proved hard to hit even with machine guns: Major Meredith said they faced the bullets 'with the invulnerability of tanks', and the army was recalled in December with most of the birds still at large.

Greece invaded Bulgaria in 1925 after a Greek soldier was shot, by one account while chasing what across the border?

His runaway dog gave the clash its nickname, the War of the Stray Dog; Greek troops occupied Bulgarian border villages until the League of Nations stepped in and a ceasefire followed.

Which of these did Peter the Great tax from 1698 to make Russian men look more like western Europeans?

Beards were old Russia to Peter, who came home from western Europe in 1698 and shaved his courtiers himself; men who paid the tax got a copper token as proof, and police could shave those who had not.

The 1859 Pig War between the US and Britain began when an American farmer shot a pig for doing what?

Eating his potatoes cost the Hudson's Bay Company pig its life and brought American troops and British warships to San Juan Island; nobody else was hurt, and arbitration gave the islands to the US in 1872.

Which US Army captain in the 1859 Pig War standoff later lent his name to a doomed Confederate charge at Gettysburg?

George Pickett landed on San Juan Island with a few dozen soldiers and refused to leave when British warships arrived; no shot was fired, and four years later his name went on Pickett's Charge.

The 1325 War of the Bucket pitted Bologna against which rival city, now famous for balsamic vinegar?

Modena beat Bologna at Zappolino and is said to have carried home a bucket from a well outside Bologna's gate as a trophy; the fighting had begun over a captured castle, not a stolen bucket.

Which Mexican general lost a leg fighting the French in the 1838 Pastry War?

Santa Anna came out of retirement to fight the French at Veracruz, where grapeshot cost him a leg; the wound made him a national hero again and carried him back to the presidency within months.

The shortest war in recorded history, between Britain and Zanzibar in 1896, lasted roughly how long?

38 minutes is the usual count: British warships opened fire at 9:02 a.m. after a sultan who had seized the throne refused an ultimatum to leave the palace, and stopped at about 9:40 once his flag came down.

Which country's prized new warship, the Vasa, sank within minutes of first setting sail in 1628?

Sweden's Vasa had sailed little more than a kilometre when a gust of wind heeled her over; water poured in through the open gunports and she sank in Stockholm harbour in front of the watching crowds.

Michigan lost the 1835 Toledo War to Ohio but was consoled with what territory when it became a state?

The Upper Peninsula struck many Michiganders as a poor trade for Toledo, a worthless wilderness, until rich deposits of copper and iron ore were found there and opinion swung round.

The Toledo War's only bloodshed came when Ohioan Two Stickney, resisting arrest, did what?

Stabbed a Michigan sheriff's deputy: Two Stickney drew a penknife on Joseph Wood during a scuffle in Toledo. The wound was minor, yet Wood was the lone casualty of a war fought mostly with warning shots.

In January 1919 a wave of what swept through Boston's North End at 35 mph, killing 21 people?

Molasses burst from a storage tank holding 2.3 million gallons and injured 150 more people; long after the cleanup, residents said the North End still smelled of it on hot summer days.

In 1814 a giant vat burst in London and sent a deadly wave of what through the St Giles slums?

Beer, well over 100,000 gallons of porter, burst from a 22-foot brewery vat and killed eight people; no one was held responsible, and the brewery even reclaimed the duty it had paid on the lost beer.

In July 1518, dozens of people in Strasbourg started doing what for weeks, unable to stop?

Dancing was at first the city's own prescription: on doctors' advice the council opened guild halls and hired musicians so the afflicted could dance it out, then changed course and banned public dancing.

What was unusual about ex-pope Formosus when Pope Stephen VI tried him in 897?

He had been dead for nine months: Stephen had the corpse dressed in papal robes and propped on a throne while a deacon answered for it, then threw it in the Tiber; within months Stephen was himself strangled.

Roman writers claimed Caligula planned to give which office to his horse Incitatus?

Consul is what Suetonius says Caligula was rumoured to intend for Incitatus, a horse he had already given a marble stall, an ivory manger and slaves; the ancient writers agree the appointment never happened.

'Defenestration', throwing someone out of a window, entered English after events in which city?

Prague gave English the word after 1618, when Protestant nobles threw two Catholic governors and their secretary from a castle window; all three survived, and the revolt that followed grew into the Thirty Years' War.

The astronomer Tycho Brahe lost part of his nose in 1566 in a duel over what?

Who was the better mathematician was the quarrel that led Tycho and his cousin Manderup Parsberg to duel; the two later became good friends, and Tycho wore a brass nose for the rest of his life.

What did Charles VI of France and other sufferers of a famous medieval delusion believe?

That they were made of glass, and might shatter, was a fear recorded among Europeans from Charles VI's day into the 1600s; historians link it to clear glass being a new, precious and almost magical material.

How did Oregon's Highway Division dispose of a huge dead whale on a beach in 1970?

Blew it up with dynamite, half a ton of it, hoping to leave bite-sized scraps for seagulls; instead huge chunks of blubber rained down on the onlookers at Florence, and one flattened a parked car.

Around 1781 Benjamin Franklin wrote a mock scientific proposal urging the study of what?

Farting, Franklin told the Royal Academy of Brussels, deserved a prize more than its dry mathematics question; he proposed a drug to make it 'agreeable as perfumes' and called other sciences 'scarcely worth a FART-HING'.

The 532 AD Nika riots that burned much of Constantinople began with fans of what?

Chariot racing teams called the Blues and Greens, usually bitter rivals, joined forces against Emperor Justinian under the chant 'Nika' ('conquer'); some 30,000 people died, by Procopius's count, when his troops stormed the Hippodrome.

Joshua Norton of San Francisco declared himself what in 1859?

Emperor of the United States was the title Norton, a merchant ruined by a failed bet on rice, sent to a San Francisco newspaper; the city played along, and the banknotes he printed were honoured around town.

Soon after his 1859 proclamation, San Francisco's Joshua Norton decreed what?

The abolition of the US Congress was among his first decrees; when Congress met anyway, Norton ordered General Winfield Scott to march in with the army and clear its halls, and was ignored.

In medieval Europe, which animals were most often put on trial in secular courts?

Pigs ran loose in medieval streets in great numbers and sometimes killed small children, so courts tried and hanged them like human murderers, as happened to a sow at Falaise in Normandy in 1386.

Why did Liechtenstein abolish its army in 1868?

Financial reasons: when the German Confederation dissolved in 1866, Liechtenstein no longer owed it soldiers, so parliament refused to pay for the 80-man force and the prince disbanded it in 1868.

Britain lost all of the 20th-century Cod Wars to which country?

Iceland kept widening its fishing limits and won each standoff, helped by a threat to quit NATO in the middle of the Cold War; in 1976 Britain accepted a 200-mile Icelandic fishing zone.

1904 Olympic marathon 'winner' Fred Lorz was disqualified because he had done what?

Ridden part of the way in a car: Lorz quit with cramps at nine miles, rode the next eleven, then got out and ran into the stadium; he called it a joke, and a year later won the Boston Marathon on foot.

1904 Olympic marathon winner Thomas Hicks was kept going with brandy, egg whites and small doses of which poison?

Strychnine, then used in tiny doses as a stimulant, was fed to Hicks twice by handlers who refused him water; by the end he was walking, and his trainers had to help him over the line.

Cuban runner Andarín Carvajal came fourth in the 1904 marathon despite stopping to eat what?

Rotten apples from an orchard gave him stomach cramps, so he lay down for a nap and still finished fourth; he had lost his money gambling in New Orleans and reached St. Louis by walking and hitching rides.

A bloodless 335-year 'war', ended by a Dutch ambassador's visit in 1986, pitted the Netherlands against which British islands?

The Isles of Scilly were supposedly declared an enemy by a Dutch admiral in 1651 and then forgotten; when a local historian asked in the 1980s, the embassy found no peace treaty, so the ambassador came to end it.

King Henry I of England reportedly died in 1135 after eating too many of what?

Lampreys were a dish Henry was especially fond of, and chroniclers blamed 'a surfeit' of them for his death in Normandy; with his only legitimate son already drowned, the throne fell into years of civil war.

According to Herodotus, what did Xerxes order done to the Hellespont after a storm wrecked his bridge?

Whipped 300 times, in Herodotus's telling, the strait was also given a pair of fetters and a scolding, and the men who had built the wrecked bridge were beheaded before new bridges were laid.

Rebecca, a pet who lived at the White House under Calvin Coolidge, was what kind of animal?

Raccoon Rebecca was sent from Mississippi in 1926 to be the Coolidges' Thanksgiving dinner; the president spared her instead, gave her a collar of her own at Christmas and walked her on a leash.

In 1801 the townspeople of Cheshire, Massachusetts pooled their cows' milk to make President Jefferson which enormous gift?

A wheel of cheese weighing over 1,200 pounds was pressed in a cider press and hauled to Washington to honour Jefferson's support for religious liberty; he refused free gifts, so he paid $200 for it.

A prankster Toronto lawyer's 1926 will left his fortune to the woman who could do what within ten years?

Have the most babies was the test in what became known as the Great Stork Derby; after a decade of births and court challenges, four Toronto mothers with nine children each shared the money.

Mike the Headless Chicken of Fruita, Colorado survived how long after a botched beheading in 1945?

18 months, because the axe left most of the brain stem and a clot stopped the bleeding; owner Lloyd Olsen fed Mike with a dropper and toured him as a sideshow attraction.

An 1856 US law lets citizens claim unoccupied islands for the United States if they contain what?

Bird droppings, or guano, were the prized fertiliser of the 1850s, so the Guano Islands Act let Americans claim any unowned island with a deposit; the law remains in the US Code.

In the 1942 'Battle of Los Angeles', US Army gunners fired over 1,400 shells at what?

Nothing that was ever identified: the barrage came a day after a Japanese submarine shelled the California coast, the Navy called it a false alarm, and a later Air Force history blamed stray weather balloons.

On a night march near Karánsebes in 1788, the Austrian army panicked and took casualties fighting whom?

Itself: in the traditional story, hussars and infantry quarrelled over schnapps, a shot rang out, someone shouted that the Turks had come and units fired on each other in the dark; the famous toll of 10,000 is unsupported.

In 1992, Pepsi's Number Fever promotion in the Philippines caused riots after it accidentally did what?

Printed 800,000 winning bottle caps: the number 349, announced as a million-peso winner, was on that many ordinary caps. Pepsi refused to pay the prizes, and a blast aimed at one of its trucks killed two people.

During the First World War, Woodrow Wilson kept what grazing on the White House lawn?

Sheep grazed the White House lawn as a wartime gesture by the Wilsons, saving the manpower to mow it; when the flock was shorn, the wool was auctioned to raise money for the Red Cross.

William Henry Harrison's 1841 presidency is the shortest in US history, lasting about how long?

31 days after taking the oath on 4 March 1841, Harrison became the first president to die in office; John Tyler took the full office rather than act as a stand-in, and opponents dubbed him 'His Accidency'.

Roman writers say Caligula once lined his army up along the ocean shore and ordered the soldiers to gather what?

Seashells were to fill the soldiers' helmets as 'spoils from the Ocean', Suetonius reports, after Caligula drew the army up in battle order on the shore; historians still argue over what the order meant.

The brief 1969 war between El Salvador and Honduras is nicknamed after which sport, whose matches helped spark it?

Soccer gave the 'Football War' its name: riots around three World Cup qualifiers between the two countries were the spark, but the deeper causes were land reform and Salvadoran migrants in Honduras.

The 1739 War of Jenkins' Ear was named after a body part allegedly severed by whom?

A Spanish coast guard captain boarded Robert Jenkins' ship in 1731 and, by Jenkins' account, sliced off his ear; seven years later opposition politicians took up the story and used it to push Britain into war.

In March 1876, chunks of what fell from a clear sky over Bath County, Kentucky?

Red meat fell in flakes for several minutes over a Kentucky farmyard; two men who tasted it guessed mutton or venison, and the favoured explanation is a flock of vultures vomiting in mid-flight.

In 1962, a girls' boarding school in Tanganyika was forced to close by an epidemic of what?

Laughter began with three girls and spread through the mission school until it had to shut; the pupils carried it home to their villages, and about 1,000 people were affected before it died out.

The ghost word 'dord', printed in Webster's 1934 dictionary as a synonym for density, arose from what?

A misread abbreviation slip caused it: a note reading 'D or d', meaning the letter could stand for density, was set as one word. An editor caught it in 1939, yet 'dord' was not fully removed until 1947.