What is your niche historical fact?

[cocobellass]

I love hearing them, the more rare yhe better. NO CONSPIRACY THEORIES

[Sargentcaptain]

The Black Hand and Gavrilo Princip's motives to kill the Archduke for some reason seem to elude a lot of people nowadays. Basic story is, Slavs were treated as 2nd class citizens in Austria-Hungry, riots were common and in the early 1910s there was serious talk about creating a tristate with Croatia as the representative of Slavic peoples. That would then lead to a strong Austria-Hungry-Croatia. On the other side were Serbs and The Black Hand who wanted Croatia and the rest of the region in their hands, naturally having a strong Austria-Hungry-Croatia would have put and end to their plans. Since the Archduke was leading the cause of a tristate solution, and since he was visiting Sarajevo, which Serbs always wanted for themselves for good, The Black Hand seized the opportunity and killed Franz Ferdinand. This led to WWI. Since Austria-Hungry, and by proxy - Croatia, were gonna lose the war, Croatia decided to switch sides and join in with Serbs forming several new states in rapid succession, eventually settling on Yugoslavia. And from there things get more and more complicated, but the interesting thing to think about is that without Gavrilo Princip, Yugoslavia (the leader of the 3rd world countries during the Cold War) would never have existed, though, even without him, Croatia would have likely have been a major player on the world stage, only on a different side.

[Effably]

I have so many! But a rather recently made historical one is the Whisky war as it used to be on-going and we're coming up on its one year peace anniversary!

Perhaps not known by many, but Canada and Denmark have been embroiled in a state of border dispute, proclaimed a war, from 1978 to June last year (2022).

The war has been "fought" over Hans Island, an island about the size of a football field. Both countries have, over the last 40 or so years continually reclaimed and occupied this hostile territory from each other. Often placing a small miniature flag to signify ownership of the island - but leaving no soldiers, mines or anything else.

It was also, in line with the name, seen as good manners to leave some national liqour by your flag so that when the enemy came and took the undefended island back they could take a break and have a few drinks before leaving the island.

Throughout this war there have been 0 casualties and no guns fired. After 44 heartwarming years of war both powers finally decided enough was enough and it came to a peaceful resolution 14th of June 2022. And stands as the best, not really, war I can think of. So if you have nothing better to toast to on Wednesday, there's something.

[msc545]

All wars should be conducted like this. It was the only war I've ever enjoyed reading about. Thank you very much for this.

[jennifer_bloom]

I heard that around 200 million Chinese people died during the communist revolution cause Mao sent people to work in the factories and there weren’t enough farmers to harvest the crops leading to food shortages. It isn’t written in the history books because it makes the government look bad.

[Agape93]

There was a nazi officer in China that saved thousands of civilians from Japanese soldiers

[OddBeMe]

John Wilkes Booth’s brother, Edwin- also an actor- saved Lincoln’s eldest son, Robert, from falling onto a train platform a few years before the assassination.

www.msn.com/.../ar-AA14NwlU

[msc545]

During world war II in Europe, allied and German soldiers took a break from trying to kill each other in the dead of winter and played a game of soccer and enjoyed it so much that they stopped fighting briefly. Legend has it that the men didn't want to go back to fighting, but they were forced to by their officers and the fighting resumed.

[normalice]

The mayflower compact was an agreement between puritans and normal people to basically not bother each other. The puritan way of thinking has sadly infiltrated all walks of life today so such an agreement could never be reached anymore..

[OfDeath]

Michael Faraday wasn't comfortable with mathematics and yet his discoveries led to the current understanding of electromagnetism which is always described using complicated algebra.