7 Of The Most Fun Historical Facts You Need To Know Posted by Julia Corrigan Last Updated: March 2, 2024 7 Of The Most Fun Historical Facts You Need To Know I love history, and I’m learning new fun facts all the time. It’s hard not to gush about them, but I’ve found an outlet: this post series, where I share all my fun, random facts with you. So here are seven more for you to enjoy! 1. A hidden, ancient city was recently discovered in the Amazon, and according to the BBC, it’s “older than any other site we know [of]” in the area. The city is about 2,500 years old, seems to have been inhabited for up to 1,000 years, and “appears to be even bigger than the well-known Mayan societies in Mexico and Central America.” 2. The first man to reach the North Pole may have been Matthew Henson, an African American Baltimore native who left home to join a sailing crew at the age of 12. On board the Katie Hines, he traveled all around the world, from North America to Asia to North Africa. While working for a furrier in Washington, DC, he met Robert Peary, a Navy officer and explorer who was impressed by his travel experience and immediately hired him as a personal assistant for his upcoming exploration of Nicaragua. 3. The first top hat ever worn in public reportedly got the man who wore it arrested. According to an 1899 article in the Huddersfield Chronicle, which claims to have been reprinting an article from January 1797, a man referred to as “John Hetherington, haberdasher” was charged with “breach of the peace, and inciting to riot” after wearing a silk hat of his own invention, which the article describes as “calculated to frighten timid people.” 4. The earliest known Egyptian pyramid isn’t the perfectly shaped kind we might think of. The three famous pyramids of Giza have been standing for about 4,500 years, but it actually took the Egyptians quite a while before that to figure out how to build them in that shape. The first stone building in Egypt was a step pyramid, built for King Djoser in or around 2780 BCE by an architect named Imhotep. Instead of smooth, tapering sides, it featured, well, steps. 5. A lot of us (incorrectly, as it turns out) think of George Washington Carver as the man who invented peanut butter, but not a lot of people know of his actual, far more important development — crop rotation — which revolutionized farming. 6. Teotihuacán wasn’t actually built by the Aztecs; apparently, they just found it. And according to National Geographic, the city’s true origins “are a mystery.” 7. And finally, the first Japanese citizen to fly in space was not an astronaut but a journalist. Forty-eight-year-old Toyohiro Akiyama’s employer, the Tokyo Broadcasting System, paid for him to fly commercially aboard a Soviet spacecraft. If there are any dramatic, interesting, or cool facts from history that you think I would like, please drop them in the comments! I always love learning more historical facts, and I’m sure other people do too. Source link
I love history, and I’m learning new fun facts all the time. It’s hard not to gush about them, but I’ve found an outlet: this post series, where I share all my fun, random facts with you. So here are seven more for you to enjoy! 1. A hidden, ancient city was recently discovered in the Amazon, and according to the BBC, it’s “older than any other site we know [of]” in the area. The city is about 2,500 years old, seems to have been inhabited for up to 1,000 years, and “appears to be even bigger than the well-known Mayan societies in Mexico and Central America.” 2. The first man to reach the North Pole may have been Matthew Henson, an African American Baltimore native who left home to join a sailing crew at the age of 12. On board the Katie Hines, he traveled all around the world, from North America to Asia to North Africa. While working for a furrier in Washington, DC, he met Robert Peary, a Navy officer and explorer who was impressed by his travel experience and immediately hired him as a personal assistant for his upcoming exploration of Nicaragua. 3. The first top hat ever worn in public reportedly got the man who wore it arrested. According to an 1899 article in the Huddersfield Chronicle, which claims to have been reprinting an article from January 1797, a man referred to as “John Hetherington, haberdasher” was charged with “breach of the peace, and inciting to riot” after wearing a silk hat of his own invention, which the article describes as “calculated to frighten timid people.” 4. The earliest known Egyptian pyramid isn’t the perfectly shaped kind we might think of. The three famous pyramids of Giza have been standing for about 4,500 years, but it actually took the Egyptians quite a while before that to figure out how to build them in that shape. The first stone building in Egypt was a step pyramid, built for King Djoser in or around 2780 BCE by an architect named Imhotep. Instead of smooth, tapering sides, it featured, well, steps. 5. A lot of us (incorrectly, as it turns out) think of George Washington Carver as the man who invented peanut butter, but not a lot of people know of his actual, far more important development — crop rotation — which revolutionized farming. 6. Teotihuacán wasn’t actually built by the Aztecs; apparently, they just found it. And according to National Geographic, the city’s true origins “are a mystery.” 7. And finally, the first Japanese citizen to fly in space was not an astronaut but a journalist. Forty-eight-year-old Toyohiro Akiyama’s employer, the Tokyo Broadcasting System, paid for him to fly commercially aboard a Soviet spacecraft. If there are any dramatic, interesting, or cool facts from history that you think I would like, please drop them in the comments! I always love learning more historical facts, and I’m sure other people do too.
