10 Random and Fascinating Historical Facts Everyone Should Know But Almost Nobody Does

No matter who you are or what period of history you may prefer, I know that there is always more information about history to learn. So here are 10 fun facts about history that I recently learned that I thought were interesting enough to share. Enjoy!

1. The recently departed Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, husband of the late Queen Elizabeth II, was not the only male consort in English history. In 1554, King Philip II of Spain married Queen Mary I of England and became King Consort. Mary was a devout Catholic, eager to undo many of the Protestant changes and damage her father, Henry VIII, had done to England. (She failed.) When Mary died, English law ensured that her half-sister Elizabeth, not Philip, became England’s monarch.

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After the death of Mary and the accession of Elizabeth, Philip proposed to marry Elizabeth as well. Spain’s interests lay in the return of England to Catholicism, which had been his main motive in marrying Mary. But Elizabeth was clever: she led him on, all while supporting other Protestant states.

In 1588, Philip sent an army of nearly 130 ships to invade England and depose the Protestant queen. The English had to push the Spanish out of the Channel. One night, at midnight, the English sent eight ghost ships loaded with flammable materials into the Armada.

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The Spanish cut their cables and put to sea, and with the formation broken, had no choice but to sail north to Scotland – and in one of the “worst storms that have struck that coast in recent years”. According to Historic UK, “When the tattered Armada finally returned to Spain, it had lost half its ships and three-quarters of its men.” Philip never gained control of England, and the country’s fortunate defeat of his monstrous Armada was seen as a divine blessing of the Protestant state.

2. On December 12, 1952, a nuclear reactor in a laboratory suffered an explosion. Long before he became president of the United States, 28-year-old lieutenant and nuclear engineer Jimmy Carter volunteered to help dismantle the Canadian nuclear reactor, which had begun to melt down. Carter was part of a team of scientists who took 90-second shifts inside the radioactive core to carefully deconstruct it.

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3. In Japan during the Heian and Kamakura eras, there was a practice called uwanari-uchi, which literally translates to “beating the second wife.” According to author Chieko Irie Mulhern, uwanari-uchi is the “sanctioned right of the first wife to fight the subsequent wife”—basically, if her husband decided to elope with wife #2, wife #1 had the right to attack the other woman, either for revenge or to protect her property and investment in her husband.

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4. The colossal 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora, a volcano in present-day Indonesia, caused a global volcanic winter event that we now call “The Year Without a Summer.” According to Smith College, the eruption was “the most destructive explosion on Earth in 10,000 years” and “10,000 people living on the island were killed.” The eruption affected the entire planet. In New England, for example, frost destroyed crops, heavy snow fell in June, and lakes and rivers remained frozen until July. Summer never came.

5. In 1846, a young Abraham Lincoln reportedly considered joining the ill-fated Donner Party. Lincoln was friends with James F. Reed, an organizing member of the pioneer group, and Reed wanted him to come along. Mary Todd, who already had a young child with Lincoln and was pregnant for the second time, objected to Lincoln joining the expedition. In the end, Lincoln decided to stay in Illinois, where he developed his political career.

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6. Luca Pacioli was a 15th century Franciscan friar, mathematician and friend of Leonardo da Vinci, known as the “father of accounting”. He formalized and published a book on double-entry bookkeeping, which is still the system required by most businesses today.

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7. In 1579, nearly a decade before he became pivotal in England’s defeat of the Spanish Armada, the English explorer and privateer Sir Francis Drake sailed to California in search of new trade routes for England. Like explorer Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo before him, and despite sailing right up the coast of California, Drake failed to “discover” San Francisco Bay. Because the Bay (as well as the land surrounding it) was inhospitable and shrouded in fog, Drake (and Cabrillo before him) missed his existence altogether and instead sailed further north, most likely where Drakes Bay is today.

There, he made contact (by all accounts peacefully) with the Coast Miwok people, nearly three decades before the founding of the Jamestown Colony in Virginia.

8. Lucrezia Borgia had a total of three husbands in her life. The first, Giovanni Sforza, married when she was only 13, while he was 26, and a year after they married, her family tried to kill him.

Giovanni had become a bit of a problem, politically, in 1494 when he was forced to choose between loyalty to his uncle Ludovico Sforza and Lucrezia’s brothers Juan and Cesare.

Juan and Cesare told Lucrezia about their plan to kill Giovanni, after which she would have warned him ahead of time. He fled to Milan disguised as a beggar. Afterwards, her family sought an annulment, claiming that the marriage was never consummated because Giovanni was impotent. Yes. Finally, Giovanni consented to the annulment (which included admitting to lying) when Pope Alexander VI, Lucrezia’s father, said he could keep her dowry.

9. It is estimated that Genghis Khan, the first Khan of the Mongol Empire, killed up to 40 million human beings or 11% of the world’s population. The sheer number of people it killed led to vast reforestation of devastated areas, which environmentalists say could be “the first case of successful man-made global cooling”. Reforested areas due to Khan’s genocides have resulted in the absorption of “an estimated 700 million tons of carbon” from the atmosphere.

According to History.com, Genghis Khan most likely killed “three-quarters of Iran’s current population during the war with the Khwarezmid Empire” and that during his lifetime “China’s population dropped by tens of millions.”

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10. And finally, a wholesome story: Bobbie the Wonder Dog was a beloved canine in Oregon who surprised his owners by showing up on their front doorstep. The almost miraculous part? Bobbie had gotten lost on a trip to Indiana, but his owners lived in Silverton, Oregon! According to the Oregon Encyclopedia, an investigation launched by the Oregon Humane Society “[confirmed] that Bobbie really did travel 2,800 miles in the dead of winter to get home.” Scrappy and emaciated, “a very celebrated dog Bobbie received medals, keys to cities and a jeweled harness and collar.”

If there are dramatic, interesting, or just plain interesting facts from history that you love, please, please, leave them in the comments! I always enjoy learning more historical information and I’m sure others do too. Or, if you prefer to share anonymously, fill out the form below!

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