I just wanted to see what this board could come up with

If you are asked to give one history fact at a party to knock people's socks off, what are you going with?


Mine: After the Civil War, many confederate families moved to Brazil due to Brazil incentivizing wanting experienced cotton farmers. Many families settled and created a town called Americana, Brazil. To this day the town annually hosts a party to remember their Civil War era ancestors and wear Confederate army uniforms as well as dresses from the same time period.

21 people died in a 1919 flood of molasses in Boston

The shortest war in history lasted 38 minutes

Though accounts vary, some say that as many as 500 retreating Japanese soldiers perished in grisly fashion during the Ramree Island crocodile massacre

https://allthatsinteresting.com/ramree-island-massacre

On this day in 1927 was the bloody Santa Claus Bank Robbery in Cisco (Eastland County), Texas.

" It all began on December 23, 1927, around noon when Marshall Ratliff, Henry Helms, Robert Hill, all ex-cons, and Louis Davis, a relative of Helms, held up the First National Bank in Cisco. Ratliff had been caught with his brother Lee after robbing a bank in Valera, and they had each served only a year of their sentences before being pardoned by Governor Miriam A. Ferguson. They had planned to rob the Cisco bank together, but Lee had already been arrested again. So Marshall pulled in Helms and Hill, whom he knew from Huntsville…"

" During this period three or four Texas banks a day were being robbed, and in response, the Texas Bankers Association had offered a $5,000 reward to anyone shooting a bank robber during the crime. It was partly this reward that turned a simple bank robbery into a deadly crime. "

" A fusillade of gunfire began, as many citizens who owned guns were now outside the bank. The robbers forced all of the people in the bank out the door and towards their car. Several of these hostages were wounded as they emerged into the alley, including Alex Spears, the bank president. Most of the customers escaped; however, two small girls, Laverne Comer and Emma May Robertson, were taken as hostages. In a shootout in the alley, as the robbers tried to get to their car, Chief Bedford and Deputy George Carmichael were mortally wounded; Bedford died several hours later, and Carmichael held on until January 17. Ratliff and Davis were also wounded in the shootout, Davis severely."
MY COMMENT:
(You can't accuse Eastland County residents of shying away from enjoying a good gunfight.)

" Helms was identified as the one who had gunned down both lawmen and was given the death sentence in late February. After an unsuccessful insanity plea, he was executed by electric chair on September 6, 1929. Ratliff was first convicted of armed robbery on January 27, 1928, and sentenced to 99 years in prison. On March 30 he was sentenced to execution for his role in the deaths of Bedford and Carmichael, although no one could testify to having seen him fire a gun in the bank."

Marshall Ratliff subsequently killed a jailer in an escape attempt and was lynched by a mob of Eastland County citizens on November 19, 1929. Had to hang him twice. The knot came loose the first time.

6 dead, 8 wounded in the robbery.

https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/santa-claus-bank-robbery

The first major land battle of the American civil war was fought in Manassa, VA. A man named Wilmer McLeans house was damaged during the fighting. Afterwards he moved his family to the quiet village of Appomattox, VA. On April 9, 1865 Robert E Lee surrendered to US Grant in McLeans front parlor.

The Magna Carta was annulled by Pope Innocent III and then reissued numerous times throughout history.

The Tuskegee Airmen DID NOT escort ANY 8th Air Force B-17s over Germany in WWII.

When the Iowa Class Battleships fire a full broadside they DO NOT move sideways…. Not even a half inch…

That's pretty incredible if true. The recoil from those guns has to be a tremendous amount of energy.

At the 1904 Olympics in St. Louis, the marathon was strange. The first place finisher did most of the race in a car, the guy in second almost died from eating rat poison, and the fourth place finisher raced in dress pants and shoes, and took a nap by the side of the road for part of the race.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-1904-olympic-marathon-may-have-been-the-strangest-ever-14910747/

The US Army intentionally poisoned all of San Francisco in 1950

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sea-Spray

Operation Tiger:

Prior to dday, the allies had a training beach landing in which about 750 soldiers died because of friendly fire, poor communication and a uboat attack

Cyrus McCormick the inventor of the reaper was a witness of the murder of Barton Key by Dan Sickles and testified at Sickles' trial.

Nixon vetoed free universal daycare in 1971.

Many holdouts from ww2 were discovered in the jungles of Southeast Asia and the Pacific over the following decades, with the last verified Japanese holdout, Private Teruo Nakamura, surrendering on the island of Morotai in 1974.

30 years later after ww2 was officially over.

https://allthatsinteresting.com/teruo-nakamura

Edit -

Here is a story about another one.

https://www.military.com/off-duty/movies/2022/12/14/one-japanese-soldier-continued-fight-30-years-after-wwii.html#:~:text=When%20Japanese%20soldier%20Hiroo%20Onoda,he%20finally%20surrendered%20in%201974.

Eddie Richenbacher, America's most successful WW1 flying ace, crash landed in the Pacific Ocean in 1942 and survived 24 days adrift at sea. Just a year earlier he barely survived a passenger airline crash outside of Atlanta.

John Tyler….the 10th President, born in the late 1700's….still has one living GRANDSON still alive today…Harrison Tyler!!

That reminds me that the last civil war pensioner died in 2020.

In 1898 Morgan Robertson published a novella titled Futility, in which he described how the largest vessel afloat, the Titan, an engineering marvel considered to be unsinkable, sails across the Atlantic (equipped with the minimum number of lifeboats allowed by regulations), strikes an iceberg and sinks, resulting in the deaths of most of the 3,000 passengers and crew.

Uncannily similar to the fate of the Titanic in 1912.

LINK - Futility

Alan Eugene Magee (January 13, 1919 December 20, 2003) was an American airman during World War II who survived a 22,000-foot (6,700 m) fall from his damaged B-17 Flying Fortress.

On January 3, 1943, his Flying FortressB-17F-27-BO, 41-24620, nicknamed "Snap! Crackle! Pop!"[2]part of the 360th Bomb Squadron, 303rd Bomb Group,[3] was on a daylight bombing run over Saint-Nazaire, France. This was Magee's seventh mission.

Magee left his ball turret when it became inoperative after being damaged by German flak, and discovered his parachute had been torn and rendered useless. Another flak hit then blew off a section of the right wing, causing the aircraft to enter a deadly spin. Magee, in the process of moving from the bomb bay to the radio room, blacked out from lack of oxygen because of the high altitude and was thrown clear of the aircraft. He fell over four miles before crashing through the glass roof of the St. Nazaire railroad station. The glass roof shattered, mitigating the force of Magee's impact. Rescuers found him on the floor of the station.

Magee was taken as a prisoner of war and given medical treatment by his captors. He had 28 shrapnel wounds in addition to his injuries from the fall: several broken bones, severe damage to his nose and eye, lung and kidney damage, and a nearly severed right arm.

Magee was liberated in May 1945 and received the Air Medal for meritorious conduct and the Purple Heart. On January 3, 1993, the 50th anniversary of the attack, the people of St. Nazaire honored Magee and the crew of his bomber by erecting a 6-foot-tall (1.8 m) memorial to them.

BQ78 said:

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Cyrus McCormick the inventor of the reaper was a witness of the murder of Barton Key by Dan Sickles and testified at Sickles' trial.

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Now that's a tidbit I didn't know. For those who don't know, Sickles' trial was the first successful use of the "not guilt by reason of temporary insanity," defense. The Union would probably have been better off if he had been convicted.

The other interesting tidbit is McCormick was in Washington to defend his patents and had been grilled for days by Edwin Stanton trying to invalidate his patents. Then he gets to the Sickles trial and who is sitting at the defendant's table but Edwin Stanton as part of the first legal "Dream Team."

Violet Jessop was a stewardess on the RMS Olympic when it collided with the warship Hawke in 1911 transferred to the RMS Titanic and survived the sinking. She then went on to work on the HMHS Britannic which wound up striking a mine in1916 and sank. Which she also survived.

p_bubel said:

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Violet Jessop was a stewardess on the RMS Olympic when it collided with the warship Hawke in 1911 transferred to the RMS Titanic and survived the sinking. She then went on to work on the HMHS Britannic which wound up striking a mine in1916 and sank. Which she also survived.

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Guess she couldnt take a hint

Green2Maroon said:

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That's pretty incredible if true. The recoil from those guns has to be a tremendous amount of energy.

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The weapons recoil system alas well as the mass of the ship with over 800 feet of the ships hull sitting 40 feet deep in water keeps it pretty steady. It's 18 tons vs 53,000 tons….

Quote:

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A drought, aggravated by Vladimir Lenin's "collective system of agriculture"by which the state seized the property and the produce of Russian peasantsleft the Soviet economy in ruins. By the summer of 1921, at least 35 million people were at risk of starvation. In desperation, Moscow instructed Maxim Gorky, the famous novelist, to issue an appeal to the West for aid. Hoover responded in a July 23 telegram that set into motion the largest and most successful humanitarian relief effort in history.

Under Hoover's leadership, the American Relief Administration (ARA), a private organization, set up 19,000 relief stations in the Soviet Union, from Ukraine to Siberia, delivering food, clothing, and medicine. Employing barely three hundred Americans alongside 120,000 Russians, the ARA fed 10.5 million people per day. It is estimated that the American effort rescued at least ten million people from death by starvation and disease. Historian Anatoly Utkin, grandson of one of the survivors, told an interviewer for The American Experience, that "there was not a spark of hope anywhere. Unexpectedly, without any reason, nobody could explain why Americans came, why they provided food for children."

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What's the story about the USSR manipulating grain prices to buy grain during one of their many famines?

Seems high by about 286 years

1. The Purple Heart medals that are handed out today are still surplus from what they made in anticipation of the invasion of Japan

2. I still can't believe that Churchill, the man who literally saved the entire country, was voted out of office less than 60 days after VE Day

2. He wasn't what the British people wanted in a peacetime leader. He had a chance later and was pretty average. He didn't change anything domestically that Labour had established.