Give me a mind-blowing history fact - Page 7

Aggie_Journalist

9:38p, 1/25/24

That reminds me, the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm I was obsessed with large humans. So much so that he recruited a regiment called the Potsdam Giants exclusively of people more than 6 feet tall. His interest was so well known that foreign heads of state would sometimes gift him giant soldiers to curry favor

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potsdam_Giants

Thanks and gig'em

Rongagin71

1:16a, 1/26/24

A little genealogical history may explain why beautiful blonde women mostly have blue eyes.

BQ78

11:06a, 1/26/24

Helen Dortch Longstreet, the widow of the Civil War General was a Rosie the Riveter during World War 2 and did not die until 1962. He liked 'em young

Rongagin71

11:17a, 1/26/24

In reply to BQ78

Everybody liked 'em nubile but the real reason was that the man had to have enough economic resources built up to marry back in the days before widespread welfare.
My father's father was 40 when he married a 20 year old cousin of John Nance Garner, and that was considered perfectly okay in those days.

DatTallArchitect

11:37a, 1/26/24

In reply to Rongagin71

He was 42 years older than her

Jabin

11:43a, 1/26/24

In reply to DatTallArchitect

DatTallArchitect said:
He was 42 years older than her

And the issue is . . . . ?

Rongagin71

11:51a, 1/26/24

In reply to Jabin

While I agree that a 42 year difference is getting too far apart, I will note the "nubile" part of my previous post.
These young ladies were giving birth in a time when it was more dangerous than now, and safer if done young.

BQ78

11:56a, 1/26/24

There was a widow of a Confederate veteran living in Waco until about 10 years ago. Got to meet her, nice lady. She was the nurse/caretaker of her husband and to make it palatable to community standards she married him since she lived in his house to take care of him.

Belton Ag

12:03p, 1/26/24

In reply to BQ78

BQ78 said:
There was a widow of a Confederate veteran living in Waco until about 10 years ago. Got to meet her, nice lady. She was the nurse/caretaker of her husband and to make it palatable to community standards she married him since she lived in his house to take care of him.

Now this does blow my mind. My dad is a veteran of the Vietnam War and entered his service 101 years after the Civil War ended and he's 80!

BQ78

12:05p, 1/26/24

The Comanches shot at least four future Civil War generals with arrows in Texas in the 1850s, who were serving with the second cav (they could have changed some things in the 1860s with straighter arrows):

JEB Stuart was hit in the sternum by an arrow but it failed to penetrate beyond that
Fitzhugh Lee had an arrow hit him in the armpit and went clear through him, puncturing one lung.
John Bell Hood had his hand pinned to his saddle
George Thomas had an arrow enter his mouth, exit near his chin and then it penetrated his chest.

In all cases (except Fitz), the men pulled out the arrows and kept fighting.

Jabin

12:26p, 1/26/24

Famed cattleman Charles Goodnight married his 26-year-old cousin when he was 91 years old. I believe that they had a child!

jwoodmd

12:35p, 1/26/24

In reply to Jabin

Jabin said:
Famed cattleman Charles Goodnight married his 26-year-old cousin when he was 91 years old. I believe that they had a child!

He fathered a child in his 90's in an era before Viagra - that's likely a mind blowing history fact!

HarleySpoon

2:43p, 1/26/24

I have a personal one. I am only in my late 50's. I had an uncle....not a great uncle that fought in the Spanish American war (1898)

My aunt married the post man who was 60 in about 1940....my aunt was 16 at the time. My mom was her younger sister and my mom was almost 40 when I was born.

BQ78

2:56p, 1/26/24

In reply to HarleySpoon

BQ78

3:13p, 1/26/24

26,000 Confederates died in Federal Prison Camps, most in the last year of the war. That is 6X the number of Confederate dead at Gettysburg and 2X the number of Confederate dead at Antietam, Chickamauga, Seven Days, Shiloh and Second Manassas combined.

nortex97

4:04p, 1/26/24

This stat blew my mind: when Microsoft went public in 1986, 10% of its revenue was from Mouse sales. pic.twitter.com/UnJRA3xA30
— Trung Phan (@TrungTPhan) January 26, 2024

Paul Allen: "When Word came out before the Mac in 1983, our first generation mouse didn’t sell very well. Jon Shirley Microsoft’s president would complain that we had 'mouse- infested warehouses.' Our strategy was to pave the way for better versions of our software." pic.twitter.com/jzacoP11Mp
— Tren Griffin (@trengriffin) January 26, 2024

(Now, arguably, Steve Jobs took/developed the idea from Xerox first, though this is a contentious subject among the nerdery.)

ChipFTAC01

5:18p, 1/26/24

In reply to BQ78

BQ78 said:
There was a widow of a Confederate veteran living in Waco until about 10 years ago. Got to meet her, nice lady. She was the nurse/caretaker of her husband and to make it palatable to community standards she married him since she lived in his house to take care of him.

There was a whole raft of Civil War brides that lived on into the late 20th century. Old veterans (say born around 1845) marry young women in the later stages. In return for taking care of them in the elder years these widows got to keep their military pension. If 75 year old vet married a 20 year old in 1920 then they'd be around my grandparents age who died in the 90s and 00s.

ChipFTAC01

5:22p, 1/26/24

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War_widows_who_survived_into_the_21st_century?wprov=sfti1#Helen_Viola_Jackson_(1919%E2%80%932020)

FTACo88-FDT24dad

6:17p, 1/26/24

In reply to jwoodmd

jwoodmd said:
Jabin said:
Famed cattleman Charles Goodnight married his 26-year-old cousin when he was 91 years old. I believe that they had a child!
He fathered a child in his 90's in an era before Viagra - that's likely a mind blowing history fact!

Username checks out

CenterHillAg

6:22p, 1/26/24

In a similar vein, before he died several years ago, my wife's grandfather would tell us stories about growing up with his grandmother who was a slave.

HarleySpoon

9:13p, 1/26/24

In reply to CenterHillAg

CenterHillAg said:
In a similar vein, before he died several years ago, my wife's grandfather would tell us stories about growing up with his grandmother who was a slave.

In a similar vein……again I'm still in my 50's, my grandmother (my father's mother born in 1883) would tell stories of the Indians coming to her family's cabin and having her mother cook turtles for them.

spud1910

10:37p, 1/26/24

In reply to HarleySpoon

HarleySpoon said:
CenterHillAg said:
In a similar vein, before he died several years ago, my wife's grandfather would tell us stories about growing up with his grandmother who was a slave.
In a similar vein……again I'm still in my 50's, my grandmother (my father's mother born in 1883) would tell stories of the Indians coming to her family's cabin and having her mother cook turtles for them.

Along the same lines, I live on land that my parents purchased in the earyly 1960s from a man whose grandfather who was a slave. And one of my grandfather's friends showed us the spring that his father saw Indians camp at for a few weeks each year.

CanyonAg77

9:05a, 1/27/24

In reply to Jabin

Jabin said:
Famed cattleman Charles Goodnight married his 26-year-old cousin when he was 91 years old. I believe that they had a child!

She had the same name, but was not a cousin. They had no children

Jabin

9:30a, 1/27/24

In reply to CanyonAg77

CanyonAg77 said:
Jabin said:
Famed cattleman Charles Goodnight married his 26-year-old cousin when he was 91 years old. I believe that they had a child!

She had the same name, but was not a cousin. They had no children

Not true. I read his biography some time ago that stated that both were true. Multiple online sources confirm that they were in fact cousins, albeit distant. For example:

Corrine Oletta Goodnight (1901-1971) | WikiTree FREE Family Tree

It's difficult to find, but some online sources confirm that she did bear him a child. For example:

Diary of Corinne Goodnight : Diary 1927/01/01-1927/08/31 in SearchWorks catalog (stanford.edu)

However, she miscarried the child:

Charles Goodnight - Personal LIfe - Goodnight Barn Historic Preservation Committee (goodnightbarnpueblo.org)

I've always wondered, however, if their marriage was simply to help her out in a situation where she and a cowboy may have gotten careless?

87Flyfisher

9:46a, 1/27/24

A battle in the American Revolution was fought in Arkansas.

https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/colbert-raid-1163/

CanyonAg77

10:00a, 1/27/24

In reply to Jabin

"Distant" cousin. Not really close enough to count. As I recall, they had never met, and she began writing letters to him based on their mutual last name

I was not aware she ever got pregnant. I was confident that Goodnight had no surviving heirs. I don't think the Haley biography mentioned the pregnancy, which may be why I missed it

Jabin

10:03a, 1/27/24

BQ78

1:53p, 1/27/24

When Jubal Early passed through Frederick, MD in July 1864, he charged the city fathers $200K to save their town from burning. After Early won the nearby Battle of Monocacy, the city borrowed the money from three town banks. After the war the city asked the federal government to pay off the debt, which was refused. Frederick finally paid off the loan in October 1951, paying a total of $400K in interest.

Strong Men Armed

7:11p, 1/27/24

Surprised no one mentioned this one:
The Wright brothers are credited with the first aircraft flight, in 1903. Charles Lindbergh flew solo across the Atlantic in 1927. Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon in 1969. Three of the most significant events in aviation history. A child who was 10 years old in 1903 would have been 76 in 1969, and would have remembered all three.

The advances in aeronautical engineering over 66 years may be unmatched in any other field of endeavor.

Jabin

7:26p, 1/27/24

In reply to Strong Men Armed

Quote:
The advances in aeronautical engineering over 66 years may be unmatched in any other field of endeavor.

Interesting point.

What about atomic energy?
Electrical energy?
And could the advances in aeronautical engineering be tied directly to the advances in engines using petrochemical fuels?

It was definitely an era of technological advances that the world had never before seen. My grandfather grew up in Wallis, TX, before 1900 plowing cotton fields with a mule. There was no paved road in or out of Wallis, no electricity, no cars, and no gasoline. His life was not that much different than that of farmers at any time previous in history.

By the time my granddad died in the 1980s, he had seen not only the advent of universal paved roads, universal electricity, universal ownership of cars, and diesel tractors, but had also been alive from the Wright Brothers to the moon landings, from biplanes in WW 1 to supersonic jet fighters, from no radio to color TVs in every home, from crude typewriters to computers and fax machines. Those are only a tiny portion of the incredible technological changes that occurred during the first 3/4, and mainly first half, of the 20th century.

Strong Men Armed

8:05p, 1/27/24

In reply to Jabin

All good points!

agrams

8:22p, 1/27/24

Major general Dan Sickles, who commanded the union III Corp at gettysburg which moved out of position to occupy the peach orchard and exposed his unit and adjacent Corp flanks, had several unique distinctions:

-he was the only Corp commander without a west point education
-after shooting his wife's lover dead, he was the acquitted after using temporary insanity as a legal defense for the first time in United States history.
-was a medal of honor recipient
-his leg was hit with a cannonball and subsequently amputated. He preserved the bones from his leg and donated them to the newly founded Army Medical Museum inDC in a small coffin-shaped box, along with a visiting card marked, "With the compliments of Major General D.E.S."

CanyonAg77

8:29p, 1/27/24

In reply to Jabin

My grandparents were born between 1898 and 1908, so they definitely saw all three flights. The only technology related remark I remember from them is they said no one believed radio was real, how could you send sound over the air? And later, people claimed they could send pictures through the air????

87Flyfisher

6:45p, 1/28/24

This is more family history but......

In 1931 when my Grandmother was 7 a sharecropper family moved next door to my Great Grandparent's cotton farm north of Greenville, TX.

The dad didn't have a good reputation as either a farmer or for taking care of his family. Among the many children was a boy who was 6 months younger than my Grandmother and he would come over to play sometimes. She said he had ragged clothes and my Great-grandmother always fixed him something to eat because it was obvious he was hungry.

The little boy was named Audie Leon Murphy.

chick79

9:10a, 1/29/24

My great grandfather was born in 1843 and fought for the Union in the Civil War. Not that mind blowing but I don't have to go back far in my family tree for this. My great grandfather was in his mid-50s when my grandfather was born.