What ridiculous history fact is your favorite?

One of Sir Issac Newton's famous phrases is

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants”

This sounds very nobal and humbling. However, its meaning totally changes with a few facts. It was written in an open letter to Robert Hooke. Hooke was apparently quite short, and EXTREMELY sensitive about this. Newton was basically dissing Hooke. Nobody will be standing on your shoulders, shortie!

The fact that they dug up Oliver Cromwell's body for a posthumous execution. It's just insane on so many levels

There are lots of great answers here so I want to post something entirely silly and much much more recent:

About 8-9 years ago someone on Reddit transcribed and revised the entirety of Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven to instead be about an Emu.

For the life of me I have never been able to find it again.

This is a great thread

The oldest recorded words from any woman living in (what is today) Scotland are someone telling the empress of Rome, to her face, that they fuck better than her

We have proof that kids have never paid attention in school. For example, in Novgorod around 1250 A.D. a six year old boy named Onfim (later called Anthemius of Novgorod) was supposedly practicing his writing and basic arithmetic. Much of what archeologists have found were doodles of him being a heroic knight The mighty horseman Onfim on his steed. who hunted down his teacher, who was a horrible monster Onfim and several other horsemen chase down the evil Writing Teacher . These were buried in a waste pile, where they were rediscovered by archeologists. They are a treasured part of Slavic history and there is now a statue of him in his hometown.

A dude had heard about some other kind of god, and so he randomly looked up at the sky and basically said "if you let me win this battle, I will convert my entire country"....

...and he won, and so Roman Catholicism was born cause he said so.

Later, some dude was like "screw your catholicism, I don't like my wife any more, I'll go make my own church with hookers and blow and divorce my wife," and so the Church of England was made cause he said so.

I may have oversimplified these stories but pretty sure that's about it.

Oxford University Is older than the Aztec civilization.

There was an infamous conman in my country by the name Sülün Osman. He has managed to con people by claiming to sell the Galata Bridge itself. After he was caught, his defense was "As long as there exists idiots that believe I can sell the bridge, I will keep selling this bridge."

Dinosaurs existed on the other side of the galaxy!

As in, it was so long ago that Earth has done half of a great cycle since then.

That North and South Korea maintain a fax line between their countries... which they use almost exclusively to send threats and insults to each other.

Also related to North Korea, the hilarious fact that Dennis Rodman, former NBA player, is so well liked by the Kim family that he's basically a diplomat to North Korea, or at least the one they turn to when things really start going badly.

Proof: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/12/20/north-and-south-korea-exchange-faxes-threatening-to-attack-each-other/ https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/north-korea-sends-fax-threatening-strike-south-korea-without-notice-flna2d11781034 https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-KRTB-4721

"Mad" Jack Churchill, who fought in the Second World War with a longbow, a basket-hilted Scottish broadsword, and a set of bagpipes.

San Francisco had an emperor.

(He even "decreed" the construction of a bridge or tunnel between San Francisco and Oakland on the other side of the bay, predicting the existence of the Bay Bridge and Transbay Tube!)

Benjamin Franklin got the flow of electricity wrong.

The first manned hot air balloon was mistaken for an eldritch monster by rural French citizens who didn't understand it and was "beaten to death" by a French mob after it descended to the ground.

A double agent was so good, he won medals from both the UK and Germany during WW2

Probably the one about tin cans and can openers. IIRC, can opener was invented decades after the tin

In 1938, Orson Welles adapted H.G. Wells's "The War of the Worlds" for the radio, apparently causing mass hysteria and a major part of the continental United States to believe that a martian invasion had occurred.

"A few policemen trickled in, then a few more. Soon, the room was full of policemen and a massive struggle was going on between the police, page boys, and CBS executives, who were trying to prevent the cops from busting in and stopping the show. It was a show to witness."[26]

During the sign-off theme, the phone began ringing. Houseman picked it up and the furious caller announced he was mayor of a Midwestern town, where mobs were in the streets. Houseman hung up quickly, "[f]or we were off the air now and the studio door had burst open."[4]: 404

How many deaths had we heard of? (Implying they knew of thousands.) What did we know of the fatal stampede in a Jersey hall? (Implying it was one of many.) What traffic deaths? (The ditches must be choked with corpses.) The suicides? (Haven't you heard about the one on Riverside Drive?)

This was a year after he adapted Shakespeare's Julius Caesar to be set in Nazi Germany.

There was a roman emperor named Pupienus which is pronounced poopy anus

There's a lot to choose from, but it's early so I'll bring up the three separate historically significant Defenestrations of Prague. Defenestration is the act of tossing someone out of a window.