World History and Trivia

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Most Americans have an abominably dreadful knowledge and understanding of world history, due, in part, to the woeful ineptitude of most history instructors. If I were an instructor, history would be brought to life, and taught as exciting, vibrant and relevant to today's geo-political times. When I was a youth in school, grade and high school teachers' primary focus was keeping students awake instead of enouraging a thirst for historical knowledge.

PAGE CONTENTS:

Odds and Ends

Professional Fools

Anglo-Saxon Apartheid?

Napoleon Bonaparte Trivia

Peter the Great Trivia

The Rape of Nanking

The Seven Years' War

First Journey Around the World

Odds and Ends

In 1958, British artist Gerald Holtom drew a circle with three lines inside, intending the design to be a symbol for nuclear disarmament. Holtom finished his design on February 21, 1958 and the design was then first introduced to the public at a protest march against nuclear weapons on April 4. The symbol quickly spread around the world and is now an internationally recognized symbol for peace.

San Francisco was the birthplace of the United Nations in 1945. Aftera brief stop at Lake Success, New York, it was moved to New York Citybecause many European nations believed San Francisco was too far totravel.

King Charles VII, who was assassinated in 1167, was the first Swedish king with the name of Charles. Charles I, II, III, IV, V, neverexisted. No one knows why. To add to the mystery, almost 300 yearswent by before there was a Charles VIII (1448-57).

The men who served as guards along the Great Wall of China in the Middle Ages were often born on the wall, grew up there, married there, died there, and were buried within it. Many of these guards never left the wall in their entire lives.

The Chinese invented eyeglasses. Marco Polo reported seeing many pairs worn by the Chinese as early as 1275, 500 years before lens grinding became an art in the West.

Genghis Khan wasn't the real name of the man who ruled much of the known world in the 13th century. It was Temujin. He was called Genghis Khan, "universal ruler".

Ghengis Khan (1167-1227), leader of the Mongolian Empire, killed his own brother in an argument over a fish.

Poland was the dominant power in eastern Europe from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century.

The Mongol conqueror Timur the Lame (1336-1405), played polo with the skulls of those he had killed in battle. Timur left record of his victories by erecting 30-foot-high pyramids made of the severed heads of his victims.

In the French court of Louis XI, the fine ladies lived mainly on soup because they believed that excessive chewing would cause them to develop premature facial wrinkles.

At the court of Louis XIV, prestige was measured by the height of the chair one was allowed to sit in. Only the King and Queen could sit in chairs with arms.

Henry VIII's second wife, Anne Boleyn, had six fingers on one hand. She wore special gloves all her life to hide her deformity. She also had three breasts.

Prime Minister William Pitt devised the first income tax that worked in England around 1800. The British government needed the revenue to prosecute its war with France. Source: THE JOY OF TRIVIA by Bernie Smith

Professional Fools

Let's meet the court jester--a professional fool.

Court jesters were the standup comics of their day. They came from all manner of men--from college dropouts, to swineherds, to monks defrocked for fooling around with nuns. Most were low born. Many were deformed or disabled. None had much to look forward to in the Middle Ages, unless they were quick-witted--and lucky--enough to sign on as the official fool for a king or lord.

It was a dangerous job. The fool was expected to provide a steady stream of entertainment. Usually he did this by mocking everyone and everything--the boss and his powerful friends included. It wasn't unusual for a fool to suffer an unfortunate end when someone didn't think a joke was funny.

If the fool could pull it off, though, he might end up on easy street. Archibald Armstrong, jester to kings James I and Charles I of England, was granted more than a thousand acres of land in Ireland. Insolence eventually cost him his job, but not his lands--a decent end for a "fool" who started out as "a most dexterous sheep-stealer."

Fools who kept their positions at court could also become important advisors. With no political ambitions of their own, they could be trusted to be more honest than the courtiers who crowded around the king. Will Somers, the court jester for Henry VIII, was so highly esteemed that he served under the next two monarchs as well.

By the time of Queen Elizabeth I, the fool was as important culturally as he was politically. Elizabeth's favorite jester, Richard Tarlton, was the Robin Williams of his age (once he quit tending swine). He may even have been the model for Shakespeare's Yorick, the "fellow of infinite jest" whose skull Hamlet admires.

Shakespeare's own theater company employed two famous fools. The first was Will Kempe, whose scene-stealing improvisational antics may have inspired Hamlet's advice to the actors he welcomes at court: "let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them." Kempe was replaced by the razor-witted Robert Armin, who likely played shakespeare'smost famous fools, including Touchstone in As You Like It, Feste in Twelfth Night, and the Fool in King Lear.

The court jester tradition mostly died out by the end of the 17th century. New generations of monarchs believed they had nothing to learn from fools. New generations of actors took comedy in new directions. Meanwhile, foolishness itself lives on--even to this foolish day. In fact, as Shakespeare's

--Mark Diller

Anglo-Saxon Apartheid?

The Germanic tribes who invaded England in the 5th century didn't just conquer the coast and roam the countryside seizing slaves. The Angles, Saxons, and Jutes also imposed an apartheid-like system on the native Celtic Britons they conquered. Or so says a 2006 study by researchers at University College London.

The researchers point to textual evidence such as the 7th-century laws of Ine, which required killers of Celts to pay far less "wergild"--blood money--than killers of Anglo-Saxons. But chiefly, they point to 21st-century English genes.

More than half the men in central England today carry what appears to be an Anglo-Saxon Y-chromosome. That's an extraordinarily high percentage, since historians think that fewer than 200,000 Anglo-Saxons came to England during the 5th-to-7th-century "invasion." If these folks simply intermingled with the 2 million or so Celtic Britons of the time, how did their genes become so prominent?

The answer, says study author Mark Thomas, is that the Anglo-Saxons created "a system of apartheid that left the country culturally and genetically Germanized." Using birth-rate data from other apartheid-like societies, Thomas and his team showed how even a small Anglo-Saxon elite could have used military and economic power to Germanize the gene pool in a few centuries. All they really had to do was use their privileged position to outbreed the Celts.

Other scholars will likely dispute Thomas's apartheid claim. But few deny that England was "Germanized" by Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and others from Germanic lands who collectively came to be called the "Anglo-Saxons."

It all started when the Romans left Britain, which they had ruled for some 400 years. By the early 5th century, the western Roman Empire was collapsing. In 410, the Visigoths sacked Rome, and the emperor recalled many of his legions to defend Italy. That left Britain undefended, with Angles, Saxons, Picts, Franks, and Scots closing in on all sides.

Around 425, a Briton called Vortigern (probably not a name but a title, meaning "high chief") reportedly hired several hundred Saxons as mercenaries to fight the Picts. But that strategy backfired when the Saxons decided they'd rather be rulers than swords for hire.

In the following decades, Angles, Jutes, and others joined the Saxons in setting up independent kingdoms in Northumbria, Essex, Wessex, Sussex, Kent, and elsewhere. The Angles' name even evolved into "England." As for the Britons, legend says that things really fell apart for them after the death of their greatest king--the one and only King Arthur.

Steve Sampson

Napoleon Bonaparte Trivia

Although most people think that Napoleon was short, he was actually five feet, six inches tall (1.676 meters), an average height for a Frenchman in those days. However, this fact will probably not keep people from continuing to make fun of him because he's short.

Napoleon Bonaparte loved white horses so much, he owned at least fifty.

Napoleon Bonaparte was always depicted with his hand inside his jacket because he suffered from "chronic nervous itching" and often scratched his stomach sores until they bled.

He had conquered Italy by the age of 26, but he was an ailurophobe, meaning he had an irrational fear of cats. (If he even thought there was a cat in the room, he was reduced to a quivering wimp!) He he!

During his reign, Napoleon commissioned 3 scientists to invent something that would properly store food supplies for his army as they invaded Russia. Their invention: canned foods. One of the scientists was Louie Pasture, the scientist responsible for the pasturization process. Their version and process for the canned food is almost exactly the same to this day. The only draw back was that no one had a good way to open the rather thick cans, so the soldiers used their knives, bayonets and sometimes rocks. This resulted in some pretty serious injuries, like cutting off one's finger!

WHERE WAS NAPOLEON BORN?

Not in France. He was born on the Mediterranean island of Corsica of Italian parents.

Did Napoleon invent canned vegetables?

Sort of - Because Napoleon believed that armies marched on their stomachs, he offered a prize in 1795 for a practical way of preserving food. The prize was won by a French inventor, Nicholas Appert. What he devised was canning. It was the beginning of the canned food industry of today.

The name "pumpernickel" was coined by Napoleon's troops during the Napoleonic Wars. His men complained that although they were often poorly fed, there was always bread for Napoleon's favorite horse, Nicoll. Thus the word "pumpernickel" was coined--pain (bread) pour (for) Nicoll.

Napoleon suffered from ailurophobia, which is a fear of cats.

How did Napoleon Bonaparte finance his invasion of Russia in 1812?

With counterfeit money. After printing it at a factory he set up in Paris, he used it to purchase military supplies.

Why were Napoleon's laws his legacy?
Napoleon took 14,000 French decrees and simplified them into a unified set of seven laws. This was the first time in modern history that a nation's laws applied equally to all citizens. Napoleon's seven laws are so impressive that by 1960, more than 70 governments had patterned their own laws after them or used them verbatim.

What was the first item made of aluminum?
The first known item made from aluminum was a rattle - made for Napoleon III in the 1850s. Napoleon also provided his most honored guests with knives and forks made of pure aluminum. At the time, the newly discovered metal was so rare, it was considered more valuable than gold.

Napoleon favored mathematicians and physical scientists, but excluded humanists from his circle, believing them to be troublemakers.

When Napoleon wore black silk handkerchiefs around his neck during abattle, he always won. At Waterloo, he wore a white cravat and lost the battle.

Peter the Great Trivia

Peter the Great, Emperor of Russia, did not take kindly to the fact that his wife had taken a lover on the side. So he had the guy's head cut off and placed in a jar of alcohol, which he commanded his wife to keep in her bedroom at all times.

Peter the Great of Russia was almost seven feet tall. He considered men growing beards to signify lack of culture. So, he issued a stiff tax on beards in 1698; those who couldn't pay the tax had to get their beards shaven.

In the winter of 1724, while on an outing at sea, Peter the Great of Russia caught sight of a foundering ship, jumped in the water, and helped in the rescue. He caught cold, suffered from a high fever, and died several weeks later.

The Rape of Nanking

by Denis Mueller

It was an event so appalling that even the Nazi’s were shock- ed. From 1937 to 1938, over 300,000 Chinese were murdered and, depending on the estimates, 50,000 to 80,000 women were raped and mutilated. Women of all ages were violated and held captive while being raped. The officers and the Emperor of Japan knew what was happening but did nothing to stop the atrocities and many of the officers laughed at the barbarity.

What is especially appalling is that the Japanese to this day deny that this ever occurred. For those of you that have any questions about the truth, just go to the Internet and look at the pictures. They will make you cry. The Japanese beheaded victims and threw the bodies into mass graves. Senior officers derived great pleasure in the horrors. They even went so far as to rip out the fetus of pregnant women and parade around with them on bayonets.

The war against the Chinese began in 1931 with the invasion of Manchuria. The armies of the emperor marched into China, and by 1937, surrounded the city of Nanking. The killing was widespread and anyone caught was killed on the spot. It got so bad that the Japanese armies started to use prisoners for bayonet practice.

In one building zone, 400 men were seized and were marched off to be executed. The cowardly officers of the Nationalist army, who would easily lose to the Chinese Communists after the war, fled the city. They left the civilian population and the remaining soldiers to the mercy of the Japanese who showed no mercy. The streets were littered with bodies. The only hospital opened was the American University Hospital whose facilities were inadequate to serve such a massacre.

The Japanese looted and plundered the city while forcing the Chinese to carry their loot before murdering them. This kind of behavior continued for weeks. The Japanese high command knew exactly what was happening but allowed the carnage to continue. After beheading countless people, they lined their heads up in a nice neat row.

The cruelty of the Japanese during World War II continued throughout the war. Americans who survived the horrors of Japanese imprisonment can testify to that. Even after their surrender, the Japanese continued to behead Americans. But for some reason the public largely forgets these atrocities. Why is that?

One explanation is that China fell to the Communists in 1949. Americans wondered who lost China, but we now know that the corrupt government that now rules Taiwan lost China. The Japanese on the other hand became part of the West. We needed them so any mention of their heinous crimes have been buried. The government of Japan steadfastly denies any such thing ever happened despite the evidence and any mention of this barbarity in not mentioned in their textbooks. This is truly disgusting. There will be no justice in the world until the victims of Japanese cruelty are compensated for their suffering.

Sources: New York Times, December 17, 1937; The Rape of Nanking, Iris Chang

The Seven Years' War

The Seven Years' War (1756–1763) involved all of the major European powers of the period. It enveloped both European and colonial theatres -- Prussia, Electorate Brunswick-Lüneburg, and United Kingdom of Great Britain were pitted against Austria, France, the Russian Empire, Sweden, and Saxony. Portugal (on the side of Great Britain) and Spain (on the side of France) were later drawn into the conflict, and a force from the neutral Netherlands was attacked in India.

The Seven Years' War may be viewed as a continuation of the War of theAustrian Succession, in which King Frederick II of Prussia had gained the rich province of Silesia, causing the political map of Europe to be redrawn in just a few years. Additional hostilities arose from the heated colonial struggle between the British Empire and French Empire which, as they expanded, met and clashed with one another on two continents.

The novel "The Luck of Barry Lyndon" (1844) by William Makepeace Thackeray is set against the backdrop of the Seven Years' War. Stanley Kubrick's movie Barry Lyndon (1975) is based on this novel. Additionally, the novel "The Last of the Mohicans" (1826) by James Fenimore Cooper is set in the Northern American Theatre of the Seven Years' War.

The French and Indian War (1754–1763) was the North American chapter of the Seven Years' War. The conflict resulted in the British conquest of all of New France east of the Mississippi River, as well as Spanish Florida. The outcome was one of the most significant developments in the persistent Anglo-French Second Hundred Years' War. To compensate its ally, Spain, for its loss of Florida, France ceded its control of French Louisiana west of the Mississippi. France's colonial presence north of the Caribbean was reduced to the tiny islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon.

The war ended France's position as a major colonial power in the Americas (where it lost all of its possessions except French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Saint-Domingue and Saint Pierre and Miquelon) and its position as the leading power in Europe, until the time of the French Revolution. Great Britain, meanwhile, emerged as the dominant colonial power in the world. On the other side of the world, the British East India Company acquired the strongest position within India, which was to become the "jewel in the imperial crown". The war was described by Winston Churchill as the first "world war."

First Journey Around the World

If you watch the weather, you may know that "El Nino" is the name for a change in the Earth's ocean-atmosphere system in the tropical Pacific. You may know that the change affects worldwide weather patterns. But what you may not know is that, 500 years ago, an El Nino may have helped Ferdinand Magellan make his history-making trip around the world.

So says a new study by researchers who noticed that Magellan met with remarkably calm winds when he set out to cross the Pacific Ocean. They also noticed that tree-ring data suggest that an El Nino hit right around the time Magellan made his trip.

After modeling Magellan's route and reviewing his writings, the researchers argue that the El Nino "may have been largely responsible for structuring the route and extent of what many consider the world's greatest voyage." Either way, just talking about that voyage makes us want to set sail. So today, let's join Magellan's crew.

Back in 1517, Ferdinand Magellan was fed up. An adventurous Portuguese captain, Magellan had explored the Moluccas (Indonesia's "Spice Islands"), fought the Moors hand-to-hand in North Africa, and been permanently lamed in battle, all in the service of his country.

Yet Portugal's King Manuel repeatedly spurned him. Magellan even found himself indicted on ridiculous charges of illegally selling goats to the Arabs. Middle-aged, down on his luck, and unappreciated, Magellan publicly renounced Portugal and offered his services to the enemy: Spain.

Spain and Portugal were arch rivals, locked in a struggle for territories and conquests. When Magellan proposed to search for a western route to the profitable Spice Islands, Spain's King Charles I jumped at the chance. Magellan soon found himself in charge of some 270 men aboard five ramshackle ships: the Concepcion, Santiago, San Antonio, Victoria, and Trinidad. Their mission: find a sea route from the Atlantic Ocean to the uncharted waters between America and the East Indies--where no European man had gone before.

The expedition got under way on September 20, 1519. In two months, the ships reached Brazil and began sailing down the coast toward the tip of South America. There were rumors of a strait there that would afford passage, though through seas rough enough to sicken even the saltiest seamen. But rumors were about all they had to go on. Promising-looking inlets repeatedly turned out to be rivers or dead ends, and by late March they had to stop for the winter (remember, they were in the southern hemisphere).

The conditions were cold and windy, the rations were bad, and the crew was unhappy. Many were suspicious and resentful of their dictatorial, Portuguese turncoat captain, who barely spoke Spanish. Around Easter, a mutiny erupted on three of the five ships, and Magellan had to use all his cunning and force to regain control. Soon after this crisis, the Santiago was wrecked and lost while exploring an inlet.

In late August, the expedition set out again. In late October, Magellan found himself in a tortuous maze of islands and waterways, between towering glaciers of blue ice. He had no map and absolutely no idea which way to turn or what lay ahead, but he finally found the strait that now bears his name. For their part, the crew of the San Antonio had seen enough. Their ship slipped away and was long gone before Magellan knew what was going on.

Magellan pressed on, and his successful navigation of the treacherous 334-mile waterway is still considered one of maritime exploration's greatest feats. After 38 days in the dangerous strait, Magellan "wept for joy" when he found the Pacific Ocean on the other side.

If he had known then how big the Pacific is, he would have kept right on weeping. Magellan believed that this new ocean would turn out to be a narrow band of water between the East Indies and America. In fact, he had 12,000 miles of ocean ahead of him, and he didn't have nearly enough food or water. Not only was it much farther than he had reckoned, his ships' suppliers had also cheated him back in Spain.

For a while it was smooth sailing. The weather was superb, and by heading north along the coast of Chile, Magellan got the steady trade winds at his back. But three and a half months later, dwindling supplies had brought famine, scurvy, and death to Magellan's crew. At one point, a despairing Magellan threw his maps overboard, reportedly yelling, "with the pardon of the cartographers, the Moluccas are not to be found in their proper place!"

Finally, the expedition arrived in Guam. After resupplying there, Magellan and his men began meeting various tribes of Philippine islanders. Viewed as a god by some and as an invader by others, Magellan recklessly intervened in a local conflict. Even more recklessly, he ended up storming a beach at Mactan with around 50 troops. Overwhelmed by a much larger force of native warriors, Magellan sacrificed himself to cover his men's escape. The natives hacked him to pieces.

Shortly after Magellan's death, the Concepcion became unseaworthy and was burned. The Trinidad never made it home, either. Only the Victoria made it back to Spain--after nearly three years at sea. It carried just 18 sailors, the sole survivors of the first documented journey around the world.

--Jeffery Vail

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