History isn’t just about heroic battles, grand adventures, moving speeches, scientific inventions, and social progress. For good and for ill, people are very complicated and nuanced beings… with a dash of depravity and lust thrown in. Human history is full of truly shocking, dark, and terrifying events, but some books skim over the more disturbing details.
The r/AskReddit community recently shared some pieces of history that would even make many adults do a double-take. Scroll down to have a read.
But be warned, some of these historical facts are definitely not for the faint of heart, while others might make you feel very uncomfortable.
#1
The Battle of Blair Mountain. Coal miners wanted to unionize and mine owners wanted more money. A million rounds of ammunition were fired and the National Guard had to intervene.
That's a shamefully short summary of it, but it was literally a war for labor rights.
To quote Robert Evans on Behind the Bastards (Part 1 on YouTube [here](https://youtu.be/XWvVdjmBhHc?si=ekzrYcd3taBhmSg0)):
>We never talk about the time they got bombed and gassed and shot at by machine guns. We just leave that out of history books. The 8-hour work day was entirely gained by polite people with signs protesting. That's how we have a weekend, not the men who charged machine gun nests and sniped at corporate guards.
>All these things we consider just a part of life like the fact that you're supposed to get a weekend; all of these things were bought in blood by men who are willing to kill for these rights who are willing to die for these things. And we don't talk about that even though it's cool and interesting because it might give people ideas.
Image credits: TacticalFluke
#2
>One of Columbus’ men, Bartolome De Las Casas, was so mortified by Columbus’ brutal atrocities against the native peoples, that he quit working for Columbus and became a Catholic priest. He described how the Spaniards under Columbus’ command cut off the legs of children who ran from them, to test the sharpness of their blades. According to De Las Casas, the men made bets as to who, with one sweep of his sword, could cut a person in half. He says that Columbus’ men poured people full of boiling soap. In a single day, De Las Casas was an eye witness as the Spanish soldiers dismembered, beheaded, or raped 3000 native people. “Such inhumanities and barbarisms were committed in my sight as no age can parallel,” De Las Casas wrote. “My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature that now I tremble as I write.”
Source: "Columbus Day? True Legacy: Cruelty and Slavery." by Eric Kasum, published October 11, 2010
It feels like a conspiracy theory, but I swear they teach us about Columbus when we are too young to be exposed to his atrocities (witnessed first hand, as well as documented in his own hand in his journals) so that he will be a "controversial figure" who "might have gotten a couple things wrong about what country he was in" rather than "a f*****g horrendous vile human being on par with the worst shitheads in history.".
Image credits: FuzzzyRam
#3
796 babies bodies found in a septic tank in Galway, Ireland.
796. Babies.
Orko90:
I think the pertinent info you're missing is that the septic tank belonged to a "Home" for unmarried mothers that was owned and operated by the Bon Secours Sisters, an order of Catholic nuns.
Image credits: hackyslashy
Seduction, love, cheating, betrayal, lust, and longing are as much a part of history as war and famine, conquests and rebellions, progress and repressions. However, for some folks, talking about brutality, warfare, political backstabbing, and complex statesmanship is more palatable than ever even hinting that s-e-x exists.
That’s one of those little ironies of modern life: some topics are considered taboo even though they’re objectively part and parcel of the human condition, like other things.
#4
When then President of Indonesia Soekarno visited the Soviet Union the KGB thought that it would be a good idea to send a honey trap. They hired two escorts to "entertain" him and recorded the acts using a spy camera. then blackmailed President Soekarno laughed at the agents and asked them to send him the tapes so that he can watch it back home.
Image credits: ilhamalfatihah16
#5
The Radium Girls from the United States. Just read a book on them and it was horrific! The radium poisoning made their jaw bones fall out with their teeth. Not to mention all the sarcomas and the one girl who hemmoraghed and bled out because the poison ate through her jugular. They were told the Radium was safe despite there being known health risks as early as 1901. There were still radium factories being operated as of 1978.
Image credits: polkadotprincess2317
#6
Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, apparently lost her virginity on her mother’s grave.
DudebroggieHouser:
Mary Shelly and Lord Byron put all modern goth couples to absolute shame.
Image credits: Maleficent_Nobody_75
At the time of writing, according to the ‘Worldometer,’ nearly 8.2 billion people live on Earth. Or almost 8.173 billion, to be more precise.
The United Nations predicts that we should have 9 billion people living on the planet by the year 2037. Furthermore, the world population should balloon up to 10 billion by 2060. Of course, these projections can and will change. Predicting the future is always difficult. No matter how much data you have, no statistical model can account for every eventuality or circumstance.
#7
The absolute atrocities that Japan committed during World War II not only the decimation of the Chinese people but also on their own turf.
Examples being the horrific stuff done at Unit 731 s**t should give you nightmares.
Image credits: HeadFit2660
#8
The reason informed consent is legally required in study participation, The Tuskegee Syphilis Study.
In 1932 a group of 600 impoverished Black men were part of an experiment to observe untreated syphilis. 399 of these men had syphilis while the rest were used as a control group, all participating with the promise of free medical care. The men who had syphilis were never told they had it. Instead they were gaslit and offered placebos to treat "bad blood" while the researchers told local Black doctors to deny them treatment.
It was supposed to last 6 months.
It lasted 40 years, and even though penicillin was used as an effective treatment 15 years after the start of the study, it was never offered to them.
During WWII 256 infected men were drafted and diagnosed by the military, unfit to serve without treatment. The researchers got them excluded from the draft to continue the experiment unbothered.
It only stopped after news of the study was leaked to the press in 1972. 128 of the men had died directly or indirectly from a completely treatable disease they were never told they had, and 59 relatives of the men contracted or were born with syphilis as a result.
Image credits: TrashAvalon
#9
Victor Hugo was so popular with Parisian pr*stitutes that most brothels in Paris closed down for a day of mourning and many SWs stood outside to pay tribute.
Image credits: mike28987
Estimating how many people have ever lived on Earth over humanity’s roughly 200,000-year history is a tough nut to crack. Being too specific is never going to work because we lack the records, so we have to make educated guesses. A 2022 article on PRB estimates that around 117 billion members of our species have been born on our planet.
There were around 8 billion human beings living on the planet in 2022, which accounted for around 7% of the total number of people who have ever lived. This is a huge chunk of the total historical human population! And every person who has ever been born has added to the rich tapestry of history, one way or another.
#10
We would have more mummies nowadays if the victorians didn’t eat them all.
Image credits: Helpful_Finding78
#11
The Olson twins countdown clock. You had grown men obsessing about this.
Slow_D-oh:
Same with:
Emma Watson
Britney Spears (who was asked repeatedly if she was still a virgin when underage.)
Anna Kournikova
and likely any popular female singer/actor who was over 15 in the 90s (at least) until very recently.
Also, just because I don't like the guy. Jerry Seinfeld had a 17-year-old girlfriend when he was 38.
Image credits: drfunkenstien014
#12
Gandhi was racist and kind of a p*do. While people say he “outgrew his racism” he unquestionably slept naked in the same bed as naked teenagers, one being his grandniece to “test himself” which even if all he did was sleep is still incredibly unsettling. I detest the British colonialism as much as the next guy but it seems Gandhi is only ever remembered for the good things he did and not the extremely morally questionable things.
#13
The inventor of the polygraph also created Wonder Woman, who was based on his wife and the college student the two of them had a polyamorous relationship with.
Image credits: Gemnist
#14
My all time favorite - it seems there was some super important Chinese empress who made emissaries and foreign dignataries go down on her at least partly as a sign of dominance.
Image credits: drevilseviltwin
#15
King Ferdinand I, or Ferrante, of Naples kept a so called black museum of the mummified remains of his personal and political enemies. He had them dressed and arranged in various scenes and would often show off the museum to potential rivals/enemies he hadn’t yet killed off. So yeah, pretty messed up.
Image credits: tlind1990
#16
A couple of NASA interns several years ago stole a huge number of moonrocks brought back during the Apollo missions, spread them out on a motel bed and had s*x on them, just so they could say they’d had s*x on the Moon.
Image credits: Melodic_692
#17
Baby farmers.
In Victorian (and previously one assumes) unmarried mothers were of course looked down upon and if you were in service and knocked up by the son of the owner you were a bit f****d as no-one else would give a single mother a job. The solution? Baby Farmers!
Baby farmers were basically an industry to “adopt” (for a fee of course) these babies. Of course, some of these farmers realised that it was somewhat noisy and expensive looking after a whole bunch of babies and so they used a tonic called Godfrey’s Cordial. Said tonic contained opium which knocked out the babies and they were fed it by a few unscrupulous baby farmers until they starved to death. They then disposed of baby, advertised again and the cycle begins again.
For a particularly notorious example look up Amelia Dyer or John and Sarah Makin.
Image credits: Littleleicesterfoxy
#18
The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin was founded in 1919 and was the first of it's kind to research trans, gay and intersex individuals. It housed an enormous collection of notes and books on sexual research and was one of the first targets of the nazi bookburnings. Everyone's seen the pictures but very few people know what was actually burned.
#19
Charlie Chaplin impregnated a 15-year-old girl when he was 35. She (Lita Grey) was 8 when he met her.
Image credits: Roronoa_Zaraki
#20
In 1944, 9 American airmen were shot down over the Japanese island Chichijima in the Bonin Islands. 8 were captured by Japanese troops, and were then beaten, tortured, and executed by beheading. Their remains were cannibalized by Japanese officers. The ritual cannibalism included eating the livers of freshly killed prisoners, and eating living prisoners over several days, amputating limbs to keep the meat fresh.
This case was investigated in 1947 in a war crimes trial, and of the 30 Japanese soldiers prosecuted, four officers were found guilty and hanged. All enlisted men were released within eight years.
Vice Admiral Mori Kunizo, commander of the Chichi-Jima air base believed hat consumption of human liver had medical benefits. He was initially sentenced to life imprisonment for his involvement in the incident, but was sentenced to death and hanged after a separate trial for other war crimes.
The 9th airman who successfully evaded capture was eventually rescued. 45 years later he was elected President of the United States.
Image credits: Underwater_Karma
#21
The inventor of the autopilot crashed his plane while attempting to join the Mile High Club.
Image credits: _Sammy7_
#22
The Dutch ate their prime minister.
Image credits: BGrunn
#23
Shakespeare was not some high-brow fancy cultural icon. He was the trash Hollywood movies of his time. People would go to the theatres to get p**s drunk, yell at actors and solicit women who were advertising themselves in the standing sections. Also, the content of his plays (and poems but that’s not my focal point here) were not rated E for everyone lol I actually can’t believe some of the plays that are taught in school. Sure, it’s easy to miss all the sex and penis jokes if you’re just reading it but a good actor will find them and play them out.
Image credits: samg461a
#24
The Romans f****d a natural birth control into extinction
I forget the details, but essentially there was an herb on some me Greek island that acted as a natural birth control. The Romans proceeded to f**k so often that said plant no longer exists.
JohnCavil01:
Silphium - while its effectiveness and even use as a contraceptive is debated it’s possibly been rediscovered and may in fact just had its name/identity drift overtime and has been hiding in plain sight.
Image credits: geofflechef
#25
In Ancient Pompeii, the way they would direct you towards the nearest brothel was with a d**k engraved into the pavement and walls pointing the way towards it.
The engravings survived the volcanic eruption, so if you go to Pompeii today you will find the paths literally paved with d***s.
danylp:
When I was there we stopped by a group led by a guide lady at the exact moment she showed them the carvings and asked them what they thought it was. Everyone said some mild things like "leaf", "boat" etc. and I was like "That definitely looks like a penis!" and the lady turned to me: "Yes, exactly, thank you!". It was fun.
#26
Winston Churchill's entire career outside of WW2 was basically monstrous. He had concentration camps in South Africa, was a eugenicist, and used ex-military police to crack down on the anti-colonial movement in Ireland.
Say what you want about the guy, he obviously has a major role in WW2, but he was basically just a coin flip away from being a British fascist.
#27
They didn't start using anesthesia on babies until the late 1980s. It wasn't until 1987 that the American Academy of Pediactrics declared it unethical to operate on infants without the use of anesthesia. Mother's were doing everything to convince doctors that their babies could feel pain, but since the doctors said they would have no long-term memory at that point, then it wasn't as important. That's not very long ago!
From wiki-, "In the late nineteenth, and first half of the twentieth century[citation needed], doctors were taught that babies did not experience pain and were treating their young patients accordingly. From needle sticks to tonsillectomies to heart operations were done with no anaesthesia or analgesia, other than muscle relaxation for the surgery.[citation needed] The belief was that in babies the expression of pain was reflexive and, owing to the immaturity of the infant brain, the pain could not really matter."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_in_babies.
Image credits: Winter_Ad_7424
#28
Queen Victoria spent quiet a lot of time writing about her sex life with Prince Albert in great detail. She was also known for being unnecessarily cruel to her daughters and actually survived at least 8 known assassination attempts.
#29
Nipple ring fad in Victorian England.
costabius:
Also, intimate (and non-intimate) tattoos were all the rage among the upper classes of England including Albert and Victoria.
Image credits: Biggie_Cheese69-2
#30
In ancient Greece, athletes used to compete in the Olympics completely naked. Imagine training your whole life, only to have your legacy reduced to 'the guy who dropped the javelin… and everything else...
m50d:
Pole vaulting incidents like this year's would've been more common.
#31
Mozart. Loved. Farts and poop jokes. Loved 'em. Read some of his weird letters he sent to friends that were just filled with poop and fart jokes.
#32
Raphael, the Renaissance painter the Ninja Turtle is named after, died after having s*x with his mistress for an entire day without stopping.
#33
James Joyce had quite the fart fetish and immortalised it in some very dirty letters to his wife Nora. I don't remember much at all of Ulysses from school but God do I remember the letters.
Image credits: brokkenbricks
#34
The pope who had a secret room with frescoes of his lovers as the Virgin Mary. I remember taking a class on religious history for a history credit in college and briefly reading about it.
Image credits: DireNell
#35
*TLDR: There were three wars and thousands of dead in Spain in the nineteenth century by three different people called Carlos because my man Fernando VII couldn't get his gigantic footlong penis up*
In the 19th century in Spain the king Fernando VII (who was an absolute a*****e but that's another story) had an approximately 30cm sized penis. That's about a foot. My dude couldn't get it up, and when he did the monster would scare his wives (he had 4, they just kept dying apparently).
At some point some doctor invented the Royal Donut™, basically a rounded pillow with a hole in the middle so he could *do the deed* more comfortably without destroying his wives' insides. And he was able to have two kids! Unfortunately they were two women, and by law in Spain it wasn't allowed for women to rule.
The guy ended up dying in 1833, but before his desth he passed a law stating that, actually, women WERE able to rule and her kid Isabel II would be crowned queen (a few years later, she was like 2 at the time).
His brother Carlos wasn't too keen on letting Fernando's daughter reign so he started a war with his absolutist supporters, but after six years they ended up losing. The thing is, even after losing the war, his family held onto the claim to the throne and there were two more wars years down the line (started by his son and his grandson, both also named Carlos). They were called Guerras Carlistas (Carlist Wars).
The faction of the Carlistas kept being influential into the 20th century and fought along Franco in the Civil War in 1936 holding most of the front in the north of Spain in the earlier stages. They ended up fusing into Franco's party when the dictatorship got established.
So what ended up happening is that because of some guy's gigantic penis thousands died but women can now rule in Spain, and the current heir to the throne is actually a woman.
#36
P**s poor came from people selling their p**s to tanneries so they could afford to buy food and basic necessities. If you "didn't have a pot to p**s in" you were even worse off.
blacktieandgloves:
In Ancient Rome there was a tax on the trade in urine. It's where the phrase "money doesn't stink" (pecunia non olet) comes from, meaning that no matter its source, money is still money.
Image credits: S4ABCS
#37
Marie Duplessis, famous French courtesan who was the inspiration for Marguerite/Camille from La Dame aux Camélias, always wore camelias, usually a white one but a red one when it was her time of the month. She died age 23 of tuberculosis.
#38
The Byzantine Iconoclasts in the Mid 720's carried out massive pogroms targeting churches and monasteries that openly displayed icons of Christ and the Saints.
One thing the Iconoclasts were fond of doing was rounding up all of the Eastern Orthodox Nuns and Monks they could find and forcing them into the chariot racing stadiums. Once there, the Iconoclasts forced the Nuns and Monks to marry each other in violation of their vows and then consummate the marriage.
In the middle of a stadium.
With 10,000 people watching.
Talk about performance anxiety.
Image credits: KreedKafer33
#39
Operation Midnight Climax
It was a cia program in the mid 50s that used pr*stitutes to lure unsuspecting men to apartments in New York and San Francisco to d**g them with LSD to test whether the combination of s*x and LSD might influence the men to reveal information the government wanted.
RANDY_MAR5H:
Yeah they picked these people on the "fringes" of society because they knew they wouldn't be going to the police, and if they did, perhaps no one would believe them anyway.
#40
The only female emperor/sovereign of China, Wu Zetian carved her p*ssy onto a mountain.
#41
The Newport Sex Scandal.
The Navy heard that there was a common spot where enlisted and civilian men who have sex with men would go for hookups or relationships. To investigate, they sent enlisted personnel to gather intelligence, which resulted in them soliciting sex and participating in the same "immoral acts" that they were trying to criminalize. This led to embarrassment for the Navy, local clergy (many of whom had been discovered engaging in homosexual behavior during the investigation), and political fallout for those in charge of the investigation.
"Hey, we need to figure out if enlisted men are trying to have sex with each other at the Army and Navy YMCA."
"Got it, well lets send some enlisted men to the Army and Navy YMCA to try to have sex with other men, and we'll keep track of who goes for it".
#42
Andrew Jackson beat the brains out of multiple men while in office.
#43
Mental health issues, PMS hormonal changes, or pretty much anything that made a women less demure and compliant used to be diagnosed as Hysteria, and was treated with Orgasms. These were administered by the doctor, but their hands got tired, thus the Vibrator was born.
Image credits: Carinne89
#44
After Martin Luther officially rejected Catholicism’s requirement for celibacy among the clergy, he got married to a former nun. In those days, German tradition had it that the best man had to witness the consummation of the marriage that made it official, so his first sexual encounter with his wife was witnessed in his bedchamber by his best man.
Marriages could be annulled (canceled) after the wedding if the couple hadn’t consummated the marriage with sex, but could not be annulled after consummation, so having someone witness the consummation was a sort of assurance that they made it official and final. Remember that in those days, the Catholic Church did not permit divorce. The nearest thing there was to divorce was annulment of unconsummated marriages.
**EDIT**: I missed several conditions that also permitted annulment, such as the marriage being found to be incestuous, and other conditions. Annulment wasn’t divorce, as much as it was a declaration that the marriage didn’t count or wasn’t valid in one way or another.
King Henry VIII of England was so upset that the Catholic church wouldn’t let him divorce that he split the Church of England from the Catholic Church in order to permit himself to get a divorce.
#45
Philip Barton Key (son of Francis Scott Key) was murdered in broad daylight by Congressman Dan Sickles. Sickles had learned that Key was having an affair with his wife. The ensuing trial was a sensation, and Sickles became the first person in the US acquitted based on a temporary insanity defense.
#46
People often forget about the *Bonobo sex studies* that emerged in the 20th century. Bonobos, one of our closest primate relatives, use sex not just for reproduction but as a way to resolve conflicts, bond, and even trade favors. The findings were pretty shocking at the time because they challenged a lot of human assumptions about sexuality and social behavior. It’s a wild reminder of just how complex and diverse sexual behavior can be, even in nature!
#47
The bombing of Dresden in WWII. Everyone remembers the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and its a constant debate of whether it needed to happen. Dresden isn't a debate, it full on did not need to happen. The allies dropped so many bombs that it sucked the oxygen out of the city and created a fire tornado. People were melting in the street, into the street. It got so hot the asphalt become sludge and when people would run out of their houses, they'd get stuck in the pavement which is now hot tar essentially. The reason why the allies bombed it? Because the city had railway connections that would hurt the Nazis. No military base, no weapons manufacturing , nothing. Just a railway system. It was also 1945 at the tail end of the war. France and England had been taken back and Russia was already well into Germany. Between 25,000 to 35,000 civilians died.
#48
Idk how NSFW this is, but the reason the azthecs sacrificed humans was bc that gave the sun energy to run away from the moon and stars who wanted to murder him and envelop the whole world into darkness.
Somehow nobody ever metions this.
#49
Tipper Gore wanted to put a Parental Advisory sticker on Twisted Sister’s album, because of her own dirty mind. She thought “Under the Blade” was about masochism and bondage.
#50
"The Fappening"- Celebrity Nudes Leak of 2014.
#51
Mozart wrote a song called "lick me in the a*s".
#52
Catherine the Great supposedly had a secret room full of sexually explicit furniture. Chairs and tables with devils and penises carved in the legs and arm rests. I think one specific table had legs that were penises ejaculating that held the main part of the table as they ejaculate.
This has never been 100% confirmed so it still falls under "Urban legend" Originating in the 50s, apparently form the soviets.
#53
Nintendo had s*x hotels at one point.
Image credits: Mcfeyxtrillion
