POWs Shared Key Details
26. Japanese POWs supplied a huge amount of information during World War 2. This happened because most Japanese soldiers did not know the rights they still kept as prisoners under the Geneva convention. Many also felt grateful to American troops for the polite treatment they received.
27. On January 23, 1902, 210 Japanese soldiers were trapped in a blizzard on the Hakkoda Mountains in Aomori prefecture. A total of 199 of them died during the climb, making it the most lethal disaster in the history of mountaineering.
28. In 1976, Japan gave 53 bonsai trees to the US for its bicentennial, including a white pine that had been cared for every day since 1625 and survived the Hiroshima atomic blast. Its history was unknown until 2001, when two brothers came to the museum to check on their grandfather’s tree.
29. Charley Ross was a 4-year-old American child whose 1874 kidnapping for ransom, considered the first in US history, became a nationwide sensation. Charley, who was never found, was enticed by two men offering candy and fireworks, which led to the warning “never take candy from strangers”.
30. Robert Liston is the only surgeon in history to have carried out an operation with a 300% mortality rate, losing his patient to infection, accidentally amputating his assistant’s fingers, who also died of infection, and cutting a spectator who died from shock.
31. Until 1870, the pope made all Jews living in Rome attend compulsory sermons every Sabbath in front of the Church of San Gregorio. They all came, but would often put wax in their ears so they would not hear a thing.
32. The only coup in US history occurred in North Carolina in 1898. A mob of white supremacists armed with rifles and pistols marched on City Hall in Wilmington and overthrew the local government, forcing both black and white officials to resign. The leader of the mob was later elected as mayor.
33. The oldest known song in human history, “Hurrian Hymn no. 6”, dates back to a 1400 B.C. Sumerian clay tablet.
34. Out of all the species that ever lived throughout all of Earth’s history, only a fraction of a percent have fossilized. Even fewer are found by humans. Most of life’s history will remain forever unknown.
35. Italy had to build an entire courthouse to prosecute the Mafia. They charged 475 members in a trial that lasted from 1986-1992. To date, it is one of the biggest trials in history.
Sobhuza II’s Record Reign
36. Sobhuza II served as king of Swaziland, now Eswatini, for more than 82 years, the longest verifiable reign of any monarch in history. Over a 50-year period, he married 70 wives and fathered 210 children. By the time he died, he had more than 1000 grandchildren. He was known by the honorific “Bull of Swazi.”
37. Winston Churchill received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953. His best-known work was a six-volume memoir on WW2, but he also authored a science fiction alternate history story about the US Civil War.
38. For most of history, smiling in a painting or photo was seen as radical, and Mark Twain once wrote, “A photograph is a most important document, and there is nothing more damning to go down to posterity than a silly, foolish smile caught and fixed forever”.
39. An 81-year-old man named Giles Corey, who was accused of being a wizard in 1692, was the only man in American history to be subjected to death by pressing in an effort to make him submit to trial by jury. His reported reply to the torture was to tell them to add ‘more weight.’
40. One of the deadliest explosions in history took place in Beijing in 1626. An unexplained blast at a gunpowder factory wiped out 4 square kilometers of the city and killed around 20,000 people. The explosion itself was about as powerful as the nuclear explosion over Hiroshima.
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