What historical fact surprised you when you learned of it?

I didn’t know that the vietnam war was the first war that was televised in america. I can’t imagine not watching video clips and media news of a war, no wonder people started caring more about it once they saw what was going on.

The corruption of Harry Truman. I was deeply shocked to hear about the no show jobs he got his wife and daughter before he was in the White House. Truman had always been a hero to me.

@Blackberry, Having the war in your living room upset a lot of cultural norms about allegiance that we are still dealing with today. I’m finding the footage shot of Afghanistan that’s posted on Youtube to have a similar impact on me. There’s so much that you just don’t see elsewhere.

Part of WWII was “televised” in the sense that people went to the movies on a regular basis, and part of the show was watching newsreel footage. People went to the movies on a regular basis. During the summer, the movie theaters had air conditioning.

@filmfann, really? I didn’t know that. I will have to read up on that. I always held Truman in high regard, too.

I was surpised to learn that the largest slaveowner in Texas at the start of the War of Northern Aggression was not a white man.

When designing the dome for the Duomo in Florence, Brunelleschi studied the Roman Pantheon to figure out the construction. He was allowed to remove one small section of the Pantheon’s dome to study the curvature and when you go there, you can look up and see the wher the piece is missing. Somehow that thrills me, a living link to the past.

I was surprised by the magnitude of the Apollo 13 accident, the way it played out and ultimately when they made it back to earth alive. I was watching a morning news show the day of the Challenger disaster. That was a huge surprise!

I was surprised to learn that Roosevelt in the U.S. and Churchill in Great Britain knew in advance about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

I was also shocked and disbelieving when word first leaked out to the public about JFK’s affair with MM.

GQ, @PandoraBoxx.

I was surprised to hear about all the inventions created by Muslims during the 9th century (part of the Islamic Golden Age), including eyelgasses and the windmill, among other things. I was also surprised to find out that after Joan of Arc was burned at the stake, there was a re-trial at the urging of her mother and she was officially declared innocent and a martyr and the man who was largely responsible for her execution was declared a heretic. I always had the image of medieval people being burning-at-the-stake-happy savages (not entirely of course), but that proved me wrong. :)

I was surprised to know that in WWII, one of the sides I can’t remember which, but I believe it was the Allies experimented with attaching bombs to bats and tried to send them to enemy territory.

The experiment failed because the bats kept flying back to the base they were released from and had a tendency to crawl into nooks and crannies in buildings and under cars. The project was abandoned.

I was also surprised to learn that Benjamin Franklin loved to have sex with French women.

I had an ancient history teacher who once said, “Benjamin Franklin had sex with more women in France than you can shake a stick at.” I think that is the most wonderful thing a teacher has ever said to me.

I was surprised when first read about the history of human ancestor. That we evolved and share the same family with apes and that religion is fake.

Oh man – @Doctor_D just beat me to the punch. ($&%#!)

I will just add the notion of Mitochondrial Eve as a key “wow” moment. People freak when you point this out.

More recently I was shocked at the full list of U.S. military operations. I would have guessed 25 line items max, not 25 page-downs.

(GQ!)

@KatawaGrey, Franklin’s sexual proclivities and “liberal attitudes” are somewhat at odds with the way the DAR paints the Founding Fathers. Also interesting is the Jefferson Bible, Jefferson’s cut-and-paste version of the book.

I was surprised when I first learned that the federal income tax was supposed to be a “temporary” tax. I guess temporary is undefined.

That Hitler frequently ejaculated during his speeches. Yeah, pull the other one right?

I was really shocked and I still struggle to get my head around it when I found out that dinosaurs roamed the earth for billions of years before they were wiped out. Billions of years! I thought that, at the most, they were probably here for a good few thouands of years but certainly not billions with an “S” at the end.

The ancient Romans kissed their wives on the mouth, not to be romantic, but to make sure they didn’t sneak into the wine while they were away.

That Cleopatra was the last pharaoh (and that’s part of why she’s so famous). I just thought everyone loves a good international femme fatale story. And that she was apparently kind of ugly, so bonus points to her.

that in terms of the history of the world, when taken as a calendar year, dinosaurs appear at the last day or few days, and we only appear at the very last seconds..astonishing…puts things in a very different and slightly spooky light…

That the Japanese performed biological warfare experiments on prisoners before and during WWII. I’d heard about the Nazi atrocities, of course, but I was surprised to hear that the Japanese did it, too.