I know it is summer and no one really wants to think about school, but I think you will find these facts interesting. Yes, most of them are useless and trivial but, hey, you can impress your friends and maybe even win that round of Jeopardy that has had you stumped for years. On with the show!
*Did you know that our calendar once had only 355 days with occasional extra weeks added here and there? Polititians, as usual, used this to their advatage and manipulated the calendar to lengthen their terms and shorten their enemy's. Julius Ceasar stopped this when he changed the calendar to 365 days. He also moved New years to January 1 and put in leap years. He obviously had to get the calendar back on track so that years could be properly counted. He had to add two extra months one year resulting in a year that was 445 days long.
*Who doesn't love to travel? Or at least look at the pretty pictures and wish you were there. One of the most popular places, with their gonolas and singing men, is Venice. Believe it or not, this beautiful city was once swap lands. So who changed it? Why, none other than Atilla and his Huns!
*Dracula. A name that can scare little children and make the bravest man want to stay miles away from Transilvannia. But Dracula, otherwise known as Count Vlad, was real. He was the ruler of Walachia, now known as Romania. He showed no mercy; impaling people by the thousands and sometimes, after a hard day at work, would treat himself to a goblet of their blood. After he died, people tried to forget him but the scary stories couldn't be hidden. He inspired Bram Stroker to create a most feared character. Vlad's father was Dracul, meaning "Dragun" or "Devil". Vlad was the son of the Devil, or "Dracula".
*Everyone knows that Columbus had to prove that the earth was round, right? Wrong. You may know author Washington Irving by his works "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow". In 1828, he wrote a famous history book all about Colubus. In one chapter he described a huge scene in which Columbus tried to win over Spanish Scholors who believed the world was flat. Yeah, right. Aristotle proved the earth to be round 2,000 years earlier. Columbus actually did meet with scholors but about something else: about the size of the globe.
*Who would ever ban coffee? Well, as coffee became more and more addictive to the Middle East, the more people thought that it was evil. By the time it hit Europe people wanted it banned. Luckily it reached Pope Clement VIII first. After tasting it, he blessed it saying, "This Satan's drink is so delicious...We shall fool Satan by baptizing it." So now coffee is safe to drink.
*What? George Washington was the 8th president?! He was actually the first president under the new constitution in 1789. The US became a nation in 1781. For a short time Congress had elected John Hanson as the first president of our United States. When he was in office the states were actually independant. The only real reason he was the first presidant was because he chose the title himself. He served only a year but, when elected, he recieved a letter congratulating him signed by no other than George Washington himself.
I hope you enjoyed this. The information for this was found in "The Greatest Stories Never Told" by Rick Beyer. Tune in next time for more unbelievably true facts! Thank you.
~Kaoru816
