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History

1,670 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 8 of 28.

421. Britain knighted Roger Casement for exposing atrocities, then hanged him for treasonRoger Casement's reports on the Congo and the Peruvian Amazon made him a hero of human rights and earned him a knighthood in 1911. Five years later the same government executed hi…
422. De Gaulle accused the first Commission president of acting like a head of stateIn 1965 Walter Hallstein, the first head of the European Commission, pushed plans that would hand Brussels its own money and strip France of a veto. Charles de Gaulle charged him …
423. A puppet state gets a flag, an anthem and a constitution, but no real powerA puppet state has every outward badge of a nation, from a name and flag to an anthem and law codes, while a foreign power pulls the strings. The phrase puppet government was firs…
424. Revanchism was born of France's bitterness over Alsace-LorraineAfter losing Alsace and Lorraine to Prussia, French nationalists of the 1870s nursed a craving for revenge, or revanche, so intense it got its own word. That grudge shaped allianc…
425. Rob Reiner joked he'd be 'Meathead' even if he won a NobelRob Reiner became famous as Archie Bunker's liberal son-in-law, nicknamed Meathead, on America's most-watched sitcom. Then he reinvented himself as a director of rare range, movin…
426. Ancient Smyrna invented the worship of Rome as a goddess to win a new allyIn 197 BC the Greek port of Smyrna broke with its neighbour Pergamum and turned to Rome, a city it had no ties with. To create a bond, it founded a cult of Rome itself, and the go…
427. East Germany's ruling party counted one in six adults as membersAt its last official count in November 1989, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany had 2,129,250 members, about 17 per cent of East German adults. Weeks later it was scrambling to …
428. The Arab world's only communist state lasted 23 years at the tip of ArabiaFrom 1967 to 1990, the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen was the sole communist state in the Middle East. Built on the former British port of Aden, it banned child marriage an…
429. The SAS got its name from a bluff about paratroopers who did not existWhen David Stirling founded his unit in July 1941, it was labelled L Detachment, Special Air Service Brigade, as part of a deception meant to convince the Axis that a large Britis…
430. How risky American home loans wiped out almost 9 million jobsBetween 2007 and 2010, a wave of missed mortgage payments in the United States rippled through Wall Street and around the world. Americans lost nearly 9 million jobs and about $13…
431. Before it was the Rust Belt, America's industrial heartland was proudly called the Steel BeltChicago was a rural trading post in the 1840s and as big as Paris by 1893. Canals, railways and Great Lakes shipping turned the region into America's factory floor, then from the …
432. Reborn after 123 years of partition, interwar Poland lasted just under 21 yearsAfter more than a century carved up between Austria, Prussia and Russia, Poland reappeared as an independent state in late 1918. The Second Polish Republic fought border wars, swu…
433. Choosing the UN's top official is often compared to electing a popeThe head of the United Nations is picked through secret straw polls in the Security Council, where any of five permanent members can kill a candidate with a veto. In 1981 China ca…
434. A 1996 border pact grew into the world's largest regional organisationThe Shanghai Cooperation Organisation began as five neighbours agreeing to build military trust along their borders. Three decades on, its ten members cover about a quarter of the…
435. The Winchester rifle grew out of a fragile invention and a bankrupt companyBefore it was sold as the gun that won the West, the Winchester was a chain of flops: a fragile 1848 repeater, a bankrupt company, a weak bullet called the Rocket Ball. Its larges…
436. Stalin's eldest son died a German prisoner after his father refused a swapWhen Field Marshal Paulus surrendered at Stalingrad in 1943, the Germans offered to trade him for a captured Red Army lieutenant: Yakov Dzhugashvili, Stalin's firstborn. Stalin sa…
437. Yellow journalism was named after a comic strip kid in a newspaper warIn 1890s New York, two press barons fought for the pennies of men buying one paper a day from shouting street vendors. Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst filled pages wit…
438. The Sudetenland was never a single region until nationalists named itHitler's 1938 demand made the Sudetenland famous, yet the word itself was barely a generation old. It borrowed the name of a mountain range and stretched it over every German-spea…
439. Two diplomats carved up the Ottoman Middle East in six days of secret talksOver roughly six days at the end of 1915, Mark Sykes of Britain and François Georges-Picot of France met almost daily and left no record of what they said. On 3 January 1916 they …
440. The T-34 won by numbers: Soviet factories kept making it cheaperMore than 57,300 T-34s rolled out of Soviet factories by the end of 1945, making it the most-produced tank of World War II. Its sloped armour and powerful gun startled German gene…
441. A lost planet called Theia may be buried inside Earth right nowAbout 4.5 billion years ago, a world perhaps the size of Mars is thought to have slammed into the young Earth, and the debris gathered into the Moon. Nobody has ever seen Theia. Y…
442. Molotov chose a name meaning hammer and became Stalin's most enduring lieutenantBorn Vyacheslav Skryabin, a shy merchant's son renamed himself after the Russian word for sledgehammer because it sounded industrial. Rivals such as Trotsky dismissed him as medio…
443. A reporter asking directions helped wreck the surprise raid that began WacoFederal agents planned a sudden daylight raid on a Texas religious compound in February 1993. A reporter tipped off about it asked a mail carrier for directions, and the carrier h…
444. For twelve years, China's government was whoever controlled the strongest armyWhen Yuan Shikai died in 1916, the young Republic of China splintered. For the next twelve years rival generals from the Beiyang Army and regional strongmen fought over provinces …
445. Watergate began with a leak-plugging squad and ended with a president resigningThe burglars caught inside Democratic headquarters on June 17, 1972 were not a one-off. They came from a White House effort to stop leaks that had already broken into a psychiatri…
446. Sable antelopes fight back against lions, sometimes fatallyFaced with lions, the sable antelope does not simply run. It confronts its attackers, swinging scimitar-shaped horns that can reach back to guard its vulnerable rump, the spot pre…
447. Sally Hemings was the enslaved half-sister of Thomas Jefferson's late wifeSally Hemings was born about 1773, the daughter of an enslaved woman and her enslaver, John Wayles, whose daughter Martha married Thomas Jefferson. That made Hemings a younger hal…
448. Under the Samanids, Bukhara was said to match Baghdad in gloryFor about 180 years, a dynasty descended from a Zoroastrian landowner in Balkh ruled much of Central Asia and northeastern Iran. The Samanids backed poets and scientists, drawing …
449. The Congress that declared independence could not collect a single taxThe Second Continental Congress raised an army, named George Washington its commander, printed money, signed treaties and declared independence. Yet it had no power to levy taxes.…
450. Japan's Reiwa era is the first named from Japanese, not Chinese, poetryWhen Japan unveiled the name Reiwa on 1 April 2019, it broke with tradition: its two characters came from the Man'yōshū, an eighth-century anthology of Japanese poetry, rather tha…
451. Italy's typical Protestant went from Piedmontese man to southern womanA Waldensian pastor, Giorgio Bouchard, once remarked that at his birth the typical Italian Protestant was a man from Piedmont with a surname like his own. Today, he said, she is a…
452. The Soviet constitution let every republic secede, and in 1991 some didOn paper, each Soviet republic had the right to leave the Union. For decades that right was dismissed as meaningless, since the Communist Party ran everything from the centre. The…
453. Rhodesia declared independence in 1965, yet Britain kept calling it Southern RhodesiaOn 11 November 1965, the white-minority cabinet of Southern Rhodesia declared independence from Britain rather than accept a path to black majority rule. The state it created, Rho…
454. Roanoke's vanished colonists left one clue, a word carved into a fenceWhen John White finally returned to Roanoke Island in 1590, delayed by war with Spain, the settlement he had left stood fortified and empty. The only clue was CROATOAN, carved int…
455. Leo XIII, the pope who championed trade unions, reigned until age 93Elected in 1878 and still pope at his death in 1903, Leo XIII had one of the longest reigns in Catholic history. His 1891 letter Rerum novarum backed fair wages, safe workplaces a…
456. The Potala Palace took three years outside and 45 years insideRising 13 storeys from a hill in the middle of the Lhasa Valley, the Potala Palace holds more than 1,000 rooms and some 200,000 statues. Its outer walls went up in three years fro…
457. For centuries, a handful of German princes chose the Holy Roman EmperorThe Holy Roman Emperor was not simply born to the job. A small college of princes, the Kurfürsten, voted for him, first by loose custom and from 1356 under a charter called the Go…
458. Magic mushrooms are not one species but a scattered family of fungiThe label psilocybin mushroom covers well over a hundred species spread across several unrelated genera. What they share is a compound the body turns into psilocin. Mexico hosts m…
459. Rachel Ward nearly lost The Thorn Birds after a disastrous first readingRachel Ward's audition for The Thorn Birds went badly, and acting coach Sandra Seacat helped her win the part anyway. The 1983 miniseries made her a star and a Golden Globe nomine…
460. In the Ramayana, not every rakshasa demon is a villainRakshasas are the shape-shifting fiends of Hindu, Buddhist and Jain storytelling, masters of illusion who can fly, vanish and change size at will. Yet the great epics are less bla…
461. Medieval kings were far likelier to be killed before clear succession rulesBetween 600 and 1200, more than a fifth of Western Christian monarchs were killed by their own subjects. Over the next six centuries that share fell to about 6 percent. The histor…
462. Clear rules of royal succession made kings less likely to be murderedWho inherits a throne sounds like a question of family trees, but it shapes whether a state survives its ruler's death. Research links primogeniture to fewer regicides: when only …
463. Orientalism began as a painting fashion and became an indictmentIn the 19th century, Orientalism simply meant Western art that depicted the Middle East and North Africa, and Paris even had a society for its painters. Then in 1978 Edward Said t…
464. A kilted Doctor Who sidekick inspired the Outlander sagaDiana Gabaldon set her time-travel romance in Jacobite Scotland because of a Doctor Who companion: Jamie McCrimmon, a kilted Highlander she found oddly endearing. Her hero took hi…
465. Europe's largest palace burned down because of drying laundryWith more than 1,500 rooms, Whitehall was once the biggest palace in Europe and home to English monarchs for almost 170 years. In January 1698 a servant hung wet linen around a ch…
466. Perestroika set out to rescue Soviet socialism and helped end itMikhail Gorbachev's restructuring was meant to make the planned economy work better, not abolish it. Instead, within six years it had legalised private businesses, let Soviet citi…
467. A refused meal in Kashi turned a pilgrim into Periyar, India's great rationalistIn 1904 a young merchant's son from Erode went on pilgrimage to Kashi, was turned away from a free meal reserved for Brahmins, and ate scraps from the street. He left a believer a…
468. Peter III ruled Russia for 186 days before his wife took the thronePeter III became emperor in January 1762, made peace with Prussia, handed back Russia's hard-won conquests and was overthrown by his wife Catherine that July. Days later he was de…
469. Spain's Planet King was said to have laughed in public only three timesPhilip IV ruled the largest empire on Earth, some 12.2 million square kilometres, and was coached to appear so solemn that foreigners compared him to a statue. In private he loved…
470. Mongolia was Moscow's first satellite state and stayed one the longestWedged between the Soviet Union and China, the Mongolian People's Republic became the world's second communist state in 1924 and remained a Soviet satellite for its entire 68 year…
471. Luffy's rubber power turned out to be a disguised sun godFor years readers of One Piece believed Monkey D. Luffy had eaten a humble Gum-Gum Fruit that made his body stretch like rubber. The story later revealed that name was government …
472. MSNBC began as Microsoft's bet that television and the internet would mergeThe cable channel now called MS NOW launched in 1996 as MSNBC, a Microsoft and NBC joint venture whose name fused MSN with NBC. Its early slogan urged viewers to get connected, an…
473. Bangladesh used satellites and DNA to bring back a lost cottonDhaka muslin was spun from a local cotton called phuti carpus into yarn so fine the cloth looked like glass. When the trade collapsed, the plant vanished too. In the 2010s researc…
474. Tempura reached Japan through a port once run by JesuitsNagasaki began in 1571 as a harbour built for Portuguese ships, and for a few years after 1580 it was governed by the Jesuits. Through it came tobacco, bread, the sponge cake cast…
475. The anti-brand author spent her teens obsessed with designer labelsNaomi Klein, whose book No Logo became a handbook for critics of corporate globalisation, grew up haunting shopping malls and rejecting her feminist mother's politics. Two shocks …
476. For a few Viking years, England, Denmark and Norway shared one kingBetween 1013 and 1042, England, Denmark and Norway were mostly ruled as one realm held together only by the sea. At its peak under Cnut the Great, from 1028 to 1035, only the Holy…
477. Michoacán, the place of the fishermen, once rivalled the AztecsMichoacán's name means place of the fishermen, after those who worked Lake Pátzcuaro. Its Purépecha Empire stood as a rival to the Aztecs when the Spanish arrived, yet the region'…
478. Military dictators are unusually willing to hand back powerThe average military dictatorship lasts about five years, and its leader typically holds on for just three. Oddly, generals are more likely than other autocrats to negotiate an ex…
479. Fired while abroad in 1968, Miloš Forman went on to win two directing OscarsWhen Soviet tanks entered Prague in August 1968, Miloš Forman was in Paris pitching his first American film. His Czech studio sacked him, so he moved to New York. Within a decade …
480. Until 1980, no monarchy let an eldest daughter outrank her younger brothersFor most of history crowns passed to sons first. Sweden broke that rule in 1980, becoming the first monarchy to hand the throne to the eldest child regardless of sex, and a string…

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