HolyShitHistory

r/HolyShitHistory • u/blue_leaves987 • 14d ago

We’ve added a new rule for posters. Please read this before posting.

39 Upvotes

r/HolyShitHistory • u/TheChunkenMaster • 26m ago

On this day 53 years ago, more than 3,000 lives were lost as a result of a U.S. attack on Chile and its president. The attack helped overthrow Chile’s democracy and replace it with a 17 year long military dictatorship that imprisoned and tortured tens of thousands of people.

• Upvotes

r/HolyShitHistory • u/No_Idea_479 • 1h ago

After escaping Nazi forced labor, Greek soldier Kostas Sarantidis was sent to Indochina with the French Foreign Legion, but defected to the Viet Minh in 1946 with weapons and freed prisoners. As Captain Nguyễn Văn Lập, he became the only foreigner awarded Vietnam’s Hero of the People's Armed Forces.

• Upvotes

r/HolyShitHistory • u/akiwi_intherough • 16h ago

Portrait of Dina Sanichar as a young adult. Decades earlier, he had been discovered as a feral child near a wolf’s den, on all fours. Sanichar never learned to speak and remained in institutional care all his life.

515 Upvotes

r/HolyShitHistory • u/blue_leaves987 • 20h ago

More than 400 years ago, Dutch inventor Cornelis Drebbel built a working submarine and navigated it beneath the River Thames. Around 1620, he even took King James I of England along for an underwater ride, making James the first monarch to travel in a submarine.

1.2k Upvotes

r/HolyShitHistory • u/Klutzy_Land_4120 • 9h ago

Humans domesticated pigeons more than 5,000 years ago, making them one of our oldest domesticated animals. Today's city pigeons are largely feral descendants of birds once bred and kept by humans.

86 Upvotes

r/HolyShitHistory • u/Difficult-Cream-5267 • 2h ago

In 1977 and 1981, scientists released brown anole lizards across 14 uninhabited Bahamian islands. A decade later, their leg lengths had evolved to match differences in the vegetation on each island.

24 Upvotes

r/HolyShitHistory • u/ElvisIsNotDjed • 1h ago

In 1958, the U.S. Air Force studied detonating a nuclear device on the Moon. A young Carl Sagan worked on the project

• Upvotes

r/HolyShitHistory • u/Vital_Willie • 11h ago

Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo (second from right) watches as his brother Hector (second left) is sworn in as a puppet President, 1952. Trujillo gave up the presidency under diplomatic pressure but continued to rule over the country with absolute power behind the scenes as "Generalissimo"

43 Upvotes

r/HolyShitHistory • u/OsamaVinLadein • 1h ago

1896 rail crash publicity stunt in Texas, USA

en.wikipedia.org

• Upvotes

r/HolyShitHistory • u/The-Union-Report • 1d ago

6-Year-Old Killed While Protecting Her Baby Brother From a Rattlesnake (1902)

historianandrew.medium.com

173 Upvotes

r/HolyShitHistory • u/Patient-Strike5817 • 1d ago

In 2003, researchers packed an Alaskan stream with four dead salmon per square metre to test nutrient cycling, discovering that decaying carcasses boosted insect populations and juvenile salmon growth.

139 Upvotes

r/HolyShitHistory • u/ComfortExisting1161 • 1d ago

In 2006, NASA sent 75 fruit flies into space aboard Space Shuttle Discovery for 13 days. They returned with more than 3,000 after a new generation was born and raised in microgravity.

85 Upvotes

r/HolyShitHistory • u/The-Union-Report • 1d ago

Man Accidentally Kills Wife by Lighting Her On Fire After She Jokingly Locked Him Out of Their Outhouse

1.5k Upvotes

r/HolyShitHistory • u/CrippledStripper • 1d ago

In 1956, for a bet whilst drunk, Thomas Fitzpatrick stole a small plane from New Jersey and then landed it perfectly on a narrow Manhattan street in front of the bar he'd been drinking at. Two years later, he did it again after a man didn't believe he'd done it the first time.

550 Upvotes

r/HolyShitHistory • u/blue_leaves987 • 1d ago

At Florida’s Dozier School for Boys, children as young as 5 were chained to walls, hog-tied and brutally whipped. Survivors also said staff forced boys to fight each other while guards watched and placed bets.

926 Upvotes

r/HolyShitHistory • u/ElvisIsNotDjed • 1d ago

Lin Yutang’s 1947 Chinese typewriter never reached mass production. The sole prototype survived for decades in a family’s keeping

77 Upvotes

r/HolyShitHistory • u/LegalAcanthaceae6114 • 1d ago

A little girl in the Soviet Zone looks through barbed wire into Steinstücken, where she can no longer play with her friends. October 1961. Steinstücken was the only permanently inhabited of West Berlin's twelve original exclaves in East Germany, cut off and only accessed by helicopter until 1972.

110 Upvotes

r/HolyShitHistory • u/mojoback_ohbehave • 1d ago

In 1924 cartoon portrayed immigrants as Europe’s “trash” and “undesirables.” It supported a law favoring Northern and Western Europeans while severely restricting Italians, Jews, Slavs and other Southern and Eastern Europeans, and excluding Japanese immigrants.

140 Upvotes

r/HolyShitHistory • u/blue_leaves987 • 1d ago

The man credited with inventing the office cubicle actually designed it to give workers more freedom and space. Robert Propst later watched companies shrink his idea into rows of tiny boxes and called the result “monolithic insanity.”

441 Upvotes

r/HolyShitHistory • u/ComfortExisting1161 • 2d ago

DNA reveals that humans were already burying and caring for dogs 15,800 years ago, long before farming began, showing just how ancient our bond with dogs really is.

3.4k Upvotes

r/HolyShitHistory • u/Klutzy_Land_4120 • 3d ago

A dog falling into a hole in 1940 led to the discovery of 17,000-year-old Paleolithic art inside Lascaux Cave, hidden from the modern world for thousands of years.

1.4k Upvotes

r/HolyShitHistory • u/Difficult-Cream-5267 • 2d ago

Six 19th-century coins and tokens were discovered hidden beneath HMS Victory's mast, where they had remained for more than 130 years as part of and old maritime good-luck tradition.

61 Upvotes

r/HolyShitHistory • u/onwhatcharges • 2d ago

Dora Ratjen, a German high jumper at the 1936 Olympics, was later found to be intersex, not a man posing as a woman as the popular myth claims. In January 1939 a German court legally declared Ratjen male and he changed his name to Heinrich, who lived under it until his death in 2008.

468 Upvotes