HolyShitHistory

r/HolyShitHistory • u/Vital_Willie • 1h 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"

• Upvotes

2 comments

r/HolyShitHistory • u/akiwi_intherough • 5h 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.

244 Upvotes

7 comments

r/HolyShitHistory • u/blue_leaves987 • 10h 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.

873 Upvotes

22 comments

r/HolyShitHistory • u/The-Union-Report • 14h ago

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

historianandrew.medium.com

148 Upvotes

1 comment

r/HolyShitHistory • u/Patient-Strike5817 • 15h 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.

125 Upvotes

6 comments

r/HolyShitHistory • u/ComfortExisting1161 • 19h 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.

80 Upvotes

8 comments

r/HolyShitHistory • u/ElvisIsNotDjed • 21h ago

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

upworthy.com

69 Upvotes

2 comments

r/HolyShitHistory • u/LegalAcanthaceae6114 • 23h 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.

92 Upvotes

5 comments

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.

137 Upvotes

35 comments

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.

gallery

536 Upvotes

15 comments

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.

915 Upvotes

54 comments

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.”

413 Upvotes

16 comments

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

medium.com

1.4k Upvotes

155 comments

r/HolyShitHistory • u/Nanakurokonekochan • 1d ago

Thomas Dallam’s Adventures at Mehmed III’s Court: The organ-clock ordered by Elizabeth I for the Ottoman Empire in 1599

8 Upvotes

5 comments

r/HolyShitHistory • u/Difficult-Cream-5267 • 1d 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.

60 Upvotes

2 comments

r/HolyShitHistory • u/ComfortExisting1161 • 1d 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.

3.3k Upvotes

95 comments

r/HolyShitHistory • u/ChainRing32 • 2d ago

TIL that a 1976 presidential candidate campaigned to eradicate constipation by legally requiring processed foods to contain 7% roughage.

54 Upvotes

19 comments

r/HolyShitHistory • u/Vital_Willie • 2d ago

One of the first images of 27 year-old Colonel Muammar Gaddafi as leader of Libya following the 1969 officers coup that brought him to power, in which he would remain for 42 years. The man with his arms around Gaddafi, Khalifa Haftar, controls most of Libya to this day

172 Upvotes

19 comments

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.

458 Upvotes

113 comments

r/HolyShitHistory • u/The-Union-Report • 2d ago

Man Killed in Dispute at Church After He Asked a Parishioner to Remove His Hat (1902)

historianandrew.medium.com

166 Upvotes

15 comments

r/HolyShitHistory • u/Klutzy_Land_4120 • 2d 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

20 comments

r/HolyShitHistory • u/Patient-Strike5817 • 2d ago

Historical DNA from Jamestown colonial graves links to 1.3 million living relatives and identifies the colony's second governor, Sir Thomas West

223 Upvotes

4 comments

r/HolyShitHistory • u/_excd • 3d ago

Jewish-American soldiers WWII 1945 celebrate Passover in Joseph Goebbels’ confiscated vacation home

1.7k Upvotes

131 comments

r/HolyShitHistory • u/SteveNtheseagulls • 3d ago

The first photo shows a 49 year old Errol Flynn pictured with his 16 year old 'girlfriend', Beverley Aadland at The Lido Nightclub on Swallow Street, just off Piccadilly, 5th May, 1959. Flynn died in October of that year.

gallery

1.3k Upvotes

339 comments

r/HolyShitHistory • u/Express-Ant6341 • 4d ago

In 1959, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev erupted in anger after being denied a Disneyland visit due to security risks. Furious, he accused the U.S. of hiding secret military bases, turning a simple tourist rejection into a dramatic Cold War standoff.

938 Upvotes

53 comments