Crucial Moments From Our Past That Everyone Should Be Aware Of
To be able to understand the world properly, it's important to learn about the events that happened in human history and learn from our past mistakes. Past events contain concrete examples that could help anyone make better, thought-through decisions and avoid the same failures.
It would be foolish to repeat the same mistake people made ages ago and expect different results. History has a tendency to repeat itself, and events from the past replay themselves once again.
Besides that, it's always fun to learn interesting historical facts that kind of feel too good to be true or simply hard to believe. We were never taught the fun historical facts in school, but now you can find them everywhere.
If you are interested in learning fun history-related facts, stories, and videos, History Defined got you covered! The Instagram page shares weird history facts that will pop every now and then in your feed and teach you a thing or two.
Here are some of the best posts from History Defined that contain the most fun historical facts you would love to learn about. Scroll down and check them out for yourself! It never hurts to know some fun historical facts.
1. Kenyan runner Abel Mutai was only a few meters from the finish line, but got confused with the signs and stopped, thinking he had finished the race.
A Spanish man, Ivan Fernandez, was right behind him and, realizing what was going on started shouting to the Kenyan to keep running. Mutai did not know Spanish and did not understand. Realizing what was going on, Ivan Fernandez pushed Mutai to victory.
A reporter asked Ivan, "Why did you do this?" Ivan replied
My dream is that one day we can have some sort of community life where we push ourselves and help each other win." The reporter insisted "But why did you let the Kenyan win?" Ivan replied, "I didn't let him win, he was going to win. The race was his."
The reporter insisted and asked again, "But you could have won!" Ivan looked at him and replied: "But what would be the merit of my victory? What would be the honor of this medal? What would my Mother think of it?"
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2. This is Shavarsh Karapetyan, a retired Armenian swimmer.
In 1976, he had just completed a 26 km (16 mile) run when he heard a loud crash. A trolleybus had lost control and had fallen into a reservoir. It was 25 meters (82 ft) off-shore and had sunk to a depth of 10 meters (33 ft).
Karapetyan immediately dived into the sewage-infested waters and managed to kick the back window of the trolleybus with his legs, despite zero visibility from the silt that had risen from the bottom. Of the 92 passengers onboard, Karapetyan pulled out 46 people. 20 of whom survived.
The combination of cold water and the multiple lacerations from glass shards led him to be hospitalized for 45 days. He developed pneumonia and sepsis. While he was able to recover, damage to his lungs prevented him from continuing his career as a swimmer.
"I knew that I could only save so many lives, I was afraid to make a mistake. It was so dark down there that I could barely see anything. One of my dives, I accidentally grabbed a seat instead of a passenger. I could have saved a life instead. That seat still haunts me in my nightmares," he said.
In 1985, Karapetyan came upon a burning building with trapped people inside. He rushed in and began pulling people out. He was badly burnt and had to once again be hospitalized.
Later in life, he moved to Moscow and founded a shoe company called “Second Breath”. He is still alive today and continues to run his business.
3. In 1996, Binti Jua, an 8-year-old female Western lowland gorilla, tended to a 3-year-old boy who had fallen into her enclosure at the Brookfield Zoo in Illinois.
4. In 1996, a newborn baby girl was left in a garbage can near the city of Kolkata, India.
Three friendly street dogs discovered and protected her for nearly two days, even attempting to feed the child before authorities were contacted and the young one was saved.
5. In 1912, Jim Thorpe, a Native American, had his running shoes stolen on the morning of his Olympic track and field events.
He found this mismatched pair of shoes in the garbage and ran in them to win two Olympic gold medals that day.
He was also the first Native American to win a gold medal for the United States.
6. Three Jewish men who all survived the Auschwitz concentration camp and were liberated on the same day, reunite 73 years later, 2019
All these men survived the camp and their tattoos have the difference of the number 10, meaning they were all in the camp at the same time. All these men went onto have families and good lives.
7. The lady circled in red was Lucy Higgs Nichols. She was born into slavery in Tennessee...
...but during the Civil War she managed to escape and found her way to 23rd Indiana Infantry Regiment which was encamped nearby. She stayed with the regiment and worked as a nurse throughout the war.
After the war, she moved north with the regiment and settled in Indiana, where she found work with some of the veterans of the 23rd. She applied for a pension after Congress passed the Army Nurses Pension Act of 1892 which allowed Civil War nurses to draw pensions for their service.
The War Department had no record of her, so her pension was denied. Fifty-five surviving veterans of the 23rd petitioned Congress for the pension they felt she had rightfully earned, and it was granted.
The photograph shows Nichols and other veterans of the Indiana regiment at a reunion in 1898. She died in 1915 and is buried in a cemetery in New Albany, Indiana.
8. Meet Margaret Hamilton, the woman who took mankind to the moon.
She is standing beside the code she created to program the computer systems on the Apollo 11 spacecraft, 1969
Hamilton created the basic concept of modern-day software and her programming was so successful and effective that it was just as important as the astronauts aboard the spacecraft itself. After getting her degree in mathematics she is considered to be the first software engineer, a term which she created.
Despite her role being one of the most important in the entire apollo mission, she was not credited as much as she should have been.
Before she worked for NASA, she programmed software for the US airforce to detect enemy aircraft. She also made software for tracking satellites and to predict the weather.
She took mankind to the moon and back.
Fun fact: the device you are using to view this post (most likely a smartphone) has over a million times more computer power than the spacecraft that took us to the moon. Let that sink in what kind of computer power you are currently holding in your hand!
9. Albina Mali-Hočevar was a Slovenian fighter who was wounded in combat several times during WW2.
She joined the People's Liberation Movement at 16.
She was wounded twice at 17.
She was wounded again by an exploding mine three days after her 18th birthday.
She continued fighting and working as a nurse for the rest of the war.
She lived until the age of 75.
10. A train of Jewish prisoners intercepted by Allied Forces.
In this photo, they then realized that the train would not be heading to a Concentration Camp, they had been liberated.
Taken on April of 1945, by Major Clarence Benjamin.
11. A father looking for his two missing sons that went missing during the war, Mitrovica, Kosovo, 1999. 🇽🇰
Mustafa Xaja, shows two of his sons photos who he fears were killed by Serbs, he had just recently been released from a Serbian prison, and was forced to cross over the border with Albania. Later, he found out his sons were safe.
12. A Couple At Woodstock Only 48 Hours After They Met And The Same Couple 50 Years Later, Happily Still Together
13. Bobbi Gibb, first woman to run the Boston Marathon in 1966, she ran without a number because women were not allowed into the race.
14. This photo shows Dr. Zbigniew Religa keeping watch on the vital signs of a patient after a 23 hour heart surgery he conducted in 1987.
In the lower right corner, you can see one of his colleagues who helped him with the surgery asleep. Dr. Religa was a pioneer of heart transplantation in Poland, and even though the surgery was considered borderline impossible at the time, he took the chance, and the operation was entirely successful. The patient in the photo would go on to outlive Dr. Religa.
15. East German soldier helps a little boy sneak across the Berlin Wall the day it was erected in 1961.
The boy had been left behind in the chaos of people fleeing to be with their families on either side of the wall.
Despite being given orders by the East German government to let no one pass into East Berlin, the soldier helped the boy sneak through the barbwire. It was reported that the soldier was caught doing this by his superior officer, who removed the soldier from his unit. It is unknown if anything further happened to the soldier.
16. “My Uncle getting caught growing weed in the backyard." - 1970s
17. Billed as "The Sheep-Headed Men," "The White Ecuadorian Cannibals Eko and Iko," and "The Ambassadors From Mars,” George and Willie Muse were world-famous sideshow performers in the early 1900s.
But even their white audiences hardly knew the horrors of their story.
Born Black with a rare form of albinism, they were targeted by a traveling "freak hunter" when they were just boys and kidnapped from their Virginia home. Then they were forced to grow out their hair and sold to a series of traveling sideshows, including Ringling Bros. They weren’t allowed to go to school or learn to read, and they never saw a dime, though their handlers made a fortune off of them. They were even told that their mother was dead so that they would stop begging to go home.
Their years of enslavement finally ended in 1927 when Ringling Bros. found its way back to Roanoke and George recognized their mother in the crowd. "There's our dear old mother," he said. "Look, Willie, she is not dead."
18. Members of the Polish resistance during World War 2, then to now.
The Polish resistance played a major role in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was the 1943 act of Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto in German-occupied Poland during World War II to oppose Germany's final effort to transport the remaining ghetto population to Majdanek and Treblinka death camps.
After the Grossaktion Warsaw of summer 1942, in which more than a quarter of a million Jews were deported from the ghetto to Treblinka and murdered, the remaining Jews began to build bunkers and smuggle weapons and explosives into the ghetto. The left-wing Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB) and right-wing Jewish Military Union (ŻZW) formed and began to train. A small resistance effort to another roundup in January 1943 was partially successful and spurred Polish resistance groups to support the Jews in earnest.
The uprising started on 19 April when the ghetto refused to surrender to the police commander Jürgen Stroop, who ordered the burning of the ghetto, block by block, ending on 16 May. A total of 13,000 Jews were killed, about half of them burnt alive or suffocated. German casualties were probably fewer than 150, with Stroop reporting 110 casualties.
It was the largest single revolt by Jews during World War II. The Jews knew that the uprising was doomed and their survival was unlikely. Marek Edelman, the only surviving ŻOB commander, said their inspiration to fight was "not to allow the Germans alone to pick the time and place of our deaths". According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the uprising was "one of the most significant occurrences in the history of the Jewish people".
20. Arnold Schwarzenegger with Wilt Chamberlain and Andrè the Giant on the set of Conan the Destroyer, 1983
21. In 1990, an improperly installed window on British Airways Flight 5390 fell off during midflight causing rapid decompression in the cockpit.
Flight attendant Nigel Ogden just happened to be entering the cockpit when he heard the loud bang and saw the pilot getting sucked out. In the reenactment image, you can see Ogden holding on to his legs, while the co-pilot is trying to rapidly descend in order to reach a safer altitude.
As the co-pilot attempted to contact air traffic control to make an emergency landing, Ogden was starting to develop frostbite from the severe cold. Most of the crew thought the pilot was already dead, but Ogden continued to hold on. There was also the fear that if he did let go, the body might collide with the plane's engine, wing or stabilizer, creating more havoc. All he knew for sure was that the pilot was slipping further and further out the window and his head was repeatedly slamming against the fuselage.
After 15 minutes of flying with a broken window, the plane landed safely at Southampton Airport. Ogden suffered frostbite on his face and damaged one of his eyes; he also dislocated his shoulder. The pilot miraculously survived with frostbite and multiple fractures on his arms and hands.
An investigation later revealed that the window that had been newly installed just 27 hours before the flight had used incorrect bolt sizes. Of the 90 bolts that were used, 84 of them were 0.026 inches (0.66 mm) too small in diameter. The other 6 bolts had the correct diameter, but were short by 0.1 inches (2.5 mm). The bolts were supposed to be 0.8 inches, not 0.7 inches.
When you think about all the insane things that happened in the past, life starts to feel a little bit weird because these things are not normally supposed to happen, but they did anyway. This is why it's extremely important to learn history and hopefully prevent some bad things from ever happening again.
