Article created by: Rasa Žilinskaitė
Learning history can be a transformative experience. It can challenge your long-held beliefs and assumptions about societies, their culture, and humanity in general.
Discovering that what you’ve been taught is not the (whole) truth, and that events you thought were isolated incidents are actually part of a broader pattern is jarring. But as uncomfortable as it may be, this process can liberate you, providing you with a new level of clarity and understanding.
So let’s take a look at a Reddit post, created by user u/FlickTheSwitch167 that asked everyone “What historical fact have you learnt that ruined everything you ever thought you knew about this life?” And it has received a fair share of insightful replies!
#1
The more we find out about Native Americans, the more I realize the entire history of the United States is complete white-washed lie.
Image credits: Dredly
#2
The church began the vow of celibacy for priests, not for any Biblical reasons, but so the priest didn’t have a spouse or any offspring who could inherit his wealth. This way the Church inherited all of it.
Image credits: KilgorePTrout
#3
That we domesticated pigeons thousands of years ago and then decided we didn’t want them anymore. People treat them like vermin after we relied on them for so much (food, messengers etc)
The pigeons you see in your cities are not wild, they’re abandoned.
Image credits: pizzkat
#4
Old norse runes were found carved up like 20 feet in a cave- when they were translated, they just said “this is very high”
God I love people aksjsj
Image credits: FireEnchiladaDragon
#5
African kings were the ones who advertised their people as work force/labor to the world. They passed away regretting those decisions.
Image credits: Amasero
#6
“It says here in this history book that luckily, the good guys have won every single time. What are the odds?”
– Norm MacDonald
Image credits: bookon
#7
When I got older and realized the countless atrocities the United States has committed. Genocide, collusion, bombing our own cities. I used to feel a sense of safety knowing that I lived with the good guys and we stood for justice. That feeling is fleeting
Image credits: FireFromThaumaturgy
#8
Ancient Antarctica was actually a rainforest, a lush and verdant paradise, filled with flora and fauna.
Despite the interesting fact that there was a whole continent of animals who lived on this planet that we’ll never know about – as their remains are locked beneath miles of ice – it blew my mind that Antarctica only fully froze over about 35 million years ago, despite breaking from its supercontinent ~ 180 million years ago.
That means Antarctica supported independent life for ~ 145 million years, which ruined any sense I have for time and perspective. We really are specks on this planet.
Image credits: oohaaahz
#9
The inventions of Nikola Tesla and what little Edison actually invented himself
Image credits: 0odreadlordo0
#10
The Irish famine was an opportunity the British took to commit crimes against the Irish. They were intentionally starved, while other crops were shipped off island to the British citizens.
Image credits: Nintendorian
#11
Leopold of Belgium,treated congo as “his personal property” And people who failed to collect enough Cocoa had thier hands/the hands of their kids cut And france forced Haiti (one of the poorest countries ever) to take a loan from a french bank,to pay the french government “a compensation for kicking the french occupation and slave traders out” They paid it for nearly 100 years, I knew humans could be bad but somehow i thought there was a limit
Image credits: Technician-Efficient
#12
95% of native people before Columbus passed away of diseases brought by explorers. That’s 19 of 20 people, for two continents.
Image credits: HarryHacker42
#13
There was a Spanish explorer that first visited the Inca empire and saw lots of prosperous cities and a great civilisation, and told his peers about it when he returned home. But when other folks went to visit the siad cities they found nothing but jungle and thought the explorer lied about his story. The fact that blew my mind is that nowadays we discovered that his story was true and the people he encounterd passed away from diseases brought into the new world and the cities and civilization they build were consumed by jungle in the spam of a few years
Image credits: Manu82134
#14
I grew up in a conservative hometown. When I was in late college, I began to learn how the Bible is essentially a long game of telephone and one where the members playing telephone purposefully exagerrated and changed what they repeated to the next person.
The Bible was written by men who never met Jesus, who got their information about Jesus from other people, in a time period that relished mystics and it was normal to change facts, did not have any understanding of “facts” in general or reliability. The men also changed what they wrote about Jesus based on political changes at the time.
Image credits: HighestTierMaslow
#15
I spent a lot of time at the library in my early 20’s and learned that the Old Testament isn’t very old and some of the oldest stories are just copies or much older Sumerian myths. The Exodus has no real world evidence whatsoever, and the Egyptians ruled over the holy land for thousands of years without ever mentioning the Hebrew people until the Bronze Age Collapse.
Image credits: zhivago6
#16
There are graffiti that got preserved in Pompei and Herculanum. Because they didn’t have paper, public announcement were directly painted on the walls. Some of those graffiti are on par with what you can find on the toilet’s wall of trucker’s stop, like very inappropriate kind of information
Image credits: chinchenping
#17
That Oxford University is older than the Aztec empire.
Image credits: Daohor
#18
Learning about the depth and breadth of slavery in human history was a real eye-opener. We have really detailed documents from more modern history to show WHY that idea is so heinous, but it’s always been a significant part of cultures all around the world serving as anything from a social construct to the very currency of war and with autonomy ranging from that of livestock to that of a low caste. Evidence of slavery predates written records and is even included in the code of Hammurabi where it was already an established institution and we still haven’t stamped it out today, April 10th 2023, where slavery affects an estimated 46 million people (that’s more than the total population of California, and approximately the population of Spain). It’s crazy how awful humans have always been to one another and that we still can’t seem to hold each other accountable for basic human rights, despite indelible proof.
Image credits: FridayInc
#19
When I learned that NASA had discovered over 100 billion GALAXIES and seeing the image to put into perspective that our entire solar system is only about the size of a coin compared to our galaxy which in relation would be the size of the United States.
We are so incredibly small within the universe.
Edit to add: Here’s a [photo](https://ift.tt/0KtxH1q) of just a snippet of the various galaxies. Keeping in mind, we haven’t even ventured outside of our solar system which is within our Milky Way galaxy, just a grain of sand in context to the universe.
Image credits: cheeseburghers
#20
That Napoleon wasn’t cartoonishly short. All those cartoons were a lie…
Image credits: DudebroggieHouser
#21
More of a fun one, but lighters predate strike matches by a couple centuries. They originated from repurposed flintlock pistols that ignited tinder shoved in the barrel that were set aflame by the trigger mechanism.
- You Might Also Like: “These 34 Color Photos Show How Beautifully Diverse Our World Was”
Image credits: Kataphractoi
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