30 Historical Facts Children Will Never Learn in School

‘Wu Zetian required people to please her orally as a greeting’
30 Historical Facts Children Will Never Learn in School

History teachers are paid to educate the youth on the past. What that teacher’s salary is far from covering, however, is helping children and young adults wade through the worst things humans have ever done to each other.

Whether it’s because of deep horror or fear of a school board discipline meeting, there’s plenty of historical events you’re very unlikely to see on a syllabus. Redditors volunteered some of the things that they were absolutely left to learn on their own, however important they might be. 

Below are a bunch of important bits of the world’s story that would make any social studies teacher change the subject.

MiskatonicProf_1926 6y ago In America you're not going to hear a lot about the shady shit the US Government did to it's own citizens in the 1950s and 1960s. Project МК Ultra was the code name of a secret CIA program that involved all sorts of crazy shit that most Americans have heard of but don't really know a lot of details about. And some of the stuff done under this program is so unbelievably weird that МК Ultra is a punchline in some circles.
Breaker_Of_Chains18 . 6y ago There was no famine in Ireland, it was genocide.
FreelanceBritWriter 6y ago That Franklin Roosevelt supported Mussolini and said something along the lines of how he wished he could emulate him back home. Obviously, we can ignore the rest of the effort that the US put into helping the Nazis. Both Roosevelt and Stalin wanted to execute every single captured German soldier. Winston Churchill nipped that in the bud and said something like no. I will never execute somebody for fighting for their country
Klitzy420 . 6y ago Anything to do with Sumerian culture.
fiveosplit 6y ago African history gets pretty crazy. I'm writing a paper right now about how the British handpicked Idi Amin to run Uganda after Uganda had been independent for almost 10 years. Idi Amin ended up being a brutal dictator who killed about 500,000 people in Uganda. The British contributed and may have even facilitated the overthrow of Milton Obote in favor of Amin because Obote was introducing policies that would take away British companies that were being used to exploit Uganda for resources.
drassaultrifle . 6y ago Gandhi was kind of a dumb asshole
metarinka 6y ago Edited 6y ago For most of it's history Wilmington was the biggest and richest city in North Carolina. During reconstruction, there was a terrible riot and mob that actually overthrew the democratically elected mayor and local government. This resulted in such a large scale migration, loss of life and loss of income that Charlotte permanently became the financial hub of the region. The cause of the riot?the mayor had elected black city council members and refused to take back their seats. Wilmington NC is the only city in the US that had it's democratically elected government successfully
 . 6y ago That you need to remove the whole good guys and bad guys mentality and actually lesrn to accept different moral standards of the past.
chickensizzla . 6y ago How Polish pilots helped to prevent the invasion of Britain during ww2 nor how Britain and France failed to meet the support agreement
CynicalSamaritan 6y ago The Heart of Darkness is based in the Congo Free State, which was presided over by King Leopold II of Belgium. Conrad wrote the story in part as a critique not just of European imperialism but also of the atrocities and crimes against humanity perpetuated during that time. It is estimated that between 5-10 million of a roughly 20 million population died during Belgian rule of the Congo Free State due to a combination of famine, disease, and forced labor. Belgium enriched itself through forced slavery and coercion, using strict quotas for the harvest of natural rubber,
a_spence 6y ago that the UK caused a famine in Bengal India During WW2 killing over 2 million indigenous people.
SerendipitousRemedy . 6y ago Hitler gave his soldiers meth because it was performance enhancing.
SeeYouWednesday. 6y ago The CIA proposed committing a false flag terror attack which included shooting down a fake passenger jet as an excuse to invade Cuba. JFK rejected the operation.
 . 6y ago Most of the world was really into butt sex until the Abrahamic religions took over
Big Apple-3A M 6y ago The Tulsa Race Massacre. In the early 1920s Tulsa Oklahoma had a very affluent black neighborhood called black wall street. Basically many African Americans were doing better financially than whites. White folks were angry about their success and wanted their land. An African american was wrongly accused of assault by a white girl and the whites used this as an excuse to attack the neighborhood including dropping bombs from WWI era planes. Many were killed and beaten. Over 10,000 people were left homeless due to houses and businesses being burned down. This is the greatest single
h-dollaz 6y ago The Japanese military kidnapped hundreds (if not thousands) of Korean and Chinese women during WWII and forced them to be sex workers for the Japanese military. Some Japanese women were even drafted to be comfort women, but they didn't know what they were being drafted for until they were there. It's actually a pretty common thing in many wars, because the military wants to keep the soldiers pure. By kidnapping these women, they know that they aren't riddled with STD's. It's very sad, especially because when the war is over, many of the camps are cleared and
 . 6y ago Edited 6y ago It took me an anthropology class in college to learn about human zoos. That is zoos where white people paid money to see aboriginal people from various regions in cages. It happened all over the world, including in the bronx zoo in, like, the 1920's. I had never heard about anything like that in any schooling before that, and I doubt most people have.
mrinkyface . 6y ago How bad the rape of Nanking was.
AceMarrow . 6y ago literally anything to do with Polynesian history
 . 6y ago Chinese express Wu Zetian required people to please her orally as a greeting.
SFW_HARD_AT_WORK 6y ago How much in common we have with people of the past. Pictures, sculptures and carvings going all the way back showing sex, drugs, drinking, partying and graffiti that you would see on an abandoned building or train today. The plight of the middle class and class struggles VS the upper class is the same today as for thousands of years. If we could listen to a court jester, their jokes would ring true today more than likely. Outside of technology making things faster/easier in a sense, were still doing/enjoying/complaining about most of the same things we have
SunDosed . 6y ago Native Americans weren't granted citizenship until the 1920s
-eDgAR- . 6y ago The Diary of Anne Frank included a lot about masturbation and self-exploration, but it was edited out. Here is an excerpt of such a part of the diary:
superanth . 6y ago Ben Franklin once wrote a thorough essay about how it's better to date older women.
 6y ago That Argentina pretty much eliminated the black race. They had ways to get rid of the men first. Not as much for the women though. Once the male to female ratio drastically dropped (Black population) the women were pretty much forced to sleep with white men, in order to wash out the Black. The Black population was so low, the Argentine government pretty much removed the Black option as a race. Crazy how they succeed.
 . 6y ago Well, until I saw Lincoln, I had never heard of Thaddeus Stevens, who seems to be a much greater believer in the equality of men than many.
Aresslayer24 . 6 6y ago Stalin son killed himself in a concentration camp yet Stalin mocked him until his death
DeputyDirectorB . 6y ago Hitler's nephew served for the US in WW2.
InternationalOne0 . 6y ago The US government went to war in Guatemala over bananas
lankylegendhours . 6y ago . Edited 6y ago Captain Bartholomew Roberts the pirate gave his pirate crew a bedtime, gotta have your eight hours so you can make that pillaging tomorrow!

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