These interesting facts about history were never taught to you by your teachers — and they probably never even I knew.
While any student of history has learned about the likes of Abraham Lincoln and World War II, how many of us know that Lincoln was a champion wrestler or that Franklin Roosevelt okayed a plan to bomb the Imperial Japanese Army with bombs attached to bats?
When we step outside the familiar historical narratives passed down by the textbooks we all read in school, we realize just how many interesting history facts slipped through the cracks. Discover some of the strangest and most fascinating in the gallery below:
On November 22, 1963, the course of U.S. history changed forever when John F. Kennedy was shot to death in Dallas, Texas by Lee Harvey Oswald (whose role in the assassination remains in dispute among amateur skeptics and conspiracy theorists).
Oswald was soon apprehended in a nearby theater, after shooting and killing police officer J.D. Tippet, who had rolled up alongside Oswald after seeing that he matched the description of the Kennedy shooter.
Then, Oswald himself was shot to death by a local nightclub owner and minor underworld figure named Jack Ruby before he could stand trial for Kennedy's murder. Ruby died of cancer in prison soon after, and with the major players now gone, much of the mystery behind the assassination may have died with them. Despite, or perhaps because of, this, the assassination has remained one of the most hotly-debated points of interest among conspiracy theorists for decades, with many laying the blame for Kennedy's death on parties including Cuba, the CIA, the Mafia, and even then-Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson.
But while such speculation has held people's interest for decades, little of it is likely grounded in fact. Above are some of the most fascinating JFK assassination facts you'll ever read. Then he returned their hospitality by enslaving the villagers, looted their resources, and infecting them with devastating diseases like smallpox.
For the most part, these Christopher Columbus facts are true. Columbus did sail from Europe to the Americas, and once he got there, he was a ruthless leader, driven by greed and a pirate-like mentality. But there is still considerable misinformation about his first and subsequent voyages that keep the myths about his voyage alive.
Whether dealing with the myths or the facts, Christopher Columbus' voyage undoubtedly marks a seminal turning point in world history despite the controversy surrounding his legacy today. Both above and below are the Christopher Columbus facts that truly define his complicated place in world history.
Traveling around the Mediterranean, Columbus led a young life that was probably typical for sailors of the time. One notable voyage to the Greek island of Khios marked the closest Columbus would ever actually get to Asia.
His life as a young sailor came to a violent end in 1476, however, when pirates attacked the fleet of merchant ships he was sailing with, sinking the boat he was on just off the Portuguese coast.
Clinging to a plank of wood, Columbus was able to swim to shore, where he eventually settled in the Portuguese capital of Lisbon.
[bad iframe src]
While Columbus was studying in Lisbon, the Kingdom of Spain — under King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella — was completing the Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula.
Since the late eighth century A.D., the Muslim-majority Moors had ruled much of the Iberian peninsula, establishing a major Islamic foothold in Europe for just over three centuries.
Beginning in the 1000s, the smaller Christian kingdoms in Iberia began pushing to reclaim the region for Christendom after Sancho III Garcés established the Christian kingdom of Aragon in the north of the peninsula. Over the next four centuries, the Muslim hegemony over the peninsula was slowly rolled back and by the time a young Columbus washed ashore in Portugal in 1476, Ferdinand and Isabella ruled over a nearly unified Iberian peninsula under the Christian Kingdom of Spain.
In 1492, the final expulsion of the Moors from Iberia was complete with the conquest of Grenada, making Spain the predominant standard-bearer for European Christian expansion in the world.
Amid this aura of religious zeal and military victory, Christopher Columbus came to the Spanish court with a plan to cut out the Muslim middlemen that controlled the lucrative trade with Asia. Having been rejected by several other nations, including England and France, Columbus was initially turned down by the so-called Catholic Monarchs of Spain.
Portugal and others were already launching voyages of exploration around Africa and becoming wealthy in the process and Spain wanted to get in on the exploration effort, but it would take some convincing on Columbus' part before the Spanish court would agree to finance the voyage.
They did eventually agree to Columbus' plan, however, and in 1492, Columbus set sail into world history.
Setting out from Spain in three vessels on August 3, 1492, Columbus sailed west across the Atlantic for more than two months. By the beginning of October, there were signs that the crew had grown mutinous. According to Columbus' journal, on October 10, there appeared to have been some sort of protest onboard the ships: The next day, they had indeed reached land. Believing that he had reached Asia, Columbus set foot on an island in what is today the Bahamas.
Columbus spent the next several months sailing from island to island in the Caribbean searching for the precious metals, spices, and other commodities that Europeans knew to be sourced from Asia, but found none of these things.
In fact, Christopher Columbus' first voyage was somewhat of a financial disaster and he had to leave behind a few dozen men in a hastily built settlement to sailed back to Spain in 1493 completely empty-handed. By now, it's a well-established fact that Christopher Columbus wasn't the first one to "prove" that the Earth was a sphere. That had been known since the time of the ancient Greeks, and navigators in Europe had a fairly accurate idea of the true circumference of the Earth — Columbus, however, did not.
He would return later that year in the second of his four voyages to the Americas between 1492 and 1502, but Columbus never found the riches he sought. Under contract from the Spanish crown to send back 90 percent of whatever goods he came across during his voyage — he was allowed to keep 10 percent for himself — Columbus' journey turned out to be a commercial failure.
In an attempt to send Spain some "commodity" of value, Columbus tried to send Queen Isabelle 500 enslaved indigenous people from the Americas. Isabelle — who considered any newly "discovered" indigenous people to now be de facto subjects of the Kingdom of Spain — was horrified and rejected Columbus' offer.
In the decades and centuries that followed, of course, European monarchs would be considerably less horrified at the idea and would actively promote a robust slave economy in the Americas. His plan was to bypass the established trade routes to Asian that were tightly-controlled by the Muslim caliphates of the Eastern and Southern Mediterranean, as well as avoiding the arduous sea route pioneered by the Portuguese traders sailing around the massive continent of Africa.
Believing the nation of Japan to be only 1,200 miles to the West of Europe, Columbus planned a voyage to reach the so-called East Indies by sailing across the Atlantic Ocean.
Columbus wasn't the first to propose sailing across the Atlantic either, but Europeans at the time generally understood the distance to Asia across the Atlantic to be closer to 12,000 miles, not 1,200. In fact, it was this discrepancy that caused the British and French courts to reject Columbus' plan.
11 Christopher Columbus Facts That Most Of Us Learned — But Are Totally Wrong
By Katie Serena
Published October 9, 2017
Updated October 14, 2019
From the true names of his ships to the actual purpose of his mission, these Christopher Columbus facts prove there are tons of falsehoods floating around.
[bad iframe src]
Trending Today In Nigeria
Removing Moles & Skin Tags Has Never Been This Easy
The Fastest Way to Get Rid of Belly Fat Has Been Discovered!
1 of 12
Previous
Like this gallery?
Share it:
[object HTMLElement]44 Disturbing Photos That Reveal The Horrors Of European Colonialism In Africa31 Colorized Vintage Crime Scene Photos That Bring A Violent Past Back To LifeNext
The Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria often go by the wrong names (or at least only one of the several names in use). The Nina was actually called "la Santa Clara," the Pinta was widely known as "la Pintada," Spanish for "the painted one," and the Santa Maria was known as "la Gallega." Even more interesting? Though scientists around the world have discovered shipwrecks dating back to Columbus' time, no one has ever located the remains of the First Fleet. Scientists attribute the mystery to the warm waters of the Caribbean, the ever-changing landscape of the region, and the fact that we only know for sure what happened one of the vessels.Wikimedia Commons
Though many people refer to Columbus as the man who "discovered America," the truth is that he never set foot on North American soil. When he arrived in what he thought was India, he was actually in the Caribbean, on the islands that are now the Bahamas. Over the course of his journey, he explored various other islands and territories along the coast, but the closest that he got to US soil was actually Central America.Wikimedia Commons
Everyone knows of Columbus' atrocities against the natives. However, not many people know that he was eventually persecuted for it. When news of his brutal tyranny got back to Spain, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella (pictured) dispatched a royal commissioner to Hispaniola to arrest Columbus. When he was brought back to Spain, he was stripped of his governorship.Wikimedia Commons
Although Columbus is best known for his historic 1492 voyage, the explorer actually made four separate journeys. His first, in 1492, took him to the Caribbean, his second was to South America, and his third and fourth were to Central America.Wikimedia Commons
Tales of Columbus cutting off the hands of native islanders and executing fellow Spanish colonists were widespread not just through the colonies, but back in Spain as well. However, though Columbus perpetuated the tyrannical ideas, he is not responsible for coming up with them. The European mindset was very much that anything the Americas had to offer was theirs for the taking. Rich European conquistadors would hear tales of riches coming from the Spanish conquests of South America and it would only enflame their greed. They'd then set off on their own conquests in search of riches.Wikimedia Commons
Since Columbus' death in 1506, the whereabouts of the explorer's remains have been a mystery. After being moved from Valladolid, Spain to Seville, his daughter-in-law requested that his body, and the body of his son, Diego, be moved across the sea to Hispaniola and buried in a cathedral in Santo Domingo. In 1795, after the French captured the region, the Spanish dug up the remains and returned them to Seville. However, in 1877, a box of human remains was discovered in the Santo Domingo cathedral, bearing Columbus' name. In 2006, DNA testing revealed that at least some of the remains in Seville are Columbus', but not all. To this day, the whereabouts of his entire body are unknown and historians believe he could be, appropriately, buried in both the New and Old World.Wikimedia Commons
While many people consider Columbus to be the first European to set foot in the New World, he actually was far from it. Most historians believe that Leif Erikson (pictured) was the first European to reach the Americas. The Norse explorer is said to have reached the shores of Newfoundland some 500 years before Columbus set sail. Some historians believe that Phoenician explorers crossed the Atlantic even earlier than that.Wikimedia Commons
A common misconception about Columbus is that he set out to prove that the Earth was round. Kids in elementary schools are often taught that he feared he would fall off the edge if he didn't reach the East Indies in time. However, what most people don't know is that as early as the sixth century, Pythagoras was theorizing that the Earth was a sphere. There is no doubt that Columbus was fully aware that the Earth was round, especially since he owned a personal copy of Ptolemy's Geography, which refers to the Earth as round.New York Public Library
Before King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella agreed to finance Columbus' grand adventure, the explorer was turned down multiple times. Advisors to the king of England, Henry VII, and the king of France, Charles VIII (both pictured), warned the monarchs that the explorer's calculations were wrong and that the voyage would be a huge waste of money. Even Ferdinand and Isabella rejected Columbus at first, though eventually they came around. In the end it turned out that Columbus' calculations were actually wrong. He dramatically underestimated the Earth's circumference and it was by sheer luck that he ran into the Americas.Wikimedia Commons
Even after Columbus' death, he was causing problems for the Spanish monarchy. His heirs mired the Spanish crown in a protracted legal battle, claiming that the monarchy had short-changed Columbus on the profits he was due. Though most of the lawsuits were filed and settled by 1536, there were still legal proceedings being carried out by the 300th anniversary of his voyage.Wikimedia Commons
Columbus Day became a federal holiday in 1937, in part because of efforts by Roman Catholic Italian-Americans. In the 19th and early 20th century, members of this ethnic and religious group successfully campaigned for the establishment of this holiday, which placed the Catholic Italian Columbus at a central point in American history. Their campaign beat out the one started by people of Anglo-Saxon descent who wanted a federal holiday honoring Leif Erikson as the first European to reach the Americas.Wikimedia Commons
Like this gallery?
Share it:
Just about everyone knows the basic facts of Christopher Columbus' voyage to the New World: He sailed from Spain in 1492 with three ships — the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria — in search of a new route to Asia. Landing on an island in what is now the Bahamas, he was greeted by the indigenous inhabitants and was cautiously welcomed.
Then he returned their hospitality by enslaving the villagers, looted their resources, and infecting them with devastating diseases like smallpox.
For the most part, these Christopher Columbus facts are true. Columbus did sail from Europe to the Americas, and once he got there, he was a ruthless leader, driven by greed and a pirate-like mentality. But there is still considerable misinformation about his first and subsequent voyages that keep the myths about his voyage alive.
Whether dealing with the myths or the facts, Christopher Columbus' voyage undoubtedly marks a seminal turning point in world history despite the controversy surrounding his legacy today. Both above and below are the Christopher Columbus facts that truly define his complicated place in world history.
Christopher Columbus' Early Career
Wikimedia CommonsA portrait of Christopher Columbus as a young man.
Historians know relatively few facts about Christopher Columbus' early life beyond his being born in Genoa around 1451 to a wool merchant and his wife, and that he joined the crew of a merchant ship when he was a teenager.
Traveling around the Mediterranean, Columbus led a young life that was probably typical for sailors of the time. One notable voyage to the Greek island of Khios marked the closest Columbus would ever actually get to Asia.
His life as a young sailor came to a violent end in 1476, however, when pirates attacked the fleet of merchant ships he was sailing with, sinking the boat he was on just off the Portuguese coast.
Clinging to a plank of wood, Columbus was able to swim to shore, where he eventually settled in the Portuguese capital of Lisbon.
[bad iframe src]
Taking a break from the sailor's life, he took up the study of cartography and navigation, mathematics, and astronomy and began developing the idea for the voyage that would make him famous around the world.
The Reconquista And The Rise Of The Kingdom Of Spain
Wikimedia CommonsThe Catholic Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula was complete with the conquest of Grenada in 1492.
[bad iframe src]
While Columbus was studying in Lisbon, the Kingdom of Spain — under King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella — was completing the Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula.
Since the late eighth century A.D., the Muslim-majority Moors had ruled much of the Iberian peninsula, establishing a major Islamic foothold in Europe for just over three centuries.
Beginning in the 1000s, the smaller Christian kingdoms in Iberia began pushing to reclaim the region for Christendom after Sancho III Garcés established the Christian kingdom of Aragon in the north of the peninsula.
Over the next four centuries, the Muslim hegemony over the peninsula was slowly rolled back and by the time a young Columbus washed ashore in Portugal in 1476, Ferdinand and Isabella ruled over a nearly unified Iberian peninsula under the Christian Kingdom of Spain.
In 1492, the final expulsion of the Moors from Iberia was complete with the conquest of Grenada, making Spain the predominant standard-bearer for European Christian expansion in the world.
Amid this aura of religious zeal and military victory, Christopher Columbus came to the Spanish court with a plan to cut out the Muslim middlemen that controlled the lucrative trade with Asia.
[bad iframe src]
Having been rejected by several other nations, including England and France, Columbus was initially turned down by the so-called Catholic Monarchs of Spain.
Portugal and others were already launching voyages of exploration around Africa and becoming wealthy in the process and Spain wanted to get in on the exploration effort, but it would take some convincing on Columbus' part before the Spanish court would agree to finance the voyage.
They did eventually agree to Columbus' plan, however, and in 1492, Columbus set sail into world history.
Voyage To The Americas
Christopher Columbus set out in 1492 in a voyage that would transform the world.
Setting out from Spain in three vessels on August 3, 1492, Columbus sailed west across the Atlantic for more than two months. By the beginning of October, there were signs that the crew had grown mutinous. According to Columbus' journal, on October 10, there appeared to have been some sort of protest onboard the ships:
[bad iframe src]
"Here [the crew] could endure no longer. But [Columbus] cheered them up in the best way he could, giving them good hopes of the advantages they might gain from it. He added that, however much they might complain, he had to go to the Indies, and that he would on until he found them..."
According to later accounts from Columbus and others on board, the situation was far more dire than Columbus' journal lets on and there appears to have been a plot to throw Columbus overboard and sail back to Spain.
The very next day, however, on October 11, signs of land — including a branch covered in berries floating in the water — buoyed the spirits of the crew and just after sunset that evening, a sailor named Rodrigo de Triana onboard the Pinta is recorded as being the first to sight land.
[bad iframe src]
TOP ARTICLES3/5Meet The Six BlackBillionaires In America — And Learn How They Got So Rich
The next day, they had indeed reached land. Believing that he had reached Asia, Columbus set foot on an island in what is today the Bahamas.
Columbus spent the next several months sailing from island to island in the Caribbean searching for the precious metals, spices, and other commodities that Europeans knew to be sourced from Asia, but found none of these things.
In fact, Christopher Columbus' first voyage was somewhat of a financial disaster and he had to leave behind a few dozen men in a hastily built settlement to sailed back to Spain in 1493 completely empty-handed.
[bad iframe src]
He would return later that year in the second of his four voyages to the Americas between 1492 and 1502, but Columbus never found the riches he sought. Under contract from the Spanish crown to send back 90 percent of whatever goods he came across during his voyage — he was allowed to keep 10 percent for himself — Columbus' journey turned out to be a commercial failure.
In an attempt to send Spain some "commodity" of value, Columbus tried to send Queen Isabelle 500 enslaved indigenous people from the Americas. Isabelle — who considered any newly "discovered" indigenous people to now be de facto subjects of the Kingdom of Spain — was horrified and rejected Columbus' offer.
In the decades and centuries that followed, of course, European monarchs would be considerably less horrified at the idea and would actively promote a robust slave economy in the Americas.
Separating The Myths From The Facts About Christopher Columbus' First Voyage
Wikimedia CommonsMuch of Columbus' first voyage has been heavily mthyologized.
By now, it's a well-established fact that Christopher Columbus wasn't the first one to "prove" that the Earth was a sphere. That had been known since the time of the ancient Greeks, and navigators in Europe had a fairly accurate idea of the true circumference of the Earth — Columbus, however, did not.
[bad iframe src]
His plan was to bypass the established trade routes to Asian that were tightly-controlled by the Muslim caliphates of the Eastern and Southern Mediterranean, as well as avoiding the arduous sea route pioneered by the Portuguese traders sailing around the massive continent of Africa.
Believing the nation of Japan to be only 1,200 miles to the West of Europe, Columbus planned a voyage to reach the so-called East Indies by sailing across the Atlantic Ocean.
Columbus wasn't the first to propose sailing across the Atlantic either, but Europeans at the time generally understood the distance to Asia across the Atlantic to be closer to 12,000 miles, not 1,200. In fact, it was this discrepancy that caused the British and French courts to reject Columbus' plan.
Believing this tract of ocean to be completely devoid of land, they thought it would be a massive waste of time and money, since it made more sense to simply sail around Africa where there were at least ports where they could stop at along the way to conduct trade.
The other major misconception of Columbus' first voyage is that he was the first European to "discover" the Americas — he was not. Icelandic Vikings in the 11th century — led by Lief Erikson — were the first known Europeans to set foot in the Americas around the 1000 A.D.
It's also wrong to claim Columbus "discovered" the Americas; that claim would certainly come as a surprise to the untold millions of indigenous people who had lived in the Americas for thousands of years. It would soon become apparent to the European powers that the Americas were an entirely heretofore unknown continent, first popularized by the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci. It was also immediately apparent to the Europeans that the indigenous peoples of the Americas were at an important technological disadvantage.
Later voyages to the Americas from Portugal, Spain, and others would metastasize into the European colonization of the Americas, the genocides of indigenous peoples, and the devastation of their civilizations. The fact is that Christopher Columbus' voyage can also be seen as the moment that the early-modern European slavery -- of both indigenous peoples in the Americas and those forcibly taken from Africa -- began.
The exchange of diseases, vegetation, and animal life — previously separated by two oceans and many thousands of years — also began with Columbus' voyages and transformed the civilizations of the separate hemispheres irrevocably, a process known to history as the Columbian Exchange. The celebration of Columbus' voyages have been since revisited in recent years as more and more scholarship gives voice to the indigenous peoples of the Americas who would be brutally subjugated soon after Columbus' setting foot in the Americas.
The push to establish an Indigenous People's Day, typically set as the same day as Columbus Day or replacing it entirely, continues to grow. States like Minnesota, Maine, Alaska, and Vermont observe the holiday and many cities around the country are adopting the holiday in response to recent activism.
"Columbus Day is not just a holiday, it represents the violent history of colonization in the Western hemisphere," said Leo Killsback, a professor of American Indian Studies at Arizona State University and citizen of the Northern Cheyenne Nation of southeastern Montana.
Very long history... Very interesting and informative