23 Scandalous And Surprising History Facts To Blow Your Mind

On the wedding night of his nephew and future King, William of Orange, Charles II watched the entire consummation whilst shouting encouragement from the sidelines.
The Great Pyramids of Giza were originally clad in white marble, with a 24k gold cap on tap.
Boston Corbett, the man who found and shot John Wilkes Booth, was completely insane from handling mercury as a hatter. Years before shooting Booth he had calmly castrated himself with a pair of scissors.
On the night of his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr had a pillow fight in his motel room.
In the 19^th Century the vibrator was created to treat Hysteria because doctors were taking too long to manually masturbate women. The vibrator became the largest selling household appliance.
After ruling Egypt for hundreds of years, Cleopatra was the first person in her family to actually learn Egyptian.
During WWII, the propaganda aimed at dehumanizing the Japanese was so successful that American marines in the pacific were keeping the body parts of Japanese soldiers as Souvenirs.
Old English law says a man could not beat his wife with a stick any thicker than his thumb, thus we have the “rule of thumb”.
The T-rex lived closer to us than it did to the Stegosaurus.
At the time of the Roman Empire, babies were 20 times more likely to be born with a tail than now.
In WWII the Russians trained dogs to run under German tanks with bombs on their backs. However, the tanks the dogs were trained to run under were Russian so they ended up running under the Russian tanks and blowing them up instead.
Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or the ‘upper crust’.
The Romans had an effective natural contraceptive. It was a plant called Silphium, and the shape of the seed is where we get the traditional heart shape we all recognize as a symbol of love. They ended up using it so much that it went extinct.
Genghis Khan raped so many women that there is a small chance that people of Asia could be biologically related to him.
The world’s oldest tree, 9,500-year-old Norwegian Spruce, has been found on a mountain in central Sweden – and it is still growing. The tree was already thousands of years old when the Pyramids were built!
Foot tickling for sexual arousal was used in the Muscovite palaces and courts for centuries. Many of the Czarinas (Catherine the Great, Anna Ivanovna, Elizabeth and others) were fervent participants. The practice was so popular that eunuchs and women were employed as full time foot ticklers. They developed this unique skill so well that their occupations brought prestige and good pay. Anna Leopoldovna had at least six ticklers at her feet.
From the time the lookouts sounded the alert, the officers on the bridge had only 37 seconds to react before the Titanic hit the iceberg.
After sailors had crossed the Atlantic Ocean to the West Indies, they would take women on board the ship and have their way with them between the cannons. The boy children of these women were said to be “sons between the guns”. The saying was shortened to “son of a gun”.
In colonial times, the person who got left in the stocks overnight was nothing less than fair game for everybody. Men or women, anybody bent over had no way of knowing who was doing the ram job, and this was the real reason you never wanted to end up here unless you had a family member or a friend who’d stand with you the whole time.
The pyramid of Giza were already 1219 years old when King Tut was born in 1341BC.
In the middle ages, one of the punishments for being gay, was to hang the offending person by his ankles and saw from his genitals towards his head. This process caused the blood to rush to the brain, meaning that the saw would get to the mid chest height before they passed out. Another cruel punishment was cathron wheeling where the ‘offender’ was placed on a large wheel and then had all of their joints broken by a large hammer, then left to be eaten by crows.
During the Banquet of Chestnuts in October 1501 Pope Alexander VI had an orgy with over 50 prostitutes.
In the 1500’s only the wealthy had floors of anything other than dirt. Hence, most everyone was ‘dirt poor’.