You hombre are run to be get wind about Napoleon for weeks .
I am a huge, huge history buff. Really, the main reason I love it is all the messy dramatic content it provides me, but there’s also stuff that’s justfunand interesting, and I love to share it! So from petty Napoleon Bonaparte to Abe Lincoln and elephants to John Wayne and the KGB, here are 10 historical facts that I justhadto share.
1.Teenage Napoleon was apparently SUPERemoand wrote self-insert prose fiction so awful, it butterfly effect–ed him into becoming the commander of the Army of Italy (which, BTW, was a French army despite its confusing name) and eventually emperor of the French.
Anyway — Napoleon “Books Were My Only Friends” Bonaparte wrote alotof bad fiction, butmyfavorite isClisson et Eugénie, a romantic story about a soldier (definitely not based on Napoleon) and his girlfriend (definitely not based on Napoleon’s ex), who cheats on him and makes him super depressed (definitely not based on real events). This would be a recurring theme in Napoleon’s life.
2.The emperor Commodus (ofGladiatorfame) honestly rivaled Alexander the Great when it came to naming things after himself. Hetemporarily renamed Rome “Colonia Commodiana,” theRoman Senate the “Commodian Fortunate Senate,“and the Roman people themselves “Commodiani.” He also attempted to rename the months of the year after himself. None of these names managed to stick.
TBF, Commodus also “saw himself as a reborn Hercules.” King of self-esteem. Here’s a statue in which he is cosplaying as him!
3.The Yuan dynasty had passports as far back as the 13th century, and they looked like this:
4.Historians think theremayhave been the wife of an emperor of Rome who briefly ruled outright:Ulpia Severina.
5.Galileo observed the moon in its different phases by telescope and painted his observations in watercolor in the autumn of 1609. These are thefirst-ever realistic depictions of the moon.
Galileowas the person who discoveredthat the moon wasn’t a perfect, pearlescent sphere and actually had imperfect topography, like Earth.
6.Apparently, in 1861, King Mongkut of Thailand (then Siam)generously offered the United States the gift of two elephants, to “be turned out to run wild in some jungle suitable for them.” He apparently had the idea that elephants would just be a really cool thing to have populate the continent. Love the vision.
7.Apparently, Joseph Stalin was a John Wayne fan (yes, as in the cowboy-movie guy)and loved his movies, but according to a biography about Wayne, Stalin decided to call for Wayne’s assassination because of his staunch anti-communist views. Stalin thought that Wayne’s rhetoric was influential enough to threaten the existence of the Soviet Union.
“The FBI had discovered there were [KGB] agents sent to Hollywood to kill John Wayne,” said film historianMichael Munn. “John told the FBI to let the men show up and he would deal with them.”
8.I recently sawthis tweetand was struck by that gorgeous dress, but…reader, I had never heard of Marjorie Merriweather Post. Naturally, I had to know who was wearing something so fabulous, and thus I discovered the woman who was possibly America’s most glamorous heiress, and who was apparently thewealthiest woman in Americafor literallydecades.
She also had an absolutelywildjewelry collection, which included theNapoleon Diamond Necklace(below) and a ton of exquisite pieces owned byMarie Antoinette. Who is this woman?!
Since I’m in my little Napoleon phase, Iobviouslyhad to go read more about the diamond necklace. And in reading about the necklace, I discoveredanotherpiece of jewelry he’d commissioned: the Napoleon Tiara.
9.In 1805,Napoleon gifted this gorgeous tiarato Pope Pius VII…as an insult. The pope couldn’t even wear it becauseit weighedfive times more than the previous papal tiara and was also too skinny to even fit on someone’s head. And ALSO, do you see that huge chunk of an emerald on the top? Nice, right? Well…
10.And finally…I recently learned about the “Pig War.” What’s that, you ask? Oh, it’s how the US border between Washington and Canada in the San Juan Islands was decided. “We fought a war over that?!” you’re probably saying. Well, we didn’tfighta war, but wehada war. A bloodless one (except for that of the pig).
The US government was like, “This all started over a pig?” And even though the resulting border dispute was debated for 12 years (!), no one ever shot each other, which is great. How did it get resolved, you ask? In the most random way possible.
