Wikipedia:Unusual articles/History

History

Pre-modern

Bal des Ardents	A masquerade ball in which the king and some noble dancers dress in wild man costumes and accidentally get set on fire by the king's drunk brother.
Burned house horizon	The horizon which consumed cultures in the Balkans and around the Black Sea.
Cadaver Synod	A deceased Pope was exhumed and put on trial!
Cagots	A group that were a persecuted minority in France and Spain into the 20th century, and nobody really knows why.
Complaint tablet to Ea-nāṣir	The progenitor of the one-star Yelp review is a gripe about poor-quality copper.
Criterion of embarrassment	You know it's true because it's too embarrassing for anyone to have made it up.
Daughter of Emperor Xiaoming of Northern Wei	A disputed first female monarch of Chinese history before Wu Zetian, whom the Empress Dowager Hu declared was a boy and was emperor for a day before being replaced by another infant.
Elagabalus	The number one Syrian teenage sun cultist polygamist possibly-transgender Roman emperor!
Erfurt latrine disaster	It's incredible how quickly someone's life can go to shit.
House of Colleoni	A former Italian noble family whose arms included three pairs of testicles.
John the Posthumous	King of France from the minute he was born to the minute he died (total: 5 days).
Kottabos	The world's first drinking game. Care to play? All you need is a bronze "lamp stand" with a tiny statuette on top and some wine.
Máel Brigte of Moray	A Pictish nobleman who somehow managed to bite a man to death despite being long-dead himself.
Nika riots	Kind of like football hooliganism, except for chariot racing, and also if it resulted in tens of thousands dead, half of Constantinople being burnt to the ground and the Emperor nearly being lynched.
Onfim	A 7 year-old medieval Russian boy whose homework tablets, complete with doodles of himself as a "wild beast", were preserved for 700 years before being excavated and becoming a primary source for life in the Novgorod Republic.
Phantom time conspiracy theory	A theory by Heribert Illig that the Early Middle Ages (614–911) never occurred. Therefore, it is now 1727 rather than 2024.
Pope Benedict IX	He became pope at twenty, and later sold the papacy. He was pope three times.
Pre-Columbian transoceanic contact theories	Native Americans are among the Ten Lost Tribes? The Zuni are related to Japanese peasants? This and more wild theories are found here.
Publius Afranius Potitus	If you're going to say you'd trade your life for your sick emperor's, make sure he doesn't get better.
Roland The Farter	If only we were all a jump, whistle & fart away from posterity!
Sacred Band of Thebes	An elite fighting force consisting of a hand-picked groups of 150 pairs of male lovers.
Sanitation of the Indus Valley Civilisation	The home of the first flush toilet, as it turns out, is Punjab.
Sino-Roman relations	These empires inched progressively closer to each other in the course of the Roman expansion into the ancient Near East and of the simultaneous Han Chinese military incursions into Central Asia. Mutual awareness remained low, and firm knowledge about each other was limited.
Wise Men of Gotham	So-named after they acted like idiots so the king would go away.

Early modern

Affair of the Sausages	One of the major events of the early Protestant Reformation in Switzerland was a religious dispute on whether sausages could be eaten during Lent.
Architecture terrible	An architectural style advocated by French architect Jacques-François Blondel.
Charles II of Spain	The last Habsburg King of Spain, who was so severely inbred that he could barely rule his nation due to his constant health problems. Upon his death, his autopsy revealed internal organs so withered and atrophied that witchcraft was actually suspected.
Curonian colonisation	A Latvian duchy's little-known colonial empire, consisting of bits of land along the Gambia River and the island of Tobago.
Dancing plague of 1518	In 1518, around 400 people took to dancing for days without rest, and, over the period of about one month, some of those affected died of heart attack, stroke, or exhaustion.
Darien scheme	An attempt to colonize the inhospitable Darién Gap, backed by the Kingdom of Scotland. The failure of the colony ruined the Scottish economy, and may have led to the Union of England and Scotland.
Defenestrations of Prague	When was the last time throwing someone out of a window started a war?
Timothy Dexter	Genius businessman or loony?
False Dmitry	A weird phenomenon in Russian history for all the fake kings that they once had. One, in reality, did become a ruler.
Glass delusion	Believing oneself to be made of glass was quite in vogue among Renaissance-era European nobility.
Gilles de Rais	Friend of Joan of Arc, and convicted serial killer.
The Great Cheese Riot	A riot that broke out in Nottingham in 1766 over Lincolnshire merchants buying Nottingham cheese with the intent of selling it in Lincolnshire.
Loveday	Can holding hands and going to church end a civil war? Turns out: no.
Makassan contact with Australia	Over a century before Europeans made contact with Australia, Makassarese people from Sulawesi seeking sea cucumbers traded with the Aboriginal Australians of Kimberley and Arnhem land, bringing Islamic and Indonesian influence to the local culture, art, language, and lifestyle.
The Miracle of 1511	When the people of Brussels protested against their rulers by building satirical and pornographic snowmen.
Mutiny on the Bounty	The true story starting with a stern captain and a lustful crew on a Royal Navy ship and ending with the British-Polynesian Seventh-day Adventist culture of the Pitcairn Islands. Plenty of drama in-between.
Order of the Pug	A fraternal order that existed for Roman Catholics in Bavaria in the 18th century.
George Psalmanazar	A Frenchman who was so successful in convincing 18th-century Britain he was a Taiwanese man, that he wrote an elaborate and blatantly fictitious history of the island.
Crown Prince Sado	To prevent him from becoming the new monarch of Joseon Korea, his father, the king, locked him in a rice chest for eight days, killing him through dehydration.
Yasuke	An African man who ended up becoming a retainer for Oda Nobunaga, one of Japan's most important feudal lords, in 1581.

19th century

The infrastructural shortcomings of Faraday's times proved especially overpowering in the summer of 1858.

Watermelon Riot	A deadly riot that unfolded over a stolen slice of watermelon.
Andrew Johnson's drunk vice-presidential inaugural address	What happens when you start your important new job fortified by three full glasses of straight whiskey, filled to the brim, after spending the week leading up to it in (more or less) a drunken stupor.
Kinjirō Ashiwara	Emperor of Japan, but only in his own mind.
John Bentinck, 5th Duke of Portland	A reclusive English nobleman who built a vast maze under his home.
Confederados	A small group of white Brazilians with roots in the southern United States.
Drapetomania	"Those slaves want to be free? They must be mentally ill!"
Dublin whiskey fire	In 1875, a whiskey brewery warehouse in Dublin caught fire leading to the deaths of 13 people—not from the fire, but from alcohol poisoning as they drank free, undiluted whiskey from the streets.
Johann Georg August Galletti	The early-19th-century master of the bizarre turn of phrase.
Great Moon Hoax	An infamous article by The Sun that claimed that animals such as unicorns and bat-winged humans were found living on the moon.
Great Stink	A London summer so smelly it prompted government action.
Charles J. Guiteau	The strangest man to ever assassinate a US President. Highlight: the self-penned poem from the point of view of a child that he wrote for his execution.
Jerome of Sandy Cove	A man, unable to speak any language known to locals, was discovered on the beaches of Nova Scotia in 1861 with his legs cut off. He lived for fifty more years, but remains unidentified to this day.
Kentucky meat shower	Not as sexy as you'd imagine it to be.
Knights of the Golden Circle	A secret society of American slave masters that planned to invade lands in Latin America to spread their pro-slavery views.
London Beer Flood	Nine people drowned by a flood of over 300,000 gallons of beer.
Louis Antoine, Duke of Angoulême	King of France for 20 minutes.
Gregor MacGregor	That's his real name. Possibly the only honest thing about him.
New England vampire panic	An outbreak of tuberculosis in the late 1800s led some superstitious New Englanders to burn the internal organs of their dead relatives, in some cases feeding them to sick family members, to try to prevent the disease from spreading.
Nongqawuse	During (and likely because of) colonization, a Xhosa teenager became an apocalyptic prophetess, ordering the Xhosa to destroy their own crops and livestock—which they did.
Heinrich Schliemann	A pioneer of archaeology, but not for good reasons.
William Walker	Trying to create new slave-holding colonies, he became president of Nicaragua for a year and inspired Latin America to come together for the first time (to oust him).

20th century

Are There Men on the Moon?	An essay written by Winston Churchill in 1942 about the possibility of alien life.
Anti-tobacco movement in Nazi Germany	Somehow, Nazi Germany was a pioneer of policies of this kind.
Eduard Bloch	The Jewish doctor that treated Hitler's mother and was the only Jew that was protected by the dictator himself when Nazi Germany invaded Austria.
Hugo Boss (businessman)	The founder of the Hugo Boss clothing brand... that started his business working with the Nazis
Burning of the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala	One of the most tragic episodes in the history of relations between the two countries.
Chewing gum sales ban in Singapore	The curious case of the banning of gumballs in an Asian nation.
Christmas truce	An unofficial armistice in WW1 where nations celebrated Christmas and played football (soccer).
COINTELPRO	The FBI's name for their undercover operation of investigation, and at times disruption, of influential groups and people in the inland United States during the Cold War. Some of the most famous individuals observed in this operation include: Martin Luther King Jr., Muhammad Ali, John Lennon, Charles Chaplin and Malcolm X.
Crocker Land Expedition	An expedition to a non-existent island created to swindle a businessman.
Czechoslovak Togo	A landlocked Eastern European country proposed getting a colony in Africa, to be administered by its troops in Siberia.
Đorđe Martinović incident	A man goes to the emergency room with a bottle up his anus, and kicks off the collapse of Yugoslavia...
East Germany balloon escape	One of the most famous cases of East Germans escaping to the West.
Elizabeth, Lady Hope	A woman that became famous for creating a hoax where Charles Darwin renounced his theories of evolution at his final moments.
Dorothy Gibson	An actress famous for surviving the Titanic sinking, and also for living a rather turbulent life afterwards.
Great Michigan Pizza Funeral	"Ashes to ashes, crust to crust."
Great Molasses Flood	A storage tank burst and flooded the streets of Boston with a 25-foot (7.6 m) high wave of molasses.
Mango cult	It takes quite the cult of personality to have a fruit you gave as a gift be venerated.
Masabumi Hosono	The only Japanese survivor of the Titanic sinking, and someone who wasn't welcomed in his home country after the disaster.
Violet Jessop	An Argentinian nurse known for surviving three separate maritime disasters, including the sinkings of both the Titanic and the Britannic.
Charles Joughin	Another Titanic survivor, famous for being so drunk that the freezing waters wouldn't kill him.
Kilroy Was Here	A meme from World War II.
Bobby Leach	Went over Niagara Falls in a barrel and survived, attempted to swim the rapids under it and survived... then died after slipping on an orange peel.
Li Guangchang	A Chinese man who founded a cult and declared himself Emperor of China in the 1980s.
Madagascar Plan	An abandoned Nazi plan to transport all of the Jewish population of Europe on to one little island.
Francisco Macías Nguema	What happens when a mentally unstable, self-proclaimed "Hitlerian-Marxist" becomes the leader of a nation? Mary Hopkin's music getting played during a mass execution becomes one of the less strange events during a presidency.
MKUltra	The CIA's dabblings in brainwashing, sensory deprivation and LSD experiments.
Moscow gold	At the start of the Spanish Civil War, more than 70% of the Bank of Spain's gold reserves were transported to the Soviet Union by the Republican government. The controversy and mystery of where it went continues to echo through Spain.
Franz Nopcsa von Felső-Szilvás	takes a deep breath He’s a baron, paleontologist, geologist, aristocrat, adventurer, scholar, albanologist, and one-time spy. Among other things, he was the first to postulate that certain dinosaurs got smaller on islands, was almost the king of Albania, and named a fossil turtle after his male lover’s arse.
North Hollywood shootout	In 1997, two heavily armed men were involved in a bank robbery, which turned into a 44-minute shootout with police officers. 20 people were injured as a result, and only the criminals died.
Octobering	In a country where Christianity has been banned as "counter-revolutionary", but still want to have a christening? No problem!
Kenzō Okuzaki	A WW2 Imperial Japanese Army veteran whose determination to hold the Emperor responsible for the hardships of the war resulted in some particularly strange acts involving obscenity, murder and pachinko balls.
Operation Paperclip	Whereby Nazi scientists (including "father of rocket science" Wernher von Braun) were granted amnesty by the US in exchange for their secrets.
Emilio Palma	An Argentine national who was the first person to be born in Antarctica.
Assassination of Olof Palme	The murder of a Swedish prime minister that became one of the country's most durable mysteries.
Punjabi Mexican Americans	Two groups discriminated against in 1910s California intermarried, creating a unique, dynamic community and a delectable new fusion cuisine.
Puyi	He became the last Emperor of China at the age of two and died as an ordinary citizen, ending 2,133 years of dynastic rule in China. In his twilight years, he also did community theater.
Radcliffe Line	The real reason for the many conflicts between India and Pakistan? They gave one man who'd never been there five weeks to draw a border.
Rangoon bombing	A relatively unknown case of North Korean violence aimed at South Korean representatives in Burma.
Reggio revolt	A coalition of Christian democrats, fascists and anarchists started an armed revolt because the Italian government chose the wrong city as the regional capital.
Mathias Rust	The West German who landed on a bridge in Moscow in 1987.
Satanic Verses controversy	One book caused the death of thousands and put Middle Eastern relations with the West in the sorry state they are today. Also don’t forget about when the author of the book got stabbed.
Self-propelled barge T-36	A Soviet barge that floated all the way across the Pacific, with no casualties.
Khalid Sheldrake	The story of an English pickle merchant who became a devout Muslim and was declared king by Uyghur rebels during the Chinese Warlord Era.
Shindo Renmei	Japanese Brazilians who refused to believe Japan had surrendered and continued the cause... by killing other Japanese Brazilians.
Stanley Lord	The captain of a ship that could've been the savior of the victims of the Titanic disaster.
Albert Stevens	The most radioactive human ever.
Tanganyika laughter epidemic	Not so funny.
Ignaz Trebitsch-Lincoln	A Hungarian-Jewish man who was, at various times, a UK Member of Parliament, German World War I spy, Nazi collaborator and self-proclaimed Dalai Lama.
Tuskegee Syphilis Study	One of the darkest and most bizarre biological experiments in US history, one which spanned decades.
Roman von Ungern-Sternberg	During the Russian Civil War, an ultra-reactionary Baltic German general converted to Buddhism and tried to revive the Mongol Empire.
United States involvement in regime change	Now, this is perhaps the most complicated and long article in this list. However, you'll find many surprises once you read it. See also Operation Condor.
West Papua	Following intercontinental invasion from Indonesia, the region became the largest territory in United Nations administrative history and the only administration then transferred by the United Nations to an aggressor.
John Zegrus	Turned up in Japan in 1959, claiming to be a war hero and a military recruiter for the UAR (and possibly also claimed to be from Africa). His true identity and motives are still a mystery.

21st century

Cottage cheese boycott	A protest against rising staple food prices in Israel.
Dean scream	A presidential bid that was ended by a scream.
Rudi Dekkers	How the September 11 attacks changed everything for the flying instructor of two of the hijackers.
Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist	Thieves stole 3,000 tons of it! Is it really that valuable?
Uday Hussein	Saddam Hussein's oldest son and a real-life Far Cry or James Bond villain. Among other things, he was a rapist and murderer, had a doppelganger named Latif Yahia, (whom Uday would send to torture) and also had the habit of kidnapping women at wedding celebrations.
Laser Kiwi flag	The real New Zealand flag in all our hearts.
Norwegian butter crisis	A massive inflation of butter prices caused illegal smuggling and an "emergency appeal" from a Danish television show.
John P. O'Neill	As special agent in the FBI, he'd investigated Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden but quit due to internal politics. He then took up a job at the World Trade Center in 2001. (Quote from his friend on hearing he'd taken that job: "At least they're not going to bomb it again". His reply: "They'll probably try to finish the job.")
Pepsi fruit juice flood	A PepsiCo warehouse collapse flooded the streets of Russia with an assortment of juices.
Stellar Wind	The codename for a part of the President's Surveillance Program, the digital response of the Presidency of George W. Bush to 9/11. Internally, the FBI personnel responsible for the administration of this program often referenced Stellar Wind's cases as "pizza cases", because they often turned out to be simple food takeout orders.