If you start to delve into events, one can often find that certain things end up being covered or “simplified” to perhaps not make some folks uncomfortable. But history is history, it can be fascinating, cruel, dull and often a lot stranger than fiction.
Someone asked “What's one historical fact that they won't teach you in school?” and people shared their examples, ranging from “I didn’t pay attention” to some things that are truly obscure. So get comfortable as you read through, upvote your favorites and be sure to share your own thoughts in the comments below.
#1
The guys defending the Alamo were the bad guys.
Texas was Mexico at the time. To attract settlers to the land, Mexico allowed American farmers to move there and bring their enslaved workers with them. Slavery was not something Mexico was crazy about and soon banned slavery in the entire country except for Texas. A few years later, they tried to ban it in Texas. That's when the Texas Revolution started. The Texans were fighting to keep slavery, not for freedom from an oppressive government.
Not everyone at the Alamo died. The enslaved workers were spared and are largely the reason we know what happened. If you visit the Alamo today (or at least when I did in 2022) most of the information is left out of the booklet and signage. It does mention the enslaved workers by name, but that's about it. Fighting to preserve slavery isn't the narrative they want to display today. I remember learning about the Alamo in school and slavery wasn't mentioned. And then how absent it was from the actual site.
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#2
Treaties between Indigenous Tribes and America are still broken to this day! (My tribe was directly attacked in 2020) We still fight for the Earth and our place in this terribly poisoned and loveless society.
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#3
The actual "pilgrims" were not the good guys in any New England history. Religious bigots to be honest.
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#4
About 1/3 of the working cowboys in the Old West were black men.
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#5
Texas and MacMillan Books removed important Native American history like ‘Trail of Tears’ from their textbooks .
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#6
How Hawaii came to be a part of the US. Basically, a bunch of white guys living on the islands didn’t like to be ruled by a monarchy of natives, so they grabbed some guns and started a revolt. When it was clear they weren’t going to win, they called US for help, and the US Government sent in the marines to occupy the islands and eventually annex them. It’s only recently that the government has finally admitted it was in the wrong to do so.
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#7
Women needed husbands' permission to have a credit card in their own name until mid 70s.
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#8
Japanese WW2 war crimes are seldom discussed in detail.
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#9
That Helen Keller (that we all learned about in school) led a Children's March to Washington DC to push for a REDUCTION in the hours children were made to work, all so they could attend school. source: People's History of the United States.
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#10
All throughout school they told us the buffalo died from natural causes. I only just learned a couple months ago that they died out because the American settlers k**led them out for sport to cut off the native Americans food supply.
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#11
Federal highways were purposely built through affluent black neighborhoods. Looking at you, Oklahoma.
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#12
The smell. Most times in history smelled awful.
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#13
The fact that African tribes sold their own people.
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#14
The Ottoman Empire systematically k**led over 1mil Armenians during WW1 via camps and it remains largely unacknowledged by Americans because the US wants to keep positive relations with Turkey who oscillate between denying it ever happened and saying they were justified because they were fomenting armed rebellion.
Never seen it in any American textbook or course. I, like many others in the US, have only learned about it because of the advocacy of the band System of a Down.
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#15
The circumstances surrounding the death of Meriwether Lewis (of Lewis and Clark) are shrouded in conspiracy. In the months leading up to his death many people reported that Lewis had become paranoid, claiming that he was being followed and that his life was in danger. In a desperate attempt for help, he sent a letter to his close friend, and then president Thomas Jefferson to request an audience. While traveling along the Natchez Trace, he stayed a night at an inn. During the night, the owner reported hearing multiple gunshots but never went out to check on the source. In the morning, Lewis was found dead in his cabin, sitting against the wall looking at the door, rifle in hand and shot in the back. In addition, while the room was ransacked, the only missing objects of note were Lewis’ riding back and personal documents.
After an official investigation, his death was ruled a s***ide and all further inquiry into the instance have been barred by the Us government. While Lewis himself did not have any immediate descendants, his extended family have submitted requests every year to have his body exhumed in order to confirm the cause of death. To this day their requests have unanimously been denied.
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#16
I didn’t know much about the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic Golden Age until I was in college. I really feel like a lot of history classes seem to gloss over the so-called Dark Ages.
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#17
The pilgrims weren't seeking religious freedom. They practiced religious repression and executed people for the crime of being Quakers.
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#18
Every major change in the last 150 years that benefited the average American had to be bought with blood and violence - from the American labor movement, to Women's Suffrage, to Civil Rights.
They don't teach it in schools because if you knew what it took to fix the problems in society you might actually start planning a way to make it happen.
#19
Went to a British school in Asia. They glossed over the opium wars.
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#20
I was 28 when I learned about the Tulsa massacre.
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#21
That Stalin was a real piece of work. 9 million + people died as a direct result of Stalin’s policies. He doesn’t get the same demonization as a certain Austrian that tried to take over Europe because the Soviets were on the winning side of WWII.
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#22
The Dutch ate their prime minister. As in an angry mob lynched him and actually consumed his flesh.
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#23
The CIA deposed or destabilized many democratically elected leaders to install leaders who were more friendly to us (read: us business) policies, causing enormous loss of life and suffering all over the world.
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#24
When I went to school, we were taught that the American Revolution came about because King George III arbitrarily imposed taxes on the American colonists.
Many years later, talking to a historian of the 18th century, I learned that the colonists had begged England for aid during the earlier French and Indian War, promising to repay it all, but then once the war was over, reneged on that promise. After repeated (and repeatedly rebuffed) requests for repayment, and after fair warning, Parliament imposed taxes on the Colonies (which were still lower than the taxes British subjects actually living in England were paying) in order to recoup those costs.
Bonus fact: I also learned that, contrary to what I was taught in school, it was the colonists who drew first blood in the Revolution (the H.M.S. *Gaspee* incident, which oddly none of my history teachers had mentioned).
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#25
The poetry written by Chinese Warlord, Zhang Zongchang.
"You tell me to do this.
He tells me to do that.
You're all bastards.
Go f**k your mother".
#26
The mass deportation of Mexicans, yep the US tried it before under Hoover. Many were US citizens.
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#27
That modern money came into existence by people storing their gold in banks and getting notes as proof that their gold was there.
Banks found out they could write more notes of gold than there was actual gold being stored there.
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#28
The Great War of Africa like, *just* happened, historically speaking. And over five million people died. As far as I’m aware, it’s not being taught in schools.
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#29
When the United States detonated the first hydrogen bomb, Castle Bravo, on Enewatak Atoll in the Marshall Islands in 1958, it was many times more powerful than calculated. The residents of Enewatak and Bikini Atolls had previously been forcibly relocated to Rongelap Atoll. Rongelap was downwind from the Castle Bravo radiation cloud. The US did not evacuate them for two days, and allowed them to return only a week later, even though the radiation levels were highly unsafe as we understand now. From 1958 to 1984, the US repeatedly refused to evacuate the Rongelap residents even as the birth defects and cancer rates continued. It was finally Greenpeace in 1984 who assisted in moving many of them to Mejatto island in kwajalein atoll. If you go to Mejatto today, the signs on the church and school still say Rongelap. There is evidence that this refusal to evacuate was a calculated decision to study the long term effects of radiation exposure in humans.
Edit: corrected Castle Bravo to 1958.
#30
Depends on where you live. In large parts of Japan they are not taught about their war crimes.
#31
I grew up in the U.S., and went to 3 different schools, all which id consider to be decent school systems. Every time we learned about "democracy" as a concept, it was heavily focused on Ancient Greek and Roman democracy, which makes sense given that it is a basis for a lot of the foundation of democracy in the U.S.. But that was the extent of what we learned about democracy. The way it was taught made it seem like democracy was extremely rare and only existant in prominent and advanced "western" civilizations like the Greeks and Romans. It failed to cover that democratic systems are more common historically than that, and often relatively short lived because they are fragile. With this in mind, it failed to stress the importance of handling an individuals capacity to vote with great care because of how easily that can slip away. It also failed to teach about any sort of alternate voting systems or perspectives in democracy. A good portion of the reason that the electoral system in the U.S. is as broken as it is, is because probably 80+% of the populace is functionally in a cave where they know nothing different, and know of no other options to be explored. Or at least thats my perspective.
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#32
Let's just say, George Washington's teeth weren't made of wood.
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#33
The harrying of the north. William the bastard burning whole villages to the ground in the north of England to cement his rule over the country. In school, it's usually "1066, Hastings and bam. William the conqueror. Here's the Tudors...".
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#34
Much about Welsh history at all really beyond a few bullet points. Welsh history is fabulously rich and storied.
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#35
The banana massacre occurred on 6 December 1928 in Ciénaga, Magdalena, Colombia. Workers of the United Fruit Company (now known as Chiquita Brands International) were on strike demanding better working conditions, such as shorter hours and fair pay. The Colombian government, under pressure from the United States and fearing that the conflict would affect the company's interests, sent in the army. Troops fired on the strikers, killing an undetermined number of people, varying according to sources from 47 (official) to more than 1,000 (according to witnesses).
The United Fruit Company, founded in the United States in 1899, had a significant impact on Latin America, influencing governments and economies, earning the nickname "the octopus" for its reach and control. In 1970, the company was restructured and renamed Chiquita Brands International. Today, it remains one of the largest distributors of tropical fruits in the world, but has faced criticism for its history of labour exploitation, corruption, and environmental impact.
In 2025, Chiquita Brands continues to operate globally as business as usual.
#36
It's really obscure but American Chestnut trees were all over the east coast of the US up until around 1900. Then they all got infected with a fungus and now they're critically endangered.
#37
The papacy (Steven IV) once dis-interred a pope who had been dead for 7 months (Formosus} just to put him on trial for a bunch of more or less trumped up charges. They ended up declaring his papacy illegal, null, and void. They threw his body in the Tiber when they were done. It was called the Cadaver Synod
The trial and Formosus' body washing up turned public opinion against Steven IV pretty quickly, and he was thrown in jail, then strangled to death.
They then had another meeting to annul the "Cadaver Synod" and reinstate Formosus. They recovered his now long dead, beaten up, waterlogged corpse, dressed it in vestments, and had him buried in St. Peters.
They also made it illegal to ever try a corpse again, thankfully. This is one of my more favorite obscure history bits lol, the Catholics are wild.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadaver_Synod.
#38
The middle Eastern and north African slave trade was larger, and somehow more brutal, then the trans Atlantic one.
#39
In the Middle Ages, they actually used to smear swords in poo, in order to try and poison the opponent with bacteria.
#40
When we learned about prohibition, it was presented as kind of this silly historical mistake. It was years later when I learned that in the 19th Century people were drunk basically all the time in part because very few people had access to clean drinking water and would drink booze instead which was often cleaner/safer to drink. So a big part of the anti-booze movement was providing safe drinking water and we owe alot of our drinking water infrastructure (like available public drinking fountains) to teetotalers.
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#41
Thousands of soldiers from the south fought for the Union in the Civil War and there were business leaders in southern cities who didn't want secession.
#42
The Great Wall of China wasn’t built all at once it’s a patchwork of different walls from different dynasties.
#43
Here in Mexico, las 'Guerras Indias', the indian wars. Throught the history of the Spanish colony to Independent Mexico, the goverment have been hunting and displacing the indigenous people from the north (Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila) and the south (Yucatan, the Mayans). There were many massacres, incluiding some of the most obscure battles in both la Guerra de Independencia (Independence war) and La Revolución Mexicana (the Mexican Revolution). Yet, this acts were never printed in the mexican public history books, and even today when a great renaissance of indigenous culture is happening the country still neglects that this wars happened.
#44
During the prohibition, the US government once poisoned alcohol by adding more benzine and methanol to stop the growing number of people who were drinking it to side step prohibition.
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#45
Back in the 19th century, small opposition newspapers in the Netherlands were called "Lilliputters" (= "midgets") because of their small size, which was a way to avoid having to pay for the newspaper stamp. The best example of this are the papers published by the fanatical republican Eillert Meeter, who received imprisonment for lèse-majeste, before being invited to meet king William II in person, who offered him an allowance if he ceased publicising. Meeter later went back to publishing anyway, but admitted in his writings that he found the king a kind and friendly person - he was just opposed to having a king.
Okay, you simply do not learn this in school because it is obscure and relatively unimportant. But still.
#46
I was quite surprised about how either my teacher nor my history book mentioned that Sweden started colonization in north America during the XVII century.
#47
In 1914, the Serbian government and military *did* conspire and organize the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand with nationalist terrorists, and that was already known back then. WWI wasn't just Austria-Hungary and Germany looking for excuses to go to war and blaming Serbia for something one serbian guy did.
Btw, Austria-Hungary sent an ultimatum to Serbia, that basically said "forbid nationalist propaganda against us, punish the military officials that we 100% know are implied in the affair and let us investigate on your soil", with the last part being what they refused.
#48
While not as exciting as other answers: Communism has killed the most people in modern history.
Edit: To be clear, it has killed the most people while promising utopia.
#49
A lot of people are taught that England's flag (White background, red cross) comes from St. George's banner.
But its often left out that George actually got his banner during his veneration as a warrior-saint by the Templars in the Crusades. A lot of the Templar banners were based on the flags of The Knights of The Round Table from Arthurian Legend.
So George actually got his banner from Sir Galahad, The Knight who found the Holy Grail, according to the legend.
There's a post I found with all the Knight's banners included. Its fun to look at as you can see the origins of a few famous flags in the banners.
https://www.reddit.com/r/vexillology/s/iKLBL7vbxd.
#50
The Zoot suit riot in Los Angeles, during the times of ww2 white service men would target Mexican Americans wearing zoot suits because of how they consider the outfits to be unpatriotic.
#51
Most of Britain’s colonial history.
#52
The existence of Sundown Towns. I never heard of them until I watched HBO's Lovecraft.
#53
Before he died, MLK Jr was hated by liberals for opposing the Vietnam war. His convicted murderer said he didn't kill MLK. The King Family sued the US government for $1 to prove the government were part of the conspiracy to kill MLK and won.
#54
Mustafa Kemal Pasha (Atatürk) was the main reason why Ottomans lost 500 km of Levantian land from Palestina to Aleppo in 1 month. Even British general Allenby was impressed how he was able to win such amount of land in such a short time.
#55
One piece swim suits became bikinis in the second world War not because of a song but because it was "more patriotic" to wear them due to more fabric being used for the front lines.
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