Article created by: Rasa Žilinskaitė
Learning history can be a transformative experience. It can challenge your long-held beliefs and assumptions about societies, their culture, and humanity in general.
Discovering that what you've been taught is not the (whole) truth, and that events you thought were isolated incidents are actually part of a broader pattern is jarring. But as uncomfortable as it may be, this process can liberate you, providing you with a new level of clarity and understanding.
So let's take a look at a Reddit post, created by user u/FlickTheSwitch167 that asked everyone "What historical fact have you learnt that ruined everything you ever thought you knew about this life?" And it has received a fair share of insightful replies!
#1
The more we find out about Native Americans, the more I realize the entire history of the United States is complete white-washed lie.
Image credits: Dredly
#2
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#3
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#4
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#5
African kings were the ones who advertised their people as work force/labor to the world. They passed away regretting those decisions.
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#6
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#7
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#8
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#9
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#10
The Irish famine was an opportunity the British took to commit crimes against the Irish. They were intentionally starved, while other crops were shipped off island to the British citizens.
Image credits: Nintendorian
#11
Leopold of Belgium,treated congo as "his personal property" And people who failed to collect enough Cocoa had thier hands/the hands of their kids cut And france forced Haiti (one of the poorest countries ever) to take a loan from a french bank,to pay the french government "a compensation for kicking the french occupation and slave traders out" They paid it for nearly 100 years, I knew humans could be bad but somehow i thought there was a limit
Image credits: Technician-Efficient
#12
95% of native people before Columbus passed away of diseases brought by explorers. That's 19 of 20 people, for two continents.
Image credits: HarryHacker42
#13
There was a Spanish explorer that first visited the Inca empire and saw lots of prosperous cities and a great civilisation, and told his peers about it when he returned home. But when other folks went to visit the siad cities they found nothing but jungle and thought the explorer lied about his story. The fact that blew my mind is that nowadays we discovered that his story was true and the people he encounterd passed away from diseases brought into the new world and the cities and civilization they build were consumed by jungle in the spam of a few years
Image credits: Manu82134
#14
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#15
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#16
There are graffiti that got preserved in Pompei and Herculanum. Because they didn't have paper, public announcement were directly painted on the walls. Some of those graffiti are on par with what you can find on the toilet's wall of trucker's stop, like very inappropriate kind of information
Image credits: chinchenping
#17
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#18
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#19
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#20
Image credits: DudebroggieHouser
#21
More of a fun one, but lighters predate strike matches by a couple centuries. They originated from repurposed flintlock pistols that ignited tinder shoved in the barrel that were set aflame by the trigger mechanism.
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Image credits: Kataphractoi
