“History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other options.”
- Abba Eban
Once the Marine Corps slapped some sense into me, I returned to college, serious about what was going on there. I spent my first two semesters intent on getting a degree in history. I became concerned that that course of study might not yield the economic future I had in mind, so I changed to one I thought might.
I've never lost my love of history, though. I find it fascinating, particularly the personalities. People are people and they always have been. They're heroic and cowardly, brilliant and stupid, egotistic, noble, selfish, weird, courageous, evil and dumb. History is mostly things happening because of people being some mixture of those things.
From what I can tell, history is slowly going the way of many of the other liberal arts, abandoned for STEM and niche obsessions. Too bad for us as a culture.
Yesterday in the studio we recorded a song of mine called That's History. It's actually a “love gone wrong” song which is covered in the chorus, but the verses are all odd historical facts strung together. I like to think any one of them could be a conversation starter. Here are just a few that show up although not in the way they're stated in the song.
Three months after his death in 1977, two men dug up Charlie Chaplin's remains and held them for a $600,000 ransom. Both men were captured and charged with, among other things, “disturbing the peace of the dead.”
Abraham Lincoln is in the Wrestling Hall of Fame: Lincoln was inducted into the Hall in 1992. Before his presidency he was an amateur wrestler with 300 bouts and only one loss.
Buzz Aldrin was the first human to urinate on the moon.
Elvis Presley never wrote a song.
The Braves and the Dodgers once played a game lasting 26 innings.
The ancient Mayans worshiped turkeys as gods.
Japan's Emperor Hirohito was buried wearing a Mickey Mouse watch.
The first car wreck occurred in Ohio in 1891.
Ketchup was once used as a medicine.
Joseph Stalin loved American western movies.
Iran banned the mullet hairstyle in 2010.
From the 1940s through the 1960, incoming freshman at Yale and other Ivy League schools were required to be photographed nude. Ostensibly, it was for research on scoliosis and other deformities, but that's not the whole story. You can check it out. It's a whole thing.
Oliver Cromwell banned Christmas celebrations which included foods such as pie.
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died the exact same day, July 4, 1826. It was the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence.
In 1807, Napoleon was swarmed by a horde of domesticated rabbits and forced to retreat to his carriage.
Since it's inception, the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota has been ranked the poorest place in America.
Due to a rare disease he had that sometimes produced a coma-like state, one theory posits that Alexander the Great was buried alive.
Brigham Young had 56 wives.
“And that's history, girl, that's history…just like you and me.”