• callouscomic@lemm.ee
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    4 months ago

    A dude had heard about some other kind of god, and so he randomly looked up at the sky and basically said “if you let me win this battle, I will convert my entire country”…

    …and he won, and so Roman Catholicism was born cause he said so.

    Later, some dude was like “screw your catholicism, I don’t like my wife any more, I’ll go make my own church with hookers and blow and divorce my wife,” and so the Church of England was made cause he said so.

    I may have oversimplified these stories but pretty sure that’s about it.

  • RobotToaster@mander.xyz
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    4 months ago

    The US newspaper billionaire William Randolph Hearst owned enough of congress that he started a war with Spain.

  • Skua@kbin.earth
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    4 months ago

    The oldest recorded words from any woman living in (what is today) Scotland are someone telling the empress of Rome, to her face, that they fuck better than her

      • Skua@kbin.earth
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        4 months ago

        Empress-consort rather than empress-regnant, I’m afraid. She was Julia Domna, wife of emperor Septimus Severus and accompanying him on his attempt to bring the north of Britain under his control

        • Skua@kbin.earth
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          4 months ago

          That said, there absolutely were empresses-regnant of the Byzantine empire, and there’s no reason to consider that a separate entity. Irene Sarantapechaena and about four or five others absolutely were ruling Roman empresses

          • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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            4 months ago

            TIL. Did the Greeks get less patriarchal over time? In the classical era they were Taliban-tier and complained they even had to see women.

            • Skua@kbin.earth
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              4 months ago

              I’m afraid I am completely unqualified to answer this beyond that Irene’s reign was a very messy one, ending with a rebellion against her. Her own son (the legal heir to the throne for who she was originally just regent) also rebelled against her earlier, and she had his eyes put out. It seems to me like Irene specifically was just absolutely ruthless enough to get past whatever societal rules may have been levelled against her

    • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
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      4 months ago

      I had to look that up, it’s just too good to pass.

      (Cassius Dio, contemporary historian) tells us that the empress teased her companion (the wife of Argentocoxos, a Caledonian chief) by saying that Caledonian women indulge in a sexual free-for-all, sharing their beds with different men while making no attempt to conceal their adultery. To a respectable aristocratic lady like Julia, such brazen promiscuity would indeed have seemed worthy of comment. We then see the wife of Argentocoxos swiftly responding with what Dio calls ‘a witty remark’ of her own:

      “We fulfil the demands of nature in a much better way than do you Roman women; for we consort openly with the best men, whereas you let yourselves be debauched in secret by the vilest.”

      A bit further below, however

      The consensus view among present-day historians is that he simply invented the speech quoted above.

      Sauce - https://senchus.wordpress.com/2019/08/14/julia-and-the-caledonian-women/

    • cynar@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      The fact they passed on legit information on d day, is still mind blowing. They relied on delays on the German side to make the information out of date by the time it would arrive. The German radio operator not being on station to receive it just made it funnier.

  • Aatube@kbin.melroy.org
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    4 months ago

    In 1938, Orson Welles adapted H.G. Wells’s “The War of the Worlds” for the radio, apparently causing mass hysteria and a major part of the continental United States to believe that a martian invasion had occurred.

    “A few policemen trickled in, then a few more. Soon, the room was full of policemen and a massive struggle was going on between the police, page boys, and CBS executives, who were trying to prevent the cops from busting in and stopping the show. It was a show to witness.”[26]

    During the sign-off theme, the phone began ringing. Houseman picked it up and the furious caller announced he was mayor of a Midwestern town, where mobs were in the streets. Houseman hung up quickly, “[f]or we were off the air now and the studio door had burst open.”[4]: 404

    How many deaths had we heard of? (Implying they knew of thousands.) What did we know of the fatal stampede in a Jersey hall? (Implying it was one of many.) What traffic deaths? (The ditches must be choked with corpses.) The suicides? (Haven’t you heard about the one on Riverside Drive?)

    This was a year after he adapted Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to be set in Nazi Germany.

      • Aatube@kbin.melroy.org
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        4 months ago

        No. In fact, I quoted the first-hand accounts of the people in charge of the broadcast.

        Yes, there may have been less of a panic than as advertised, but it wasn’t a gross (or intentional) distortion. The drama was also only broadcast once.

        The offices of the city of Trenton, New Jersey, a location within the dramatization, had its communications paralyzed for 3 hours due to the calls made to ask the city well.

  • TIN@feddit.uk
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    4 months ago

    Dinosaurs existed on the other side of the galaxy!

    As in, it was so long ago that Earth has done half of a great cycle since then.

    • AdNecrias@lemmy.pt
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      4 months ago

      Was finding the number odd (expecting a longer orbit) but looks like the solar system has already orbited the center of the milky way 18 to 20 times. Imagine that much change in earth in 20 years.

  • kbin_space_program@kbin.run
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    4 months ago

    End of the bronze age. Have a set of letters between citystate rulers, one writing that help is urgently needed as seaborne invaders have been spotted nearby and his military is off with the hittite empire.

    The response back, in modern slang amounts to “lol ur fucked.”

  • CaptainBasculin@lemmy.ml
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    4 months ago

    There was an infamous conman in my country by the name Sülün Osman. He has managed to con people by claiming to sell the Galata Bridge itself. After he was caught, his defense was “As long as there exists idiots that believe I can sell the bridge, I will keep selling this bridge.”

  • Martin@lemmy.ml
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    4 months ago

    The fact that they dug up Oliver Cromwell’s body for a posthumous execution. It’s just insane on so many levels

    • Hugh_Jeggs@lemm.ee
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      4 months ago

      Did they not just dig it up so they could put his head on a spike for all to see?

      Ask anyone from Ireland or Scotland at that time if it was justified and your head would be on a feckin spike for even questioning it 😂

  • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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    4 months ago

    There’s a lot to choose from, but it’s early so I’ll bring up the three separate historically significant Defenestrations of Prague. Defenestration is the act of tossing someone out of a window.