12 Stories From History We Don’t Usually Hear About

Witold Pilecki, an army captain who joined the Polish resistance during World War II, wanted to uncover what the Nazis were up to at the Auschwitz concentration camp. So in 1940, he made sure he was arrested: he joined a crowd of people the Nazis were rounding up in Warsaw.

Pilecki indeed found himself at Auschwitz. He later reported on what happened when he arrived there:

Together with a hundred other people, I at least reached the bathroom. Here we gave everything away in bags, to which respective numbers were tied. Here our hair of head and body were cut off, and we were slightly sprinkled by cold water. I got a blow in my jaw with a heavy rod. I spat out my two teeth. Bleeding began. From that moment we became mere numbers – I wore the number 4859.

While at Auschwitz, he smuggled out reports about the camp and organized a secret resistance movement. Pilecki eventually escaped from the camp in 1943 and survived the war.

When Abraham Lincoln was shot during a play at Ford’s Theatre in April 1865, he and his wife Mary were not the only people in the Presidential Box: the Lincolns had invited Henry Rathbone, a young major in the US Army, and his fiancée Clara Harris to join them that tragic night.

After John Wilkes Booth quietly slipped into the box and shot Lincoln, Rathbone attempted to apprehend him; Booth cut him with a dagger before fleeing the scene. Rathbone survived.

Rathbone and Harris married in 1867, but the ghost of the assassination loomed over their marriage and took a heavy toll on Henry’s mental health. In 1883, he shot Clara before attempting to take his own life. She didn’t survive.

After the attack, Henry was committed to an institution.

The Civil War may have ended in 1865, but its legacy still echoes into the 21st century. One example of this was an American still receiving a Civil War pension until her passing in 2020, 155 years after the war officially ended. Her name was Irene Triplett.

She was born in North Carolina in 1930 to Mose Triplett, an 83-year-old ex-Confederate who defected to the Union army. He passed eight years later, and his monthly pension of $73.13 ultimately became Irene’s.

In 1947, Representative Andrew May was convicted of war profiteering during World War II. But that wasn’t the only stain on his wartime experience.

During the conflict, the Kentucky congressman’s position on the House Committee on Military Affairs meant that he routinely heard sensitive and classified information. During a press conference in 1943, he didn’t keep some of that information to himself: he told the press that the Japanese navy didn’t have their explosives calibrated correctly, so American submarines protected themselves by traveling out of range.

The Japanese heard May loud and clear and quickly recalibrated their explosives. Suddenly, they had better success bringing down American submarines.

Charles Lockwood, a naval commander during WWII, believed May’s carelessness may have contributed to the loss of 10 submarines and 800 sailors.

Juan Pujol Garcia learned an important lesson during the Spanish Civil War: you have to fight fascists. So when World War II began, Garcia knew he couldn’t sit on the sidelines. He offered his services as a spy to the British in 1942, but didn’t get the job.

That didn’t hamper Garcia’s ambitions – he became a spy anyway. He ingratiated himself with German officials and posed as a spy sending reports from London.

Finally, the British realized he was an asset and welcomed him aboard. As a double agent, Garcia fed incorrect information to the Germans, and they ate it up.

Garcia’s greatest feat was in 1944, when he convinced the Germans that D-Day was not the main Allied invasion of France. He advised the Germans to reserve their troops for the big show, which would happen later and further north near Calais.

Thus, the Allies met with less German resistance in June 1944 than they would have without Garcia’s intervention.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the oil boom made many people rich. Among the beneficiaries were members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma – the royalties they received for the oil drilled on their land made them wildly wealthy. As David Grann, author of Killers of the Flower Moon, explained to NPR:

[…] the Osage would receive a check every four months. Initially it was for maybe $100, and then it grew to [$]1,000. But then it continually grew. And by the 1920s, the Osage collectively had accumulated millions and millions of dollars. In 1923 alone, the Osage received what today would be worth more than $400 million. They had become the wealthiest people per capita in the world.

By the early 1920s, members of the Osage Nation were being targeted for their oil wealth and murdered. As Grann recounts in his book, the investigation into the crimes led to the founding of the FBI.

During the Cold War’s arms race, the US and Soviet Union tried to outdo each other in creating and stockpiling nuclear weapons. But an arsenal of weapons wasn’t good enough – they had to test them, too.

Both the Americans and Soviets tested their weapons in space. In 1962, one American test went very wrong. Scientists had been working on a hydrogen bomb for a project codenamed “Starfish Prime.” When they were ready to test the bomb, they did so near Hawaii, but 250 miles above sea level.

Even at that distance, the bomb was ridiculously potent. As reporter Phil Plait explained in Discover magazine, its electromagnetic pulse devastated the island state’s electric grid:

In Hawaii it blew out hundreds of streetlights, and caused widespread telephone outages. Other effects included electrical surges on airplanes and radio blackouts.

The effects weren’t permanent. But they nonetheless displayed the power of nuclear weapons.

Everyone knows about “the midnight ride of Paul Revere” – in April 1775, the Boston silversmith and patriot allegedly rode from Boston to Lexington, MA, to alert residents that British troops were on the move.

Revere’s story is remembered thanks in part to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who etched the patriot’s name in popular memory in 1860 when he published “Paul Revere’s Ride,” a not-totally-accurate poetic retelling of that revolutionary event.

New York may have had its own Paul Revere: Sybil Ludington, who supposedly rode up to 40 miles in New York to warn the local militia that a British attack was imminent in April 1777. She was only 16 years old.

Ludington out-Revered her Boston counterpart in two ways. First, she rode more than twice the distance – he only made it a little more than 12 miles. Second, Revere was captured outside Lexington, but Ludington evaded arrest.

Although the term “serial killer” was only coined in the 20th century, history is filled with examples of people committing mass murder. The Benders are an early and relatively unknown example in American history from 1870s Kansas.

The family – John, Elvira, John Jr., and Kate – settled in Labette County, KS, and operated an inn out of their home. They were spiritualists, and Kate even claimed to be a medium. But their connection to the deceased proved to be more tangible than spiritualism: the Benders killed roughly 11 people at their inn and buried their victims on the property.

The Benders were never held accountable for their crimes. When their neighbors began to question the unexplained disappearances of travelers in the area, the family quietly skipped town. No one saw them again, and their transgressions were only discovered during an investigation of the abandoned homestead.

King Louis XIV may have rebranded himself as the celestial “Sun King,” but that didn’t mean he was immune from corporeal concerns. In fact, Louis suffered from a host of ailments over the course of his life – including a painful anal fistula.

The royal fistula proved to be beyond the expertise of Louis’s physicians, and they struggled to treat him. After exhausting their options, they turned to a barber-surgeon. Surgery in the 17th century was risky. Not yet armed with germ theory or robust knowledge about hygiene and antiseptics, surgeons often performed operations with high mortality rates.

Louis and his physicians employed Charles-François Félix de Tassy for the delicate task of cutting the fistula. To prepare for the royal surgery, Félix practiced the operation over the course of six months on no less than 75 test subjects – many of whom were prisoners and peasants. Félix had mixed success on those patients.

Finally, the day of the king’s surgery came. Louis received no anesthesia, but survived the operation.