Over on Reddit, someone asked people to tell the R rated historical fact they “know” that is usually left out of classroom discussion. The most interesting responses are below.

1. Charles II

captain_darling:

Charles II on the wedding night of his nephew and future King, William of Orange, watched the entire consummation whilst shouting encouragement from the sidelines.

2. The Ivanov experiments

GhettoMuppet:

The Ivanov experiments- basically some Russian scientist in the 1920s conducted experiments where he tried to make a “humanzee”. I think there were other secret soviet experiments as well where they tried with gorillas in a (failed) attempt to make a super solider hybrid thing.

3. Boston Corbett

BalalaikaMiG:

Boston Corbett, the man who found and shot John Wilkes Booth, was completely insane from handling mercury as a hatter. Years before shooting Booth he had calmly castrated himself with a pair of scissors.

4. Vibrators

Scrimpasher:

The vibrator was created to treat Hysteria because doctors were taking too long to manually masterbate women. The vibrator became the largest selling household appliance.

5. Bolsheviks

benrawie:

When the Russian Bolsheviks overthrew the provisional government and stormed the Winter Palace in 1917 their revolution was halted for a few days. The reason was because the Bolsheviks got ridiculously drunk in the Winter Palace after finding the wine stores.

6. Anne Frank

Swtcherrypie:

The Diary of Anne Frank was edited by her father because of some of the thing she talked about: such as her period, discovering herself, learning about hear clitoris/labia and learning some about boys from a younger guy that was staying with them too, and also he father’s infatuation with fart jokes and such (which he didn’t want published.)

7. FDR

ludnik:

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a horny SOB who kept multiple mistresses

8. American marines

GlastonBerry48:

During WWII, the propaganda aimed at dehumanizing the Japanese was so successful that American marines in the pacific were keeping the body parts of Japanese soldiers as Souvenirs.

9. Princess Olga

OtakuSoze:

Let me tell you the story of Princess Olga of Kiev. Her husband, Igor, was murdered by the Drevlyans, an Eastern Slavic tribe. Olga took over the Kievan Rus’, but the Drevlyans didn’t want a female ruler, so they sent her a group of suitors. Still pretty pissed about her husband’s murder, Olga had the suitors carried by her servants on a boat to the courtyard of the castle. The boat was dumped into a giant hole and the suitors were buried alive. She told the Drevlyans that she had accepted a suitor and organized a party in a bath house. After the guests arrived, the doors were barred shut and the bath house was burned down. After the memorial to the people who died in the bath house, a party was held and the Drevlyan guests got drunk off their ass. Olga’s royal guard proceeded to kill all 5,000 of them that night. When they requested her forgiveness, Olga asked the Drevlyans to give her three pigeons and three sparrows from each home from their capital of Iskorosten. When they arrive, she had hot coals tied to their legs and set them back home. As the city burned to the ground from the resulting fire, the people that ran out of the city were either killed, enslaved, or extorted by Olga’s army. The entire tribe was basically wiped out in the following years. Olga is a saint in the Eastern Orthodox church. tl;dr: Never piss off a Russian.

10. Tsar Nicholas

chrae9:

Tsar Nicholas was fucking his sister

11. Russian dogs

topsey:

In WWII the Russians trained dogs to run under German tanks with bombs on their backs. However, the tanks the dogs were trained to run under were Russian so they ended up running under the Russian tanks and blowing them up instead.

12. Where the <3 comes from

R88SHUN:

The Romans had an effective natural contraceptive. It was a plant called Silphium, and the shape of the seed is where we get the traditional heart ♥ shape we all recognize as a symbol of love. Anyway, they fucked so much that it went extinct.

13. Dusan Popov

nastygirl503:

The FBI ignored compelling evidence of the attack on Pearl Harbor because Hoover didn’t trust the Serbian double agent Dusan Popov who was a gambling Drunken man whore. He was nicknamed tricycle because of his love of threesomes. He was also one of the inspiration points for Fleming’s Bond.

14. Edison’s dark side

mermaidwarrior:

Thomas Edison electrocuted a lady circus elephant to death. She killed three men over the years (including an abusive trainer). Over a thousand people came to watch her die, and Edison recorded it on video.

15. The Angel Of Death

nanananana-batman:

When I was a freshman in high school we had to do reports on the holocaust. I for some reason picked Josef Rudolf Mengele who was also known as “The angel of death.” The teacher didnt let me read the report in front of class. He was a sick man. He took jewish kids and did experiments on them. He tried finding ways to turn their eyes blue. He had sewn 2 twins together by the length of their spines, the mother later killed them because they were nonstop screaming in agony. He even took a baseball bat to a childs leg and right when the broken bone was about to heal he broke it again. He did this a ton of times to see if the leg would just give up on healing.. the list goes on. this guy was nuts.

16. Extreme slavery

ssfsx17:

The reason why the Spartans were able to be so focused on war was because of massive slavery. Even though much of the ancient world had slavery, the Spartans took it to an extreme level, to the point where the Athenians were horrified just from seeing it.

17. X-rated creation story

transona:

There’s an Egyptian creation myth which states that the universe was the result of the ejaculation of the god Atum As such apparently some Pharaohs would ceremonially ejaculate into the Nile

18. Enemy fire

mrpirate23:

I recommend listening to Dan Carlin’s podcast called Hardcore History. He has few segments on the Mongols and damn, they are pretty terrifying. They used to light the fat of the enemies they killed on fire, and proceeded to shoot it with their catapults onto their other enemies. Also throwing in some heads, limbs, and other body parts into the mix.

19. Western bias

chunkymonk3y:

That millions more chinese people died cruely at the hands of the Japanese than jewish people died at the hands of the germans but it seems that our history books sort of left that out…hmm

20. Rape of Nanking

FiFibonacci:

It surprises me sometimes that a history textbook that covers the Holocaust does not cover the Rape of Nanking Soldiers chopped off the bellies of pregnant women, forced family members to rape each other, cut open children and infants to rape them, forced monks who had an oath to a life of celibacy to rape others, raped young girls literally to death, and so on.

21. Civil War Hookers

prettyforariot:

During the civil war, prostitution was as big as fighting. General Hooker had huge groups of women go would follow around his troops and satisfy their urges (where the term Hooker comes from) and in 1861 the Union Army Medical Department reported that 1 out of 12 soldiers had venereal disease. One report showed that out of 468,000 men checked, 188,000 had an STD.

22. Genghis Khan

ProfessorShitDick:

Genghis Khan raped so many women that the people of Asia have a very small chance of being biologically related to him.

23. Basil

phargle:

A Byzantine emperor, Basil — he captured 15,000 Bulgarians in battle, and blinded 99 of every 100, leaving the 100th guy with one eye — and then send them all home.

24. Al Capone’s penis

Psilocybear:

From a very young age Al Capone had pus coming out of his penis. When he was finally arrested on grounds of tax evasion he was found to have syphillis, which was at the time very treatable. Capone refused treatment however because he was afraid of needles. After his 11 year stint in Alcatraz, the disease had eaten away at his brain so much that he could no longer resume his life of crime. Before his death he was often spotted casting a fishing rod into his swimming pool.

25. Et tu?

lakotian:

Julius Caesar banged Marcus Brutus’ mom. I think that is hilarious.

26. Vlad the Impaler

Corrupt_T:

Vlad the impaler liked sticking large sticks up peoples bottoms, once you got over this fact, he was apparently a nice guy.

27. Professional ticklers

FearBoner8D:

Foot tickling for sexual arousal was used in the Muscovite palaces and courts for centuries. Many of the Czarinas (Catherine the Great, Anna Ivanovna, Elizabeth and others) were fervent participants. The practice was so popular that eunuchs and women were employed as full time foot ticklers. They developed this unique skill so well that their occupations brought prestige and good pay. Anna Leopoldovna had at least six ticklers at her feet. While the ticklers performed their task, they also told bawdy stories and sang obscene ballads. This was done to work the ladies up to an erotic pitch so that they could meet their husbands or lovers in a sex impassioned mood. [The Sex Life of the Foot and Shoe. William A. Rossi, 1993]

28. The anti-Santa

acor003:

In the 1880s, Anthony Comstock went around collecting people’s dildos and other sex toys. He is like the Anti-Santa… in every way.

29. Christopher Columbus

graffwriter:

Christopher Columbus prostituted pre pubescent native american girls

30. Stocks

digsy:

“For sure, they don’t teach you this in history class, but in colonial times, the person who got left in the stocks overnight was nothing less than fair game for everybody to nail. Men or women, anybody bent over had no way of knowing who was doing the ram job, and this was the real reason you never wanted to end up here unless you had a family member or a friend who’d stand with you the whole time. To protect you. To watch your ass, for real.” ― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

31. Armenian genocide

Joga-o_o-Bonito:

The Armenian genocide. It was a fucking genocide it happened only an estimated 100,000 people were left in Armenia. The word genocide was created just to describe the massacare that the Armenians faced yet still some people say that it never happened and as an Armenian fuck you.

32. Founding father

Starkboy7:

Ben Franklin visited brothels almost every night

33. Cat massacre

durvid86:

During/leading up to the French revolution cats were massacred by printing apprentices who were treated worse than the pets of the bourgeois

34. Unit 731

MagnusTheGreat:

Unit 731. It was a biological and chemical warfare research unit that undertook lethal human experimentation during the occupation of China. Vivisection, germ warfare and weapons testing on living subjects (Human beings). Unit 731 was basically full of scientific sadists and psychopaths that killed people in incredibly gruesome ways and it seems their imagination knew no limits. After WW2, the leaders of the unit gave the US military their research data in return for their own freedom and many of previous members of Unit 731 became part of post-war politics, academia, business, and medicine. They were just as bad or even worse than most of the staff of the extermination camps. They didn’t even refer to the Chinese people as humans, but logs(there was a lumber mill nearby and I guess they thought it was some sort of a sadistic humor)…And some even bragged about how many logs they had cut that day (vivisection)

35. Pythagoras

Miztahfrawg:

The mathmatitian Pythagoras, who discovered the Pythagorean theorem, (A2 + B2 = C2 ) Was go-nutty, Bat-shit crazy. He killed people who didn’t agree or disproved him, he convinced people that facing the sun when you urinate is a heavily punishable sin, and didn’t believe in fractions, or decimals. He simply refused to beleive that More then two and less then three could possibly exist.

36. Malcolm X

Mosquare:

Malcolm X was bisexual and was a sex worker. Source : The Guardian

37. Bestiality

IdPreferNot:

I teach early American history and literature and they were surprisingly preoccupied with bestiality. It shows up in a lot of Puritan journals and official writings including fairly graphic descriptions. No one else in my department like to teach this and just carefully selects readings that do not mention it. I, however, teach at least one journal entry or sermon that talks about it and my students LOVE it.

38. Grim punishments

lifesadventure:

in the middle ages, one of the punishments for being gay, was to hang the offending person by his ankles and saw from his genitals towards his head. this process caused the blood to rush to the brain, meaning that the saw would get to the mid chest height before they passed out. also cathron wheeling, the offender was placed on a large wheel and then had all of their joints broken by a large hammer, then left to be eaten by crows. and thats just england! for norway look up blood eagle.

39. The Romans

rome_demands:

The Romans were sick fucks. The emperors had young boys as concubines frequently, and some even hired toddlers, from their parents, to nibble at their inner thighs while they bathed. Tell that to your grandma the next time she says the world is becoming amoral.

40. U.S. Eugenics program

Plantbitch:

I can’t believe nobody has said this yet! The US was a leader in negative eugenics, and sterilized over 10,000 people against their will for sexual promiscuity, “feeblemindedness”, having children out of wedlock, being physically “unfit”, and many other things. A Supreme Court ruling in Virginia that sided with the state was what Hitler based his eugenics laws off of. This is what made the Holocaust legal in the nazi empire. Well legal in the sense that they passed laws saying they could do it, not legal in the sense that it was ok. Certain states sterilized people into the 1970s, NC being one of them. The Supreme Court ruling has never been overturned.

41. The My Lai Massacre

bastthegatekeeper:

somewhere around 400 unarmed civilians were killed during the Vietnam war by U.S. soldiers, the women were raped. 26 soldiers were originally charged with war crimes, 1 served time. He was given a life sentence but served less than 4 years of house arrest.

42. Jumbo

Ordem_E_Progresso_:

Lyndon Johnson, man. That guy. One particular story that has surfaced involved someone asking Johnson flat out “why are we in Vietnam?” during a meeting and Johnson responding by whipping out his dick (which he publicly nicknamed ‘Jumbo’) and yelling “THIS IS WHY.”

43. The Milky Way

HamWallet:

The Milky Way supposedly got it’s name because it was formed when the Greek goddess Hera sprayed her breast milk into the sky.

44. Mozart

thrasumachos:

Mozart was surprisingly filthy, and was obsessed with feces and bathroom humor. He wrote two songs about anilingus.

45. Why Napoleon lost

mediocre_sophist:

Napoleon losing the battle of Waterloo. Not really R rated so much as PG-13. In addition to the many, many reasons history books give us to explain why Napoleon lost the battle, what they leave out is the fact that during the battle Napoleon had a terrible case of diarrhea. You’d think this would get mentioned, as I imagine it’s hard to command an army when you are constantly shitting all over the place and becoming dehydrated as a result. Source: You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos by Rob Arthur. Fantastic book full of crazy facts like this. Others include how much Martin Luther King Jr loved to bang hookers (the lighter skinned the better, but never white), John F Kennedy’s reputation for being extremely quick in bed, and a great letter from Mozart to his sister describing a series of farts he let out while writing the letter

46. Pope orgy

mmej2:

Banquet of Chestnuts – October 1501. Basically Pope Alexander VI had a orgy with over 50 prostitutes. The only major sexual event we learned about.

47. “Barrier troops”

3436465:

That the Russians would have “barrier troops” that would be set up behind Russian army forces and shoot those soldiers that were trying to desert from the front line.

48. Wrestling

JiltedLibrary:

That the first American past time was incredibly violent wrestling. There were only two chances to ever lose as the victor would take the loser’s eye as a trophy.

49. King Guijian

lookingforuser:

King Goujian of Yue placed a row of convicted criminals at the front of his army. Before the battle the criminals would cut off their own heads to scare his enemy’s army by how motherfucking crazy Goujian’s army was.

50. Revolutionary brothel

Power_of_bacon: