As the quote goes, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." But what if the past wasn't taught in the first place? Oftentimes, history books completely overlook or sanitize uncomfortable truths from history...
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So, recently, when Redditor u/Turbulent_Archer_727 asked, "What's one historical fact that they won't teach you in school?" The replies sent me down a rabbit hole of research. From nonconsensual experiments and procedures to plots to overthrow the government and declare war — here are 10 historical facts your teachers definitely didn't want you to learn about:
Warning: This post contains mentions of racism, death, animal death, drugs, war, and forced sterilization.
1.Many people at the Alamo were, in fact, forgotten:
The Battle of the Alamo is a historical event shrouded in legend due partly to the glorification of a few recognizable figures in history books and films such as 1960's The Alamo.
As author Bryan Burrough explained to NPR, our view of the events at the Alamo tends to lean towards a "heroic Anglo narrative." "Slavery was the undeniable linchpin of all of this," he continued. "It was the thing that the two sides had been arguing about and shooting about for going on 15 years. And yet it still surprises me that slavery went unexamined for so long."
Burrough also noted that alongside Black individuals, the Tejanos who fought alongside the white Texas settlers were largely written out of the historical record due to the aforementioned "Anglo narrative."
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2.The Irish potato famine was, in part, caused by the British government:
During the summer of 1845, a "blight of unusual character" began overtaking Ireland's potato crop — the country's main source of sustenance. This famine was long credited with being an unfortunate byproduct of natural events; however, the British government was not without fault for this tragedy.
Due to Britain conquering and exerting its rule over the Irish people, vast plots of land were given to the English invaders, who, in turn, would rent out small amounts of acreage to the Irish natives. These "sharecroppers" were then forced to survive on the bare minimum and quickly learned that they were able to grow triple the number of potatoes on their plots of land than they could any grain. At this time, the British Corn Laws — legislation that placed high tariffs on grains imported from other countries — were being imposed on Ireland, which created the "perfect storm" that forced the typical Irish diet to become dependent on potatoes.
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When the "blight" was discovered, contemporary reports stated that within a few days, freshly picked potatoes would turn into slimy "mass[es] of rottenness." "Famine fever" soon struck the country — which was the common name for a whole host of ailments, including scurvy, dysentery, cholera, and typhus. It is estimated that around one million people died during the Great Irish Potato Famine, and another two million emigrated to either Great Britain or North America.
Shortly after the famine began, Irish leaders petitioned Queen Victoria and Parliament to repeal the restrictive "Corn Laws." Their petition was granted, but by then, it did little to offset the burgeoning crisis. In the spring of 1847, the British government attempted to provide relief to the Irish by establishing work programs and soup kitchens.
However, an official apology from the British government wasn't issued for another 150 years when Prime Minister Tony Blair gave a statement of remorse for his country doing "too little" during the crisis.
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3.The 13th amendment wasn't ratified in one U.S. state for 130 years:
The 13th Amendment — which forbids slavery within the United States — was ratified by Congress on December 6, 1865. Alongside the 14th and 15th Amendments, often known as the "Reconstruction Amendments," civil rights, at least in words, increased for many Americans.
Most individual states within the US had ratified the 13th Amendment on their own by 1870; however, it took some states, such as Delaware and Kentucky, several more decades to ratify the Amendment. However, no state held out on the ratification of the Amendment quite like Mississippi. The 13th Amendment wasn't fully ratified in the Magnolia State until March 16, 1995, and it remained uncertified until February 7, 2013. Only after its certification in 2013 was the 13th Amendment finally ratified by every state that existed at the time of its creation 148 years prior.
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4.The Battle of Blair Mountain:
West Virginia coal miners and coal companies had a strained relationship for many decades due to the coal companies' unjust treatment of miners and unwillingness to improve unsafe work conditions. In an effort to keep their workers from unionizing, these companies often deployed a multitude of violent methods.
However, the struggle came to a head on August 1, 1921, when pro-union sheriff Sid Hatfield was assassinated outside the McDowell County Courthouse. Miners throughout West Virginia flocked to the outskirts of the state's capitol in order to make their voices heard. United Mine Workers members Fred Mooney and Frank Keeney quickly organized a posse of these outraged miners. They declared their intention to march to Mingo County to confront the coal companies and free imprisoned union members who were being held in the area.
However, to reach Mingo County, the miners had to pass through Logan County — a known stronghold for coal companies governed by anti-union sheriff Don Chafin, who vowed: "No armed mob will cross the Logan County line." Chafin and his supporters began preparing for battle and set up a path of trenches and machine gun nests around Blair Mountain.
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On August 24, Keeney and Mooney made a last-minute attempt to call a ceasefire to the oncoming mine war after Henry Bandholtz, General of the War Department, assured them that violence would prove disastrous for the miners and union members. However, after two miners were killed in a skirmish with Sheriff Chafin's forces, all hope of a ceasefire was lost.
Within four days, over 10,000 miners and union members swarmed the Logan County border to exchange gunfire with coal company sympathizers. The battle waged on until September 4, when federal troops became involved. Death tolls have never been confirmed, but estimates vary widely from somewhere between 16 and 100 people killed during the five-day battle.
Now considered a pivotal point in the fight for worker's rights in America, at the time, the Battle of Blair Mountain was considered an enormous loss for the miners. The state of West Virginia charged Keeney, Mooney, and 20 others with treason, as well as hundreds of other union members and miners with murder — however, nearly all were acquitted. The legal fees associated with these trials emptied the wallets of the UMW, which impaired their organizational efforts throughout the rest of the decade.
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5.Tuskegee Experiment:
The Tuskegee Experiment (aka the Untreated Syphilis Study) was a sinister study conducted by the United States Public Health Service between 1932 and 1972.
The experiment took place in Macon County, Georgia, with over 600 participants — who were poor and mostly illiterate sharecroppers. When the study began, researchers informed the men that they had "bad blood," which at the time was a local catchall term that meant anything from anemia to the aforementioned syphilis. The men who participated in the study believed they were being offered medical care beyond their wildest dreams — everything from exams, free meals, rides to and from appointments, free treatment, and even burial stipends extended to their families after their deaths. However, they were never informed of the purpose or potential consequences of the "experiment."
National Archives / AP
When the study began in 1932, there was no proven cure for syphilis; however, 15 years later, Dr. Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, which became the standard treatment for the disease. Despite the newly discovered and proven cure, medical treatment was still withheld from the men in the Tuskegee Experiment. It was later determined that not only had dozens of men died due to the withholding of medical treatment, but countless wives and children had also been unknowingly infected.
The study only met its end in 1972 thanks to investigative journalist Jean Heller's discovery of a four-decades-long "nontherapeutic" study on the unmedicated course of syphilis in Black men. When the news broke, the public outcry was so fierce that it sparked action from multiple federal agencies; the Assistant Secretary for Health and Scientific Affairs soon appointed an Ad Hoc Advisory Panel to review the study.
After four months of review, the Advisory Panel — comprised of nine members from the fields of law, medicine, religion, health administration, and education — deemed the study "ethically unjustified." The following month, the Assistant Secretary for Health and Scientific Affairs declared an official end to the experiment.
In May 1997, President Bill Clinton issued an apology to five surviving members of the study.
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6.The World War II pet cull in England:
In the summer of 1939, the National Air Raid Precautions Animals Committee was formed in Great Britain. The Committee's first act was to draft a pamphlet outlining precautions for all British pet owners called "Advice to Animal Owners." In preparation for the approaching war, the pamphlet informed anxious Brits: "If at all possible, send or take your household animals into the country in advance of an emergency." However, it concluded, "If you cannot place them in the care of neighbors, it really is kindest to have them destroyed."
This heartwrenching advice was circulated in the aforementioned pamphlet, listed in every newspaper, and broadcasted on the radio. Clare Campbell, author of Bonzo's War: Animals Under Fire 1939-1945, told the BBC the announcement was "a national tragedy in the making."
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When war was officially declared on September 3, 1939, pet owners flocked to veterinarians to have their animals euthanized. The mass euthanasia only worsened after the Blitzkrieg began in September 1940. Contemporary journalist Susan Day urged readers of the Daily Mail: "Putting your pets to sleep is a very tragic decision. Do not take it before it is absolutely necessary."
One of the biggest reasons families euthanized their pets was because rations weren't allotted for animals. Some wealthy individuals, such as the feline-loving Duchess of Hamilton, acted against the cruelty and created a sanctuary for animals who needed a safe home. The duchess began sending staff to London's East End, where they eventually rescued hundreds of unwanted pets.
However, it wasn't enough to save them all. Within the span of one horrific week, an estimated 750,000 pets were killed. The British Zoo also took part in these measures by culling all of their poisonous animals in the event they escaped after a bombing raid. Fortunately, humane societies later stepped in and prevented more senseless pet deaths.
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7.The Business Plot:
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Person in a suit poses in front of a large, striped fabric backdrop
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Throughout America's history, there have been many, many attempts to overthrow our democracy — including "The Business Plot," a little-known coup in 1933 that involved right-wing financiers plotting to overtake the government, depose the newly-elected FDR, and install Marine Corps. Major Smedley Butler as dictator of the United States.
During this time, the country was feeling the full effects of the Great Depression; as author Sally Denton explained to NPR, "There were suggestions that capitalism was not working, that democracy was not working." This caused many to look to other forms of government — including Communism, socialism, and even fascism — as a way to pull America out of its woe-ridden state.
Denton noted that the financiers "thought they could convince Roosevelt to relinquish power to basically a fascist, military-type government." How close we came to this fascist dictator-run state is often debated. Still, it should be noted that this wealthy group of conspirators had already supplied the "coup d'état" with millions of dollars and weapons before attempting to recruit Maj. Smedley Butler for the role of dictator. Luckily, however, Butler viewed this as an act of treason and immediately reported it to Congress.
The following year, Butler testified under oath before the Special Committee of Un-American Activities; however, no one involved in the proposed coup was prosecuted for treason.
The final congressional report stated, "There is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient."
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Imagine it's 1953, and the world is at the height of the Cold War. Many high-ranking US government officials begin to fear that Communist nations are developing working methods of mind control to brainwash POWs who are being held in North Korea after the Korean War. This is how Project MK-Ultra came about.
As a countermeasure, CIA director Alan Dulles approved Project MK-Ultra (aka America's attempt at mind control). Under the direction of chemist Sidney Gottlieb, the agency began working with powerful hallucinogenics that they believed could be helpful in brainwashing as well as psychological torture.
Many of the participants in these "brainwashing" experiments were not informed of the studies being conducted on them, such as Operation Midnight Climax. This operation was an MK-Ultra project in which the government would employ sex workers to lure men to "safe houses" where they would be dosed with LSD and monitored from behind a two-way mirror.
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Other experiment participants, such as Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, willingly volunteered to be studied for Project MK-Ultra while he was a student at Stanford University. Kesey later became an advocate of LSD and began hosting hallucinogenic-fueled parties known as "Acid Tests" — one of the factors behind the introduction of mainstream psychedelic culture in the late 1960s.
However, after funding and conducting studies at major universities, LSD — as well as MDMA, heroin, meth, "magic mushrooms," and a whole host of other drugs — were deemed too unstable to be used in the field.
The project was exposed in 1974 after New York Times journalist Seymour Hersh published a story about the CIA's nonconsensual mind control experiments and illegal spying operations. President Gerald Ford, in an attempt to tackle the newly reinvigorated distrust of the government following the Watergate Scandal, then formed a committee whose sole purpose was to investigate illegal CIA activity within the United States.
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9.Operation Northwoods:
Seven months before the Cuban Missile Crisis, certain officials within the United States Department of Defense drew up a plan to justify declaring war against Cuba. This plan, referred to as Operation Northwoods, was a proposed false-flag mission that would entail CIA operatives plotting, staging, and committing acts of terrorism against the United States military, as well as American civilians, and then blaming it on Cuba.
A few of the atrocities proposed were assassinating Cuban immigrants, sinking boats filled with Cuban refugees, and painting a civilian aircraft to appear as a US Air Force fighter plane before fabricating a Cuban "shootdown" of the "Air Force plane." Some top brass even contemplated sacrificing the lives of those in the Armed Forces in order to move ahead with a war, writing: "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba. Casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation."
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These proposals shockingly earned the approval of all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They even went so far as to land on the desk of President Kennedy's defense secretary, Robert McNamara, who resoundingly rejected them.
Operation Northwoods lived in the shadows for another 30 years and was only declassified due to the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992; however, the documents weren't common knowledge until 2001 when author James Bamford released his book Body of Secrets.
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10.The forced sterilization of Native American women:
In the six years after the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970 was passed, it is estimated that nearly 25% to 42% of Native American girls and women were nonconsensually sterilized by the Indian Health Service. Many of the procedures were performed on girls and women under the age of 21 despite there being a court-ordered moratorium on patients of that age.
In 1976, the U.S. General Accountability Office investigated the sterilization practices of four offices of the Indian Health Service. The GAO uncovered evidence that most patients were unaware of the significance of the paperwork they were signing, while others were coerced into the procedure under the threat that other necessary healthcare would be withheld. Some were even told that sterilization would later be reversible when they were ready to have children.
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In 1977, Maria Sanchez, chief tribal judge on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, spoke to the United Nations Convention on Indigenous Rights in Geneva to tell them that Native American women were still being targeted by sterilization, which she called a "modern form" of genocide.
With impacts such as lasting mental health struggles and divorce, the effect of these procedures is still being felt in Native American communities today. While forced sterilizations haven't been a major headline in nearly half a century, author Jane Lawrence explained a chilling reality, "Sterilization abuse has not been reported recently on the scale that occurred during the 1970s, but the possibility still exists for it to occur.”
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Did any of these facts surprise you? What are some other heartbreaking historical facts that aren't taught in schools? Let us know in the comments!