Photo: Doug McKinlay (Getty).
In the days of high school, we were taught as innocent wide-eyed pupils to take in whitewashed, clean-cut version of historic events: Columbus sailed the ocean blue, Washington chopped down a cherry tree, Honest Abe never told a lie. But if you were to look up a simple list of fetishes of famous people, you’d know that even our brightest minds from the past were far from perfect. Here are a few historical facts about certain famous people and events that prove your history teacher lied to you. And you should be mad. Very mad.
Historical Facts That Will Make You Think Twice About The Past:
Well, looks like history has it’s secrets. Obviously.
History just got even weirder: 10 Famous Historical Figures Who Married Family Members
Historical Facts That Will Make You Think Twice
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Benjamin Franklin wrote an essay called Fart Proudly.
While Ambassador to France and noting the extreme pretentiousness that inhabited Victorian Europe, Franklin wanted to toss a bit of rudeness into the scholarly circle-jerk. "It is universally well known, that in digesting our common food, there is created or produced in the bowels of human creatures, a great quantity of wind," he wrote in 1781. "That the permitting this air to escape and mix with the atmosphere, is usually offensive to the company, from the fetid smell that accompanies it."
Franklin encouraged scientific inquiry into how to improve the smell of farts. He ends it on a high note: "Fart for freedom, fart for liberty -- and fart proudly."
Photo: Comstock (Getty).
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The first juvenile executed in the United States was hanged for buggery.
In other words, he had anal sex with farm animals. According to historian William Bradford, writing in History of Plymouth Plantation in 1912, Thomas Granger buggered "a mare, a cow, two goats, five sheep, two calves, and a turkey." On September 8, 1642, he died. The animals had to live with the trauma.
Photo: AFP / Stringer (Getty).
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Henry Ford received the Grand Cross of the German Eagle for being a friend of the Nazis.
Notorious anti-Semite and car aficionado Henry Ford even went as far as to provide military equipment for the Germans. Ford Motor Company also knowingly benefited from Jewish slave labor in its Deutschland subsidiary. Hitler had a portrait of Ford on his desk for inspiration. To say American industrialists funded WWII on both sides is, well, one of those things we don't like to talk about too much. Mustangs are pretty cool, though.
Photo: Getty
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Maya Angelou was a prostitute.
Once upon a time, before she figured out why the caged bird sang, she was making men sing on the nightly. She was also a female pimp. Angelou tells about her days as a sex worker in her 1974 memoir "Gather Together in My Name."
Photo: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
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The Spartans encouraged homosexuality because it boosted morale on the battlefield.
Gay relationships would make Greek warriors more heroic, due to wanting to impress their comrade crushes. The Sacred Band of Thebes was a full-fledged homoerotic club consisting of 150 pairs of male lovebirds. Yes, Al Sharpton wasn't entirely inaccurate when he called the ancient Greeks "homos."
Photo: 20th Century Fox
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Gandhi gave young girls in his ashram enemas. Young girls in his ashram gave Gandhi enemas.
All the time, according to an article in the Harvard Crimson from 1983. He would also address his maids in the morning by asking the question, "Have you had a good bowel movement this morning, sisters?" Seems a clean conscience and a clean rectum is the key to a happy life.
Photo: Dinodia Photos/Getty Images
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Female hysteria was a legitimate medical diagnosis, and one of the key ways to treat it was to give the patient an orgasm.
In 1859, physician George Taylor estimated that a quarter of all women suffered from hysteria. That's a lot of orgasms. It's been hypothesized during the classical era that male doctors masturbated female patients to get them to chill. Further, female hysteria directly influenced the invention of the vibrator.
Photo: Evening Standard/Getty Images
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If JFK didn't have sex every day, he would get headaches.
John F. Kennedy's conquests are well documented. One famous quote that has been passed around in reputable media circles is, "I get a migraine headache if I don't get a strange piece of ass every day." After his last "headache" on November 22, 1963, Lyndon B. Johnson took his place, and he was arguably even more of a penis-centric thinker.
Photo: AFP/AFP/Getty Images
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The CIA considered dropping boxes of extra-large condoms labelled MEDIUM behind enemy lines to demoralize the Soviets.
It was Southern aristocrat and psychological warfare strategist Frank Wisner's brainchild--the idea of instigating mass envy in the USSR.
Photo: Marvin Joseph /The Washington Post (Getty).
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Malcolm X was bisexual.
Or at least, he dabbled in the dudes. It's such a nebulous identity nowadays. Biographer Bruce Perry, who wrote "Malcolm – The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America," interviewed more than 420 people who intimately knew the famous black nationalist leader of the Nation of Islam. In his teens and early 20s, Malcolm X allegedly became a male sex worker (just like Maya) and had numerous same-sex relationships. Not that this is even remotely taboo nowadays; it's just a fact backed by mounds of circumstantial evidence and witness testimony.
Photo: Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
