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
We have proof that kids have never paid attention in school. For example, in Novgorod around 1250 A.D. a six year old boy named Onfim (later called Anthemius of Novgorod) was supposedly practicing his writing and basic arithmetic. Much of what archeologists have found were doodles of him being a heroic knight who hunted down his teacher, who was a horrible monster . These were buried in a waste pile, where they were rediscovered by archeologists. They are a treasured part of Slavic history and there is now a statue of him in his hometown.
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.
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."
That North and South Korea maintain a fax line between their countries... which they use almost exclusively to send threats and insults to each other.
Also related to North Korea, the hilarious fact that Dennis Rodman, former NBA player, is so well liked by the Kim family that he's basically a diplomat to North Korea, or at least the one they turn to when things really start going badly.
The first manned hot air balloon was mistaken for an eldritch monster by rural French citizens who didn't understand it and was "beaten to death" by a French mob after it descended to the ground.
(He even "decreed" the construction of a bridge or tunnel between San Francisco and Oakland on the other side of the bay, predicting the existence of the Bay Bridge and Transbay Tube!)
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."
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants”
This sounds very nobal and humbling. However, its meaning totally changes with a few facts. It was written in an open letter to Robert Hooke. Hooke was apparently quite short, and EXTREMELY sensitive about this. Newton was basically dissing Hooke. Nobody will be standing on your shoulders, shortie!
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.
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.