36 Times "Drunk History" Taught Me An Amazing Thing About The Past

4 years ago 5

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Some Suffragettes hid barbed wire in flowers.

If you're not familiar with Drunk History, it's essentially a show where comedians get drunk and tell stories from history. And it's just as hilarious and informative as it sounds.

Here are 36 fascinating things I've learned from the show.

1. Rose Valland, a French assistant art curator at the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris, listened to Nazis discuss where they were going to take art owned by French Jews, and they had no idea she spoke German.

2. Valland made sure to memorize exactly where they were taking the art.

3. So when the Monuments Men came to find out where everything was, she was able to tell them the precise locations.

4. Rose Valland helped save over 60,000 works.

5. To escape slavery, Robert Smalls took over a Confederate Ship.

6. He made it past Confederate Forts by using the correct signals and dressing up as a captain.

7. When dawn came and Confederates realized what was going on, Smalls and his wife hoisted a bed sheet as a white flag to indicate surrender to a nearby Union ship.

8. Smalls ended up being the first person to enlist 5,000 Black people in the Union Army.

9. He also became a Congressperson for five terms and purchased the house where he was once a slave.

10. Dick Turpin, an English highwayman, tried to rob another English highwayman, but they ended up working together.

11. Until Turpin accidentally shot his partner. Twice.

12. In 1963, Gloria Steinem went undercover at a Playboy club for SHOW magazine.

13. She worked as a server for four weeks, experiencing the immense sexism and danger the women were required to endure in order to keep their jobs.

14. Her exposée led to Hugh Hefner ending both a certain unfair money policy and the requirement that Playboy club servers have an invasive physical exam.

15. Before Rosa Parks was arrested, teenager Claudette Colvin was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a White person.

16. The Secretary of the Montgomery, Alabama chapter of the NAACP, Rosa Parks, learned about Colvin's bravery and the two became friends.

17. When the Montgomery NAACP made plans to start a bus boycott, they decided against using Colvin's arrest as the impetus because they knew White people wouldn't support a dark-skinned teenager. So Parks sat down in the White section of the bus and got arrested.

18. Modern American Halloween exists because Elizabeth Krebs was tired of kids vandalizing her town every October 31st.

19. One year she decided to throw a party so the kids would be too exhausted to cause any harm.

20. When it didn't work, Krebs spent the entire next year planning a huge party for the next October 31st.

21. This time, it worked, and the Halloween party became a town tradition, seeping into every region of the country.

22. The Americans sent to Japanese internment camps were made to essentially sign an oath of loyalty to the U.S.

23. But Frank Emi refused and he piloted a resistance inside the Japanese internment camp, Heart Moutain.

24. When the government tried to draft Japanese Americans, Emi and 62 others were arrested for leading a mission of resisting the draft. They all went to prison.

25. Nearly 500 Japanese American men in internment camps resisted the draft.

26. Frank Emi later received an apology from President Truman.

27. There were people who worked for the Kray twins whose job it was to listen for anybody publicly talking about them.

28. Also, the detective chasing the Kray twins knowingly partied with Ronnie Kray.

29. British Suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst lead the charge for Suffragettes to learn jitsu.

30. At one point she had a whole line of bodyguards who fought police, including by throwing them into flowers that had barbed wire in the bouquets.

31. J. Edgar Hoover tapped Dr. Martin Luther King's phone.

32. And he overheard Dr. King insulting him.

33. Plus, the FBI fully tried to blackmail Dr. King, but it didn't work because Dr. King refused to back down.

34. Joan of Arc said she was only thirteen the first time she spoke to angels.

35. And she was only nineteen when she was burned at the stake.

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