- Students of the Old West agree that there was a prostitute named Julia Bulette in Virginia City, Nevada, during the Comstock Lode era, that she was murdered in 1867, and that Frenchman Jean Millian was hung for the crime. After that, things get confused. She was either a madam or worked free-lance. She either scratched for "meager earnings" or made up to $1,000 a night. Strangest of the disagreements, though, is this: she was either a white woman born in 1832 in England or a black woman born in 1838 in Mississippi.
- The driest continent on Earth? Antarctica. Even though it contains 90% of the ice in the world, the Antarctic is technically a desert.
- When King David decided to crown Solomon as his successor, he sent high officials to fetch his son to the coronation site at the spring of Gihon, telling them to take the royal mule with them for Solomon to ride.
- Twelve nations joined together to form the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949. Only six of those actually have an Atlantic coast, though, and one - Luxembourg - has no coasts at all.
- Ninety percent of all Thoroughbred racehorses are descended from a single stallion, a horse known as the Darley Arabian.
- Richard Bong, America's top ace of World War II, learned to fly fighters in Arizona, taught by a flight instructor named Barry Goldwater. He then went to California where he learned to fly the Army Air Corps' new P-38 Lightning, the fighter he would use to shoot down 40 Japanese planes. While hotdogging around San Francisco in his P-38, "buzzing" residential areas, Bong managed to actually blow a woman's laundry off her clothesline. As punishment, his commander sent him to the woman's house with the assignment to help her with her laundry and mow her lawn.
- Spanish forces conquered large areas in the New World with surprising speed, due primarily to their possession of horses, metal armor, and firearms. How great was the European advantage? Hernando de Soto's force of less than 1,000 soldiers fought a nine-hour battle in 1540, in what is now southern Alabama. The Spaniards killed 11,000 Indians while losing only 70 men.
- The tracks of modern main battle tanks are so large that their pressure on the ground, per square inch, is sometimes less than that of an infantryman's foot.
- Payphones were introduced in 1889, but they didn't have coin slots. You paid an attendant standing nearby.
- Washington socialites had a nickname for Lucy Hayes, wife of President Rutherford B. Hayes. They called her "Lemonade Lucy" because President and Mrs. Hayes did not allow any drink stronger than lemonade in the White House. Mrs. Hayes, incidentally, was the first president's wife to be referred to as the "First Lady".
- Edward the Confessor was an interesting English king. When he ascended the throne, one of his first acts was to confiscate all his mother's estates because she had neglected him as a child. He had no heir because, prior to his marriage, he took a vow of celibacy.
- The orchid family is the largest family of flowering plants in the world, but only one member of the family - the vanilla plant - produces edible fruit.
- The world medical community, despite immense success in some areas, has still managed to completely eradicate only a single disease: smallpox.
- Certain members of the Russian nobility felt that Grigori Yefimovitch Rasputin, a peasant monk, had too much influence with the Tsar and Tsarina, so they murdered him. It wasn't easy. They fed him poisoned pastries and wine. Rasputin swallowed enough potassium cyanide over a period of a few hours to kill six men, but it didn't faze him, so one of the conspirators shot him in the chest. He appeared dead for a time, then leaped up, threatened to tell the Tsarina what had happened, and ran out the door. A conspirator followed and shot him again, this time in the head. For good measure, the shooter kicked the cleric hard in the temple, then dragged him back into the house and beat him savagely about the head with a barbell. The assassins then tied Rasputin securely, wrapped him in a carpet, and threw him in the Neva River. When the body was discovered, an autopsy determined that Rasputin drowned while trying to free himself from his bonds.
- Charles E. Bolton wrote a number of poems, always signing them "the Po8". His poetic efforts aren't part of America's literary heritage, though, because Bolton was the infamous "Black Bart" who robbed twenty-seven Wells Fargo stagecoaches, leaving his poems behind in place of the stolen money.
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