What's your favorite weird history fact or story?

"The toughest town in the wild west," Palisade, Nevada.

Just about everything people believe about the wild west is a myth. In particular, the notion that it was a violent place with nearly nonstop gun battles was purely a creation of the dime novels of the time. Actually, wild west towns tended to be generally peaceful, boring places. The big cities of the east had much higher rates of violence. Most towns forbade the carrying of weapons in town.

But in the late 1870s, the town of Palisade decided they wanted to give the eastern dandies passing through on the railroad a little thrill. So they started staging gunfights when the trains stopped in town. It started out with just a single western-style pistol duel (which, BTW, was an entirely fictitious creation of the dime novels and never actually happened), but eventually it turned into a veritable wild west Disneyland, with staged bank robberies, Indian raids fought off by US Cavalry, all the WW cliches. And everybody in the area was in on it, the townsfolk, the Army, the Indians, the railroads,...

This probably helped cement the idea in the popular imagination that the wild west cliches were real until 30 years or so later when the fledgling movie industry made them stick for good.

The "S" in Harry S Truman stood for "Sexy".

During the Mexican-Americian War the "Dirty Sanchez" was known as "The Victory Wipe"

I can't remember the name of the lake/battle, but in WW2, there was a lake with 1 german and 1 us/british ship. When the news of war came, the us/british ship just went over there, and the germans agreed to officially give up, and just drink beer together the rest of the war.

Gavrilo Princip sandwich

The early Romans told their troops to stay silent when charging into battle. People typically tell while they're charging to get rid of fear, so seeing the Romans stay silent was extremely intimidating and showed that they were fearless with excellent discipline.