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Category Archives: Obscure American History
The Craziest Nuclear Weapon Plans In American History
Posted in 20th Century Insanity, Strange America
Tagged America, Carl Sagan, Cold War, Davy Crockett, Fat Man, Insanity, LBJ, Little Boy, moon, Nuclear Bombs, Nuclear Plans, Nuclear Powered Cruise Missile, nuclear reactor, nuclear weapons, Operation Argus, Outer Space, Project A119, Project Orion, Project Pluto, Russia, Space
The Fenian Brotherhood: Invading Canada, From America, For Ireland
“Ha ha, guys, what are you doing? Come on, stop that.”
~American and Canadian Forces, 1866
For years, we’ve treated Canada like our polite, little brother to the North. They’re friendly, they send over some comedians we like, and excluding the time they killed the Baldwin family in the South Park movie, they’ve been an adequate ally and neighbor. We tend to forget that they’re technically still a Commonwealth of England, with the Queen on their currency and everything, but we don’t really care about that, since we’ve not really had a beef with England since they burned down our White House and we were forced to replace it with a much more kickass presidential residence.
Now, while Canada has never really done anything wrong by us, England does have its fair share of people pissed off at them. Like, say, the Irish. Oh yeah, the Irish have a very sticky history with England and, well, there’s no nuanced way to say this so we’ll just spit it out—a bunch of Irish Americans invaded Canada as a “fuck you” to England, which is just about the closest we as a nation has come to invading Canada since the early 1800s. So that’s a thing, a thing that happened, in history. Let’s talk about it.
That One Time the Fenian Brotherhood Kept Invading Canada From America
The 1778 American Invasion of Whitehaven, England
“Yeah I’ll invade England, whatever, I do what I want, you ain’t the boss of me.”
~John Paul Jones
Considering that we wouldn’t have ended up becoming a country if the end result had gone a different way, it’s surprising how little about the Revolutionary War the average American is aware of. We know about the Declaration of Independence, and Concord and Lexington at the start of things. We know Bunker Hill. We know that Benedict Arnold was an asshole, and that Nathanael Greene was a badass, and that Yorktown pretty much sealed the whole deal for us. But apart from the founding fathers, and some iconic imagery of George Washington, when we think of the American Revolution we think of the early battles up until, say, Saratoga…and then, us eventually winning.
There were four years of war between Saratoga and Yorktown, and in general our history books kind of gloss over that period. Pretty much the only people talking about that time period were, say, the screenwriters for The Patriot, and even with that you’d not immediately recall that the climax of that movie was 1781’s Battle of Cowpens. We bring this up not to shame our history teachers—we get it, there’s a lot of important stuff to get through, and you might as well focus on the greatest hits—but rather to remind America that there was a lot of badassery going down in the American Revolution that gets swept under the rug. We’re here to lift up that rug and show you those awesome, awesome dustballs.
Let’s talk about the time America invaded England.
The 1778 American Invasion of Whitehaven, England
The Teddy Roosevelt Assassination Attempt of 1912
“Oh, he’s still standing. Welp, I’m dead.”
~John Flammang Schrank
We don’t try to hide our infatuation towards Teddy Roosevelt here at America Fun Fact of the Day, and that has very little to do with the fact that great-great-grandsire Johnny Roosevelt is our editor-in-chief here. We’ve extolled his American greatness here before, and the greatness of his children time and time again. The man was badass, to put it bluntly, and we could write in depth AFFotD articles about hundreds of the things he did in his life. But when we think of Teddy Roosevelt, there’s one story in particular which really shows that, as far as unbridled American badasses go, Roosevelt was the cream of the crop, a giant among giants, and the kind of person you most definitely would never want to fuck with.
This is the story about the time someone tried to fuck with Teddy Roosevelt.
The Teddy Roosevelt Assassination Attempt of 1912
Get Your Hands Off My Bottle: A Short History of the Whiskey Rebellion
“Do. Not. Fuck. With. Our. Whiskey.”
~18th Century Americans/19th Century Americans/20th Century Americans/You Get The Gist
America was founded under a few core principles. Now, it’s been a while since we’ve skimmed through the Declaration of Independence, and if you put a gun to our head we’d still not be able to tell you what the Third Amendment of the Constitution does, but we’re pretty sure America is all about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness through the imbibement of alcohol. Nope, that’s right, we nailed it on the first try, don’t even try to ask Google if that’s right they’ll just steal your cookies and put them on boat servers and sell them to Nigerian Princes (besides being keen historians, we’re also internet experts).
We bring this up because we’d like to tell you about a very important history tale, from America’s distant past. Imagine, if you will, a time when America’s very existence could be threatened by even the smallest of threats. Picture a government trying to tax our booze to pay for war debts. And imagine people rising up and saying, “Get your hands off our fucking booze” with enough anger and violence that it marks the only time that an acting President led troops to battle.
Yes, that’s right, we’re here to talk about the Whiskey Rebellion, the relatively minor yet strangely important hiccup in American history that, naturally, was centered around our nation’s love of alcohol.
Get Your Hands Off My Bottle: A Short History of the Whiskey Rebellion
Posted in Miscellaneous America, Pre-1800 America, Washington, Whiskey and Bourbon
Tagged Alexander Hamilton, America, Clint Eastwood, David Lenox, General John Neville, General Neville, George WAshington, Gran Torino, John Neville, Mingo Creek Association, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, Revolutionary War, the Whiskey Rebellion, Washington, Whiskey, Whiskey Rebellion
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