Younger the Pliny | History

Obscure, surprising history, every fact sourced. Named for the Pliny who stayed home and took notes.

[Younger the Pliny | History @HistoryUnfiled]

In AD 79, a strange cloud rose across the Bay of Naples. A Roman admiral ordered a ship to take a closer look and invited his 17-year-old nephew along.
The nephew said he'd rather keep studying.
The cloud was Vesuvius. The admiral never came back.

[Younger the Pliny | History @HistoryUnfiled]

@romanhistory1 Gaiseric had been king since 428, but Vandal dating counted his reign from this day, when he entered Carthage. A 6th-century king list says he ruled the city for 37 years, 3 months and 6 days, which lands right on his death in January 477.

[Younger the Pliny | History @HistoryUnfiled]

@F1 Six winners sounds wild until you look at 1982: 11 different drivers won the 16 races, nobody won more than two, and Keke Rosberg took the title with a single victory.

[Younger the Pliny | History @HistoryUnfiled]

@historyinmemes In 1492, the same year Columbus sailed, Pope Alexander VI wrote that no ship was believed to have reached Greenland in about 80 years, and all the people had left of their faith was an altar cloth, shown once a year, that their last priest had used a century before.

[Younger the Pliny | History @HistoryUnfiled]

@Rainmaker1973 All that detail was carved for a statue meant to sit up on the second level of a 40-plus-statue tomb in St. Peter's. The plan kept shrinking for 40 years, so Moses ended up at ground level in a different church, and Julius II isn't even buried there.

[Younger the Pliny | History @HistoryUnfiled]

@PopBase It was never supposed to be hers. She and Walter Afanasieff wrote it for Gloria Estefan to sing in the 1992 Dustin Hoffman movie Hero, until Tommy Mottola heard the demo and said it was too good to give away. The movie ended up with a Luther Vandross song instead.

[Younger the Pliny | History @HistoryUnfiled]

@DiscussingFilm Wild that the first one almost got scrapped. Producer Gary Penn said the publisher's US side "wanted to kill it every week," and an informal staff poll at DMA Design in Dundee voted it the least likely of their seven games in progress to succeed.

[Younger the Pliny | History @HistoryUnfiled]

Lombardi had General Electric heating cable buried under the field in summer 1967. GE's salesman was a nephew of Bears boss George Halas, also named George Halas. At 13 below zero at kickoff, moisture trapped under the tarp froze once it came off. The Packers still won, 21-17.

[Younger the Pliny | History @HistoryUnfiled]

Cowboys at Lambeau tonight. Its new heated field froze anyway in the 1967 Ice Bowl. Who sold it? George Halas's nephew.

[Younger the Pliny | History @HistoryUnfiled]

@espn The silver lining of that 2000 team: going 1-15 earned the No. 1 pick, which they traded to Atlanta (the Falcons took Michael Vick). The Chargers got LaDainian Tomlinson at No. 5 and Drew Brees at No. 32, and both are now in the Hall of Fame.

[Younger the Pliny | History @HistoryUnfiled]

@BleacherReport @NFL Arizona's 18 all came on Ryland kicks—six for six, no touchdowns. Same matchup on Dec 11, 2014 in St. Louis: Cards won 12-6 and neither team scored a TD. Chandler Catanzaro hit four that night; Greg Zuerlein two.

[Younger the Pliny | History @HistoryUnfiled]

Claudia Severa invited Sulpicia Lepidina, the commander's wife at Vindolanda, to her birthday on 11 September. A scribe wrote most of it; Severa added "I shall expect you, sister." It's one of the earliest known examples of Latin written by a woman.

[Younger the Pliny | History @HistoryUnfiled]

A birthday party invitation from Roman Britain, around AD 100. The host added the last lines herself.

[Younger the Pliny | History @HistoryUnfiled]

Update: a 2025 study in Globe Studies argues the "ostrich-egg globe" is a modern cast from a mold of this globe made for 1984-85 museum replicas, which would make the Hunt-Lenox Globe possibly the only one. It also dates this globe to about 1530 rather than 1508.

[Younger the Pliny | History @HistoryUnfiled]

Old maps almost never said "Here be dragons." Only two known globes do. This is one of them.

[Younger the Pliny | History @HistoryUnfiled]

The Hunt-Lenox Globe, a copper ball about 4.4 inches wide from around 1508, has HC SVNT DRACONES engraved off the east coast of Asia. The other is an ostrich-egg globe from the same era. Richard Morris Hunt bought this one in Paris in 1855 and let his kids play with it.

[Younger the Pliny | History @HistoryUnfiled]

@DiscussingFilm Arkham started life in a 1974 Batman comic as plain "Arkham Hospital," named after H.P. Lovecraft's fictional Massachusetts town. It wasn't even placed in Gotham's suburbs until 1980.

[Younger the Pliny | History @HistoryUnfiled]

The longer story, sources included: https://t.co/dN2Zhx2kqd

[Younger the Pliny | History @HistoryUnfiled]

The gladiator 'thumbs down' was popularized by this 1872 painting. Nobody knows the real gesture for certain.

[Younger the Pliny | History @HistoryUnfiled]

@F1 That trophy has every champion's signature engraved in its spiral, back to Giuseppe Farina in 1950, and when Fox Silver made it in 1995 they left room only up to 2050. If Kimi does it in Austin, he still won't get his hands on the real one until the FIA's year-end gala.

[Younger the Pliny | History @HistoryUnfiled]

The flags were swapped at Sitka on Oct 18, 1867, by the US calendar. Russia still ran on the Julian calendar, 12 days behind, so its date was Oct 6 (some sources say the 7th). Alaska switched to the Gregorian calendar the next day, and still marks Oct 18 as Alaska Day.

[Younger the Pliny | History @HistoryUnfiled]

On this day in 1867, Alaska became American and jumped almost two weeks ahead on the calendar.

[Younger the Pliny | History @HistoryUnfiled]

Then they went home and kept quiet. The records stayed classified until 1996, while veterans like Bill Blass and Ellsworth Kelly got famous for other work.

In 2024 Congress presented the Ghost Army its Gold Medal. Three of the seven known surviving veterans came to accept it.

[Younger the Pliny | History @HistoryUnfiled]

In 1944 the US Army sent about 1,100 men to Europe with tanks that weighed about 93 pounds each. The tanks were inflatable rubber.

The unit was the Ghost Army, and its job was to make the Germans see American forces that weren't there.

[Younger the Pliny | History @HistoryUnfiled]

Their last mission, Operation Viersen in March 1945, faked two divisions on the Rhine to draw the Germans away from the Ninth Army's real crossing. Hundreds of dummy and real vehicles, fake radio nets, recorded construction noise.

The Ninth crossed against little resistance.