26Xenophanes
Xenophanes, who died in 490 B.C.E., found fish fossils and concluded that the land where they were found must have been underwater at some time. He was the first person known to have used fossils as evidence for a theory of the history of the Earth.
27. The location of the tomb of Alexander the Great has been lost to time. Alexander was entombed in Alexandria, the tomb was subsequently visited by many pilgrims throughout history, including Caesar. The tomb was well visited up till the 1500s when its location was suddenly forgotten.
28. In 1976, Japan donated 53 bonsai trees to the US for its bicentennial, including a white pine that had been tended daily since 1625 and survived the Hiroshima atomic blast. Its history was unknown until 2001 when two brothers showed up at the museum to check on their grandfather’s tree.
29. The first recorded pizza delivery was in 1889 to Queen Margherita of Savoy. Reportedly, she was tired of courtly fare and requested a local peasant meal. They delivered a white, green, and red pie to symbolize the newly unified Italy's flag. She called it "delicious" and the rest is history.
30. An 81-year-old man called Giles Corey, accused of being a wizard in 1692, was the only man in American history to be subjected to death by pressing in an attempt to get him to submit to trial by jury. It is said that his response to the torture was to tell them to add 'more weight.'
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31General George Thomas
General George Thomas was arguably better than both Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant. He never lost a battle and once completely destroyed a confederate army, earning him the nickname "sledgehammer". History has forgotten about him because he was too modest and always downplayed his own accomplishments.
32. During the exceptionally cold winter of 1795, a French Hussar regiment captured the Dutch fleet on the frozen Zuiderzee, a bay to the northwest of the Netherlands. The French seized 14 warships and 850 guns. This is one of the only times in recorded history when calvary captured a naval fleet.
33. The very first strike ever recorded in history started in 1152 BC. During the reign of Rameses III in Ancient Egypt. While building a royal necropolis, the workers felt they were being underpaid, so they organized a massive strike. Their wages were actually increased and workers returned to work.
34. German agents set off an explosion in New York Harbor on July 30, 1916, that killed four people, destroyed $20,000,000 worth of military goods and damaged the Statue of Liberty. It was one of the largest artificial non-nuclear explosions to have ever occurred.
35. As many as three US Presidents, and also Abraham Lincoln's son may have died as a result of contaminated water supply to the White House. Until 1850 there was no sewage system and a field of human excrement called "night soil" flowed freely into the water supply.
