26Hakkoda Mountains Incident
On January 23, 1902, 210 Japanese soldiers got caught in a blizzard on the Hakkoda Mountains in Aomori prefecture. A total of 199 of them died during the ascent making it the most lethal disaster in the history of mountaineering.
27. Voltaire's joke that the Holy Roman Empire (HRE) was "neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire" was mostly true. The center of the Church at the time was actually the Vatican, the HRE's people were mostly Germanic and not Roman, and the nation was never truly unified at any point in its history.
28. Mir Osman Ali Khan, the fifth richest man in the history of mankind - donated 5 tons gold to the National Defence Funds of India and was using the Jacob Diamond as a paperweight.
29. After Pearl Harbor was bombed FDR gave his “Day of Infamy” speech, one of the most famous speeches in American history. FDR was paralyzed from the waist down due to polio, so he walked to the podium for his speech with the help of steel leg braces, a cane, and his son.
30. When the Mongols sacked Baghdad in 1258, they threw all books from the house of wisdom in the river, doing so erased much of the information that was discovered during the Arabic golden age. The river is said to have turned black from all the ink after first being red with blood.
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31Cleveland Spiders
The worst record in MLB history belongs to the 1899 Cleveland Spiders, for losses (134) and winning percentage (.130). They were so bad that opponents refused to visit their park, forcing Cleveland to play 112 of 154 games on the road, leading to an impossible-to-break record of 101 road losses.
32. The Battle of Leyte Gulf was, by some criteria, the largest naval battle in history, with over 200,000 naval personnel involved. The Japanese lost 1 fleet carrier, 3 light carriers, 3 battleships, 6 heavy cruisers, 4 light cruisers, 11 destroyers, 300 aircraft, & 12,500 killed
33. The oldest known song in human history, “Hurrian Hymn no. 6”, dating back to a 1400 B.C. Sumerian clay tablet.
