History posts from the fact desk

In September 1752 Britain jumped from the 2nd to the 14th. Nobody lost any time. Parliament renamed eleven dates to catch up with the calendar most of Europe already used.

In the summer of 1518 somewhere between 50 and 400 people in Strasbourg danced for days on end. The dancing is well recorded. The deaths, and the reason it happened, are still argued over.

Mount Tambora's 1815 eruption chilled Europe's summer of 1816, and the rain kept Mary Shelley indoors near Geneva. The volcano set the weather; a dare and a waking dream made the novel.

Mostly true. The British bombardment of the Zanzibar palace on 27 August 1896 ran from 09:02 to about 09:40, but sources also give 40 and 45 minutes, and the rifle detail is unsourced.

Partly true. Machine guns failed to dent the emu population of Western Australia in 1932, but the war was a cull by a handful of men, and the name came from the newspapers.

Guy Fawkes Night was among the most-read pages on Wikipedia on 6 November 2026. Six checked facts about the Fifth of November, from who was burned in effigy to the law that kept the day for two and a half centuries.

Wojtek the bear travelled with Polish troops from Iran to Scotland. His rank and his shell carrying at Monte Cassino are disputed, and the two sides rest on different kinds of evidence.

Victor Lustig took money for the Eiffel Tower in 1925 by posing as a ministry official. The retellings give one clear payment and one stopped repeat, and no French record turned up.

Cleopatra died in 30 BC. The Great Pyramid was already about 2,500 years old by then, and Apollo 11 was only about 2,000 years away. Three dates from three source pages make the fact true.