Napolean III was kind of a dick, like his uncle, and he didn’t take the defeat in stride. Instead, he sent 30,000 more troops to Mexico, beat up on the Mexican Army and installed this smarmy jerk with awful facial hair, Emperor Maximilian I, as the leader of Mexico.
From 1991 to 1993, Monica Seles won 22 titles and reached 33 finals out of the 34 tournaments she played. She compiled a 159–12 win-loss record (92.9% winning percentage) during that time, including a 55–1 win-loss record in Grand Slam tournaments. And then somebody stabbed her. A deranged Steffi Graf fan literally stabbed her. With a nine-inch boning knife. On the court. READ THIS, SERIOUSLY.
On this day in 1959, Fidel Castro was sworn in as PM of Cuba. Check out his yearbook photos, which predicted his future here.
TODAY IN HISTORY: JFK was assassinated on this day in 1963. Hear how America first heard about this tragedy. Six and a half minutes later?
Source: hypr.vc
The only thing that can make our official Election Day drinking game more fun? OK, maybe your candidate winning. But also this awesome list of presidential trivia, which will make all your friends say, “Golly, friend, you’re smarter than Adlai Stevenson!”
When was the last time a sitting vice president was elected? How did Warren Harding die — high blood pressure or murder? How did Millard Fillmore get his odd name? Find out below.
10 Redditors From the 19th Century
Controversial viral factory Reddit was pretty much the same back in the 1800s, the glory days of the Internet, when iPad Mini–wielding street urchins crowded around the manors of oil barons to steal Wi-Fi.
The United Artists Theatre, Detroit.
Click here for the rest of this devastating gallery of the city’s landmarks in disrepair.
A report published by Ancestry.com tracks Obama’s family tree 10 generations to a man named John Punch — known as America’s first slave. Surprisingly, the connection isn’t through Barack Obama Sr. but Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, who descended from a North Carolina family who intermarried with freed slaves.
President Obama’s lineage can be traced back three centuries to a mixed-race family called Bunch, the father of whose patron, John Bunch II, isn’t clear. But there’s reasonable evidence to suggest that the man is John Punch. The difference in spelling can be explained by researchers’ tendency to simply record names as they sounded.
Both John Bunch’s wife and mother were white — and so, if this connection is true, Obama descends from the first-known half-black family in America.
