30 History Facts That Make People Tear Up

‘The Sand Creek massacre is particularly bad’
30 History Facts That Make People Tear Up
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History, unfortunately, has a rep for being boring. I don’t want to blame the world’s high school history teachers, especially since they probably can’t pick the events they cover. Instead, the thing that I think is sometimes hard to communicate is that these people of the past were deeply human, like we are today.

That kind of relatable emotion is what allows us to really connect with a past population. After all, history is jam-packed with tragedies, and once you start seeing the fallen as people not that different from you, the tear ducts are ready to go. 

Read below for some historical facts that brought Redditors to tears.

SamTheArse . 5y ago . Edited 5y ago A story from my great grandfather who fought in WW1... Soldiers would cease fire to pick up their men's bodies and would have a smoke together, go back to their trenches and start firing again. Neither side of front line soldiers actually wanted to be there. Just drafted for war.
CommunismlsntSoNeat 5y ago It doesn't exactly make me cry, but Albert Goring, the staunchly anti-Nazi brother of Hermann Goring, spent the second world war helping jews and dissidents to escape. Не was caught several times, but was let off the hook due to his brother's influence within the Reich. After the war, he was shunned for his last name and his accomplishments forgotten.
AdvocateSaint 5y ago This soldier, I realized, must have had friends at home and in his regiment; yet he lay there deserted by all except his dog. I looked on, unmoved, at battles which decided the future of nations. Tearless, I had given orders which brought death to thousands. Yet here | was stirred, profoundly stirred, stirred to tears. And by what? By the grief of one dog. Napoleon Bonaparte, on finding a dog beside the body of his dead master, licking his face and howling, on a moonlit field after a battle. Napoleon was haunted by this scene until his
A-Pleasent-Fellow 5y ago The Rape of Nanking in 1937. Looking up photos of what the Japanese did there left me silent for a while. They Raped and murdered women, Bayonetted babies, (you can look up a photo of it.) used the wounded as rifle and bayonet practice, forced mothers on their sons and fathers on their daughters, and made a contest out of beheading civilians. (There is a Japanese newspaper article you can look up about it. It's disgusting.) and the worst part about it is that the Japanese government denies most of these acts. Along with a lot of
thefuzzybunny1 5y ago After the Pearl Harbor attack, at least some men were alive in a pocket of air inside one of the capsized ships. Navy personnel could hear them banging on the hull and trying to signal for help, but there was no way to get at them safely. The water was full of fuel and oil, so blowtorches weren't a workable idea. And there was no way for divers to get into the ship because the damage had rendered the whole thing a deathtrap of twisted steel. There wasn't even any way to communicate with the trapped men.
mpafighter . 5y ago The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. The doors to the exit and the stairwells were locked. So you either had to jump out the window or be burned alive.
lipstick_and_lace 5y ago One of the girls in the Donner Party was fed her dead mother and told afterwards. They had an agreement to not feed people their family members, but they had broken off from the camp in an attempt to find rescue. She would randomly burst into tears about it at school years later. The whole story of the Donner Party is so horrible and sad and it bothers me that it's just used for cannibal jokes.
fracking_toasters_ 5y ago Teddy Roosevelt's mother Mittie and his wife Alice, who had just given birth days before, both died in the same house on the same day, hours apart from each other. In his diary entry that day, he drew a large black X and scribbled The light has gone out of my life. That's some heavy shit right there, man.
urticadiocia 5y ago Virginia Woolf's suicide and the note she left behind makes me fucking weep like a baby. Just the way she expresses sentiments of happiness and love to her husband, but also her guilt and struggle with mental illness- it just kills me.
Scruffy_Nerf_Hoarder 5y ago Edited 5y ago I learned about this in a Dan Carlin podcast. During the German-Soviet war, there was a Red Army soldier who sang each night with a hauntingly-beautiful voice. His comrades would give him their tea rations and scarves to protect his larynx. One night, he couldn't sing because he had gotten sick. A German soldier crawled across no-man's-land and tossed something into the Soviet trench; the Soviet soldiers thought it was a grenade. However, it was a package containing a letter asking if the singer was okay and if he needed medicine. A truly heart-warming
RexSueciae 5y ago RMS Carpathia was the first ship to arrive on the scene when the Titanic hit an iceberg and sank. Every one of the Titanic's 705 survivors were rescued by Carpathia, which made a tremendously heroic effort that night in the North Atlantic. The scene is dramatized in A Night to Remember, the classic film from 1958 (and one of the more accurate, especially given the constraints of technology at that time) -- Harold Cottam, the radio operator on Carpathia, had already gone off-duty when the Titanic's distress signals were received. Не immediately conveyed the message to Captain Arthur Rostron, who
MarchKick . 5y ago Most if not all the astronauts aboard the Challenger survived the explosion. It was the crash into the water that would have killed them.
-eDgAR- 5y ago Edited 5y ago r/TheGrittyPast is a really good sub for this type of content since it highlights more morbid anecdotes and facts from the past. One that really stands out to me from the sub is this image of the Filipino Zoo Girl that was on display in the Coney Island Zoo in 1914. She was bound by ropes and people tossed peanuts at her. It's just heartbreaking to see something like that happen, especially to a child so young, but human ZOOS were a thing up until as late as 1958.
kamomil 5y ago Irish unmarried moms were sometimes required to live in institutions, raising their own babies until they were adopted Imagine knowing how cute your kid was, taking care of it, knowing you couldn't keep it. Sometimes they were as old as 2 or 3 when adopted The movie Philomena dealt with this topic
meenakshi96 . 5y ago When Alexander Hamilton's eldest son died, his second child Angelica Hamilton had a mental breakdown and she never recovered. Sometimes, her family would walk into a room with only her in it, and she would be speaking to her dead brother.
scaryboilednoodles . 5y ago The oldest recorded name for a cat was from Ancient Egypt. The cat's name was Nedjem which means Sweetie.
whatisscoobydone . 5y ago Dangerfield Newby, one of the free black men who died in the raid on Harper's Ferry, had a letter from his enslaved wife on his person. Не had been working to buy her and his children, but her owner kept raising the price.
Lucky-daydreamer 5y ago WW1- Mercy dogs, they would go out into no mans land and find wounded soldiers. They would bring medical supplies for the soldiers to patch themselves up. Or if the soldier was to mortally wounded, stay and comfort them in their final moments.
PunsAndRoses246 5y ago The end of a sappho poem: Beyond all hope, I prayed those timeless days we spent might be made twice as long. I prayed one word: I want. Someone, I tell you, will remember us, even in another time. That quote always make me tear up.
. 5y ago Edited 5y ago The torture and murder of Junko Furuta. What they did to her would make the cartels cringe, but the worst part of her sordid case is that all of the people involved in her death were given slaps on the wrist and are roaming the streets of Japan today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder of Junko Furuta
Lastofherkind 5y ago There were approximately 300 infants and children that were murdered in Jonestown, being forcibly fed or injected with cyanide. I feel so much pain for all the victims but the kids in particular make me ache with despair.
reddicyoulous 5y ago This story about Sir Nicolas Winton who saved over 600 children from the holocaust No one knew of his story until 50 years later when his wife found notebooks detailing the 669 kids he helped escape the Nazi's.
_DMYZ 5y ago Henry Gunther was an American soldier killed during WWI at 10:59am on November 11th, 1918; one minute before the Armistice took effect at 11:00am. Gunther charged a German roadblock outfitted with machine guns. German soldiers tried waving him off knowing the war would come to an end in mere moments. Apparently he got too close, fired a couple rounds, and was promptly shot and killed instantly.
metal_gearmen 5y ago The story of Alex (1977-2007), an African grey parrot who learned to speak, recognize objects and play with his owner,lt was one of the smartest parrots ever reported. Не loved his owner and his owner adored him as well. In the end, he suffered arteriosclerosis, so his owner went to see him one last time, to which Alex told his owner:You are good; I love you. She replied, I love you too. Не said I'll see you tomorrow and she replied yes, I'll see you tomorrow.
Electoriad 5y ago Christmas Day, 1914. German and British soldiers got up from their trenches and called a 48 hour truce to just chill and even play soccer. This makes me cry because it shows that the soldiers of both sides really found it pointless to fight other people just cause their country said so. This is probably the strongest story of unity I've heard about in history class.
Lia_Is_Lying 5y ago The Sand Creek massacre is particularly bad. They had so much faith in the peace treaties that had been signed, the signs of good faith from American settlers. Only to be massacred. The leader of the camp, Black Kettle, desperately holding up the American flag he'd been given with a white flag underneath it, encouraging his people to gather around it- thinking that the settlers would realize they were allies and stop the killings. Only to be shot down. The descriptions of the massacre are brutal- children tortured and slaughtered, pregnant women with their children torn out
5y ago Through genealogy, I found an old newspaper reporting an accident that happened: My 4x great grandmother and grandfather were crossing the river into maine from canada when their wagon tipped. Не and 5 children survived, my 4x great grandmother and month old baby did not. That tugged at my heart. I cannot imagine the devastation he and his children felt as they were moving. There was also a lot of stillborns and a lot of children who never saw past the age of 10 It's quite a sad journey at times.
-eDgAR- 5y ago The story of Hachikō, the dog who waited patiently for his owner 9 years after his death. I'm sure many are familiar with this story because of the movies and the episode of Futurama (Jurassic Bark) which was inspired by this story.
lone_gu-z-man 5y ago Edited 5y ago Anne Frank's death at the age of 15, hiding from Nazis, had contracted Typhus, couldn't recover from it & left her diary for us, her last words from her diary_ As I've told you many times, I'm split in two. One side contains my exuberant cheerfulness, my flippancy, my joy in life and, above all, my ability to appreciate the lighter side of things. By that I mean not finding anything wrong with flirtations, a kiss, an embrace, an off-color joke. This side of me is usually lying in wait to ambush the other
anthropology_nerd 5y ago We all know the Thanksgiving story in Massachusetts, where the Wampanoag leader Massasoit entered into a peaceful alliance with Plymouth colonists. That peace was broken within a generation. Massasoit's son, Philip, was killed in the subsequent war. Philip's head was mounted on a pike at the entrance to Fort Plymouth, where it stood for several decades. Philip's wife and children were captured and sold into slavery in the Caribbean. Native American history is filled with stories of heartbreak and resilience, both of which frequently produce tears when hearing the stories.

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