History classes in the US only have time to skip across the highlights of history, which is too bad. Later on we found that history is way more interesting, and we would have enjoyed those classes more if we had wider subject matter instead of repeating stories of wars every year. And if our text books had added in some really weird and obscure trivia, we would have paid attention.
No matter what era you study, there are small facts that you've never heard before, mainly because they are too small to make an entire article of, so Cracked put them together in a list of 30 Eyebrow-Arching Historical Facts. You, being a Neatorama reader, will encounter some you know well, like the Demon Core and the St. Louis. But many will be new to you.
And I just realized that two of the three examples I selected to show you are things that wouldn't have been in my history classes at all. That's the thing about history; there's always more of it being made.