13 dark chapters of history most people never learned in school

A lot of history gets reduced to wars and presidents, but the true horror stories are the ones that end up ignored in the margins.

Sent away during the Depression

It was hard enough losing your job during the Great Depression. It was a lot worse if you were Mexican American, as being unemployed came with the threat of being pushed out of the country. Local and federal authorities backed raids and removals of Mexican Americans during the 1930s.

Anyone with Mexican ancestry could be kicked out. Statistics suggest that two million people were forced to go to Mexico, and 1.2 million of them had actually been born in the United States. They were forced to leave because of their race, simple as that.

Experiments behind prison walls

Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia during the 1950s and 1960s was a bad place to be if you were an inmate, but not for the reasons you might expect. Researchers used the prisoners as test subjects. The lead researcher in many of these experiments was dermatologist Albert Kligman, who helped run many tests involving pharmaceuticals and viruses.

These tests also involved fungi and some of the radioactive material later used in Agent Orange. Most of the men were Black prisoners awaiting trial because they couldn’t afford bail. Some were paid for participating, yes, but the idea of informed consent back then was nothing like it is today. Over a thousand people were used as human subjects.

A pill tested in Puerto Rico

Researchers in the 1950s desperately wanted women to test the birth-control pill so they could get it onto American pharmacy shelves. They decided to test it on women in Puerto Rico. Women in places like Río Piedras were given a high-dose version of Enovid in 1956, and about 17% reported side effects. These included stomach pain and vomiting. 

The thing is, the women were never told the drug was experimental, and they had no idea they were being tested on. Dr. Edris Rice-Wray warned that the dose would cause too many problems. Three women died during the trials. But officials never bothered to perform autopsies to see whether the medication was to blame.

Bloodshed in an Arkansas farming town

The Elaine massacre started with a meeting in a church. It ended with 237 to 800 Black people being killed. Black sharecroppers near Elaine, Arkansas, gathered on September 30, 1919, to talk about getting fairer payments from the white landowners. But shots were fired after white men approached the meeting, and what followed was days of violence.

Armed white groups moved through Phillips County. They killed numerous Black people, and officials aren’t sure exactly how many died, but the figures were at least in the hundreds. It didn’t get better when federal troops arrived on October 2, as Black residents were arrested in large numbers. 12 Black men were quickly convicted and sentenced to death, although they were later acquitted.

The asylum built for Native Americans

Canton, South Dakota, was once the site of the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians, a federal mental institution created specifically for Native Americans. It operated from 1903 until 1934, and around 374 people from roughly 50 tribes were sent there. Except, it wasn’t only for the mentally ill. Any Native Americans who opposed the government could be sent there.

So could those who opposed business interests, or were culturally misunderstood. There were serious problems in how the place was run, and at least 120 patients died. They were buried on the property, without any individual markers. The cemetery sits today on the grounds of a golf course.

Germs beneath New York

People taking the subway to work in New York in June 1966 had no idea of the dangers they were facing. They were passing through a military biological-warfare experiment. The U.S. Army personnel released Bacillus globigii deliberately into the subway system for four days.

They dropped light bulbs filled with the bacteria onto tracks. It didn’t take long for the material to spread through tunnels and stations. The bacteria itself was considered harmless back then, although now, it’s treated as a pathogen. 

A train out of Bisbee

On July 12, 1917, armed deputies and local vigilantes in Bisbee, Arizona began rounding up striking copper miners and other men around town. They detained 1,186 people. Some of these people weren’t even involved in the copper mine strike. The forces marched the men to Warren Ballpark and loaded most of them into railroad cars. 

But they weren’t going anywhere nice. No, they were sent on a roughly 16-hour journey about 200 miles into New Mexico. They had very little food or water the entire time. The men were dumped at Hermanas without money or transportation and told not to come back to Bisbee. In other words, they were illegally kidnapped and deported for striking.

An armed fight in coal country

That’s not all for strikers. Thousands of armed coal miners marched across West Virginia in August 1921, and they were heading toward Mingo County. That was where union miners had been jailed under martial law. It all kicked off at Blair Mountain, where they had to face Logan County Sheriff Don Chafin and roughly 3,000 armed supporters. 

Both sides exchanged gunfire along the mountain ridge for several days. Planes working for Chafin’s side dropped gas bombs and homemade explosives, leading to President Warren G. Harding eventually sending federal troops. The miners chose to surrender rather than fight the Army.

Civilians under a railroad bridge

The Korean War had barely even started. Yet somehow, civilians near No Gun Ri were trapped in the fighting in late July 1950. American soldiers shot groups of South Korean refugees near a railroad bridge because of rumors that some North Koreans had been disguising themselves as South Korean refugees. 

Some of the casualties included women, children, and older people. There was never an official final death toll released, although historians believe up to 400 people may have been killed in the massacre. It should never have happened.

Villages wiped from the map

Nowhere was safe during Guatemala’s civil war. Soldiers moved through rural areas from 1981 into 1983, burning houses and ruining crops. They murdered any residents they suspected of helping guerrilla fighters, and under General Efraín Ríos Montt, the campaign got worse.

Families were forced to flee into the wilderness with practically no supplies. A UN-backed truth commission later concluded that the state had committed acts of genocide against Maya groups, and around 200,000 people were killed or disappeared during the war.

Explosives beneath a Michigan school

May 18, 1927, should’ve been an ordinary school day for students in Bath Township, Michigan. But at around 8:45 a.m., a huge section of Bath Consolidated School blew apart, and it was because school-board treasurer Andrew Kehoe had hidden explosives beneath the building.

He wasn’t finished, though, and Kehoe later drove to the wreckage to detonate explosives inside his vehicle. He killed himself in the blast. Thirty-eight children and several adults died in total. The death toll was higher than the Columbine High School massacre and the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings.

A drug that stayed on Canadian shelves

Canada had already started approving the drug thalidomide by April 1961. That was when it became harder to ignore the reports from overseas. Doctors prescribed the drug to some pregnant women to treat nausea and other symptoms. But as it turns out, the drug was responsible for many babies being born with missing limbs and damage to their internal organs. 

Both West Germany and Britain withdrew it from the market in December, yet Canada didn’t officially follow until March 2, 1962. The exposure had already happened by then. Around 115 Canadian children born in 1961 and 1962 had birth defects associated with the drug.

Detained on suspicion

Supporters of the American Plan didn’t care whether a woman was convicted of a crime or not. She’d lose her freedom either way. The Plan began near the start of World War I, and it involved authorities trying to control sexually transmitted infections near military bases. They were given the power to detain any woman suspected of prostitution or se***l activity. 

Officials would force the women to undergo invasive medical examinations, and then confine them if they tested positive. Some were kept in jail, and some were kept in special detention centers. Around 30,000 women went through the system, sometimes staying locked up for weeks or months. They very rarely got any actual medical care.

Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.

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