History That Rattles: The Starter Pack

5 Shockingly True Stories You’ll Want to Retell at Every Dinner Party

Barbora Jirincova

Copyright © [2025] by [Barbora Jirincova]

All rights reserved.

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

Contents

1. 1. What if you’d never seen a lightbulb?

2. 2. The day Caesar crossed the Rubicon — and nobody knew

3. 3. The train in the woods

4. 4. Not Roman, not holy, not an empire — but deadly serious

5. 5. The bloody history of your morning tea

6. 6. Where to go next?

Chapter One

What if you’d never seen a lightbulb?

Electricity didn’t just power machines.It lit up freedom.

We often speak of revolutions and great battles as the turning points of history. But one of the most radical shifts came quietly — when ordinary people could stay awake after dark—not huddled by a fire. Not hoarding expensive candles. But by flipping a switch.

The right to read after sunset — to learn, to think in peace — was once a luxury reserved for the wealthy. Here's how that changed.

Paris, 1901: The factory worker and the light

Paul stumbled home from the factory, legs like iron rods. His body ached, but his mind buzzed. He turned the key, stepped inside, and without thinking, flipped on the hallway light.

He had books to read.

He wasn’t going to be a worker forever. He had plans.

His grandmother used to say: “Honor books. And respect the light that lets you read them.”

She remembered winters when the only light came from oil lamps — and even that was too precious for girls to waste.Books weren’t for daughters. Light wasn’t either.

But Paul would let his daughters read. Every night, if they wanted. Let them read until morning.

Because now, they could.

***

Village near Munich, 1674: The girl and the candle

Tessa stared wide-eyed at the flame. Her mother was reading aloud from the family Bible, but Tessa barely heard. She had never seen a candle this close.

Candles were expensive. Dangerous. Hidden away in cupboards, lit only when the parents read in secret. Books weren’t allowed in every home. Candles certainly weren’t for children.

But tonight, her parents let her stay up and listen.

She couldn’t stop watching. The light danced. Shadows played. And for the first time in her life, the world stayed visible after nightfall.

It felt like stepping into a fairy tale.

Tomorrow, the magic would vanish again.

***

What changed between these stories?

Everything.

When Paul flipped that switch in 1901, he didn’t just light a room — he lit a path.Suddenly, education wasn’t just for nobles. Girls could study. Workers could dream.

Reading no longer depended on daylight, savings, or social class. The darkness stopped deciding who would get ahead.

That’s what electric light did. Not just invention — liberation.

So next time someone scoffs at energy costs or debates electricity as a privilege, remember:

The right to light — for everyone — changed the world.

Chapter Two

The day Caesar crossed the Rubicon — and nobody knew

When the world changes today, we see it before we blink.

News explodes across screens. Messages ping. Borders close before planes can land.

But imagine living in a world where empires rose and fell — and you found out two days later.

That’s precisely what happened in January, 49 BCE.

Quintus counted time like a shopkeeper counts coins.

He had four children. A thriving slave business. No army to defend his city.

And now — whispers in the forum.Caesar had crossed the Rubicon. With veterans. With swords. With intent.

Quintus didn’t care about politics.He cared about looting. Rape. Undisciplined soldiers.

He had hours — maybe days — to decide whether to run or stay. But how many hours?

The messenger had arrived on horseback, breath ragged, switching mounts every mile.Was Caesar one day away? Two?

Were the senators lying?

He panicked. Then calmed himself.

“Wars always happen somewhere else,” he thought.He kissed his children. Sent his wife away. Hid what he could. And waited.

Maybe it would blow over.

***

The Shocking Truth?

Back then, news didn’t come first.

War came first.

You only found out when someone banged on the gate.

In a world without real-time updates, even life-and-death choices were made in the dark.

Today, we cancel flights over a single tweet.

Quintus had to guess how long he had before an army burned his home — with no way to check.

That’s how different the past really was.

Not just in clothes, or laws, or gods.

But in the terrifying quiet before the world changed.

Chapter Three

The train in the woods

History doesn’t just repeat — it circles like a wolf.

It was early morning in the forest of Compiègne. Cold. Wet.The kind of silence that follows millions of deaths.

Inside a railcar parked on a lonely track, French Marshal Ferdinand Foch sat stiff and silent.Across from him, the German delegation looked hollow-eyed.

They hadn’t come to negotiate.

They had come to surrender.

The war had drained everything — men, money, nations, sanity.But France wanted more than an end.It wanted humiliation, served cold on iron wheels.

And so, at dawn on November 11, 1918, the Germans signed the Armistice in that train car — surrounded by trees, and by silence that stung.

But the killing didn’t stop there.

The guns were ordered to fall silent at exactly 11:00 a.m. — the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.Romantic symmetry for the newspapers.

Except the paperwork had been signed hours earlier.

Which meant thousands still died — knowingly, pointlessly — in the gap between peace agreed and peace enacted.

Imagine charging into gunfire knowing the war would end in thirty minutes.

But the story of Compiegne did not end in 1918.

That train car should have become a relic of peace.

But history has a vicious memory.

In 1940, Adolf Hitler demanded that France sign its surrender in that same carriage —dragged out of a museum and placed back in the very same forest.

He stood where Foch had stood.

He made the French sit where the Germans had sat.

When it was done, he had the car shipped to Berlin.

How did it end for the traincar? Historians are not certain, but some imply that as the Allies marched to Berlin in 1945, Germans blew up the traincar.

To prevent another humiliation.

Because history doesn’t forget.

And sometimes, it doesn’t forgive either.

Chapter Four

Not Roman, not holy, not an empire — but deadly serious

Rome, 800 CE

It was Christmas. The Tiber stank as usual, spoiling the festive mood. Everybody who’s anybody gathered in St. Peter’s Basilica. The atmosphere was tense, despite the time of year.

They were watching a barbarian from some wild land beyond the Alps praying at the altar of their basilica. The barbarian was Charlemagne, a powerful figure in Europe beyond the Alps, yet despised, as were all Germans and Slavs, by the proud Romans and Italians.

However, the barbarian wore the Iron Crown of Lombardy. He came to Rome with an army openly supporting Pope Leo III, who had been attacked by powerful Roman families the year prior. At any moment, bloodshed and pillaging could start; they all knew it.

And then the pope did something unexpected.

He put a crown on the barbarian’s head, proclaiming him the Roman Emperor.

How could a Frank from some wild German forest be the successor of the great Roman Emperors?

There was already an emperor, empress Irene, to be precise, in Constantinople.

This Charlemagne character would be just another short-lived episode in Italian history. It meant nothing…

***

They called it the Holy Roman Empire.

But it wasn’t holy. It wasn’t Roman. And it was barely an empire.

This is a famous line attributed to Voltaire.

It began with a surprise. On Christmas Day, in the year 800, Pope Leo III placed a crown on Charlemagne’s head during Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica. No one had warned Charlemagne this would happen. Some sources claim he would never have entered the church that day if he had known. Some sources believe it was all staged.

Whatever the truth, the deed was done — and the idea took root: a new Roman Empire had been born, led not from Rome but from the misty forests of central Europe.

What followed was a thousand-year game of make-believe with deadly consequences.

The emperors who came after Charlemagne were crowned not because they ruled Rome or even Italy, but because they could convince—or force—the Pope to bestow the crown upon them. That meant riding down from Germany, across the treacherous Alps, into a land that despised them.

It was a quest as symbolic as it was suicidal.

Italian cities resisted foreign rule. Rival claimants waited with armies. The journey itself was dangerous.

Emperors would be poisoned, betrayed, or simply abandoned in their bid to wear the same hollow crown.

And still, they came.

Why? Because being crowned emperor—even in a crumbling basilica, even by a Pope under duress—meant something. It meant you stood above kings, that you were part of a line that stretched back to Augustus, that you held the secular sword to match the Pope’s spiritual one.

In theory.

In reality, the "empire" was a fractured jigsaw puzzle of duchies, bishoprics, and rebellious cities. The emperor’s authority varied wildly. Sometimes he commanded armies. Other times, he had to beg the princes to even attend his coronation.

It was not holy. The Church often turned against its own emperors, excommunicating them when they got too powerful.

It was not Roman. Rome itself rarely obeyed imperial command.

And it was not an empire in any modern sense. It had no capital, no fixed laws, and no standing army.

At times, it was little more than a title, floating above the chaos of Central Europe.

And yet—it mattered. For a millennium, men killed, schemed, and bled for that impossible title.

Why? Because sometimes the fiction of power is more powerful than the truth.

Chapter Five

The bloody history of your morning tea

The world’s finest tea didn’t come from Britain. It came from the calloused hands of Indians who would never taste it.

Tea may be civilised. Its history is not.

In the hill country of Assam, the jungle had to be beaten back with blood.

By the mid-19th century, British traders had grown tired of China’s monopoly on tea. They wanted control. So, they turned to India — and found wild tea bushes thriving in Assam.

The climate was perfect. The labor was... available.

Sort of.

Recruiters arrived in impoverished villages across Bengal, Orissa, and the tribal northeast. They offered jobs, food, shelter.

What they didn’t mention: the contracts that trapped entire families for years. The beatings. The cholera. The snakebites. The loneliness.

Children carried baskets bigger than their heads. Women plucked leaves from dawn till dusk, bent like question marks over wet ground. A missed quota meant a reduced ration. Or worse.

They weren’t allowed to drink the tea they picked. That privilege belonged to their colonial masters. The best leaves were packed for export, brewed in London parlors and Scottish salons — while in Assam, workers boiled muddy water and tried not to think about the steaming wealth sailing away.

By the turn of the century, India had become the world’s top tea exporter. But not for Indians. The drink was marketed to them much later — once the Empire had squeezed out its profits.

Even today, in Darjeeling or Kangra, tea estates stand like monuments to colonial ambition. Some still use the same tools.

So next time you stir your cup, remember: it wasn’t the British who built the tea trade. It was the barefoot girl in Assam, picking leaves she wasn’t allowed to touch.

Because history doesn’t rest in textbooks. It lingers in routines. In breakfast cups and grocery aisles. In names we can’t pronounce and dates we don’t remember. What the Empire built for profit, someone else paid for in silence.

And sometimes, what rattles most isn’t a headline or a monument, but the quiet trace of someone else's life under our ordinary habits.

Let us listen to a fictional tale of Kangra tea and the people who made it.

***

Crushed Dreams That Smell of Tea

A storm was coming, Akansh thought, as he stood on the veranda and watched the Himalayan peaks nearly touch the black clouds creeping toward the plantation. This storm would pass. The work would go on. That was the nature of this land.

He wasn’t superstitious, unlike the laborers working in the green sea of tea bushes below. He was educated—an anomaly in the Kangra region. Two years ago, he’d come to care for his sister after their parents died of malaria.

At university in Bombay, he’d seen other storms brewing—loud, nationalist voices calling for independence. He’d felt little sympathy. Independence wasn’t what troubled the workers in Kangra. Survival was.

City revolutionaries had no idea how people lived here. Their parents got rich exploiting the poor just like the British, yet dared to speak for them.

Here, life was different. More Indian. The tigers came less often now, scared off by hunters’ rifles. But the jungle still held secrets.

Akansh had little reason to complain. The plantation manager, sahib Stansfield, was a good man. Clean water. Lenient wardens. Some workers—called coolies by everyone—were even granted land to grow rice.

But everything could change in an instant. One new manager, and the whips would crack again.

“Daydreaming again, brother?”

Kimaya.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Akansh frowned. Sahib’s house was no place for his sister.

“The storm is coming,” she smiled. “We’ve delivered the leaves. We have to wait it out. I thought I’d visit you.”

“No,” he said. “You came to see sahib Stansfield. But he’s not here.”

“He’s a good man,” she murmured.

“Go to your hut, Kimaya. The storm is coming. Rest while you can.”

And she went. Akansh watched her with sorrow. She dreamed of life as a lady, like their aunt, who became a sahib’s concubine in Calcutta. That money paid for his schooling. But still—his aunt was a whore.

And most sahibs never brought their Indian women to the cities. A few rupees per night—that was all. One day, maybe, he’d take Kimaya to Bombay and find her a decent husband.

Until then, he was here. To guard her.

***

Thomas Stansfield sipped tea in the club. “Best harvest yet,” he beamed. The others barely nodded, dulled by the heat. But Thomas had read London’s latest reports, brimming with praise.

His Kangra tea had won medals in Amsterdam and London. Only the richest could afford it. Assam and Darjeeling got attention, but Kangra was the best. He knew it.

“Ten malaria cases this week,” said Dr. Harvey.

“It’s not their fault mosquitoes bite them,” Thomas snapped. “We should fix the uphill water tanks. That’s where they breed.”

“With what money? The company’s already angry about your pipes.”

“Those pipes prevent cholera. That saves lives. And money. Hiring new workers every month isn’t cheap.”

Harvey shrugged. “Humanity’s expensive in these parts.”

Thomas hated that cynicism. But after seven years, he was tired too.

He’d tried to prove kindness paid off. But truth is, it didn’t.

Clean water, clothes, dignity—it all cost money. And the wardens resented his restrictions. He paid them more to keep them in line, to stop them raping and beating the workers. But the workers still earned little. Still starved.

Being human, he had learned, was bad for business.

***

“You must hate us,” Thomas said back in his hut, as Akansh unlaced his soaked boots. The storm had caught him outside.

“Why would I, sir? You’re a good man.”

“You’re clever, educated. You know what we do here. Tell me the truth. Don’t you hate us?”

“Honesty has earned many a worker a beating,” Akansh shrugged.

Thomas smiled bitterly. “That’s not an answer. Why are you here, Akansh?”

“My sister.”

“You could take her to Bombay,” Thomas said.

“If another manager comes, maybe I will.”

Akansh meant it. His sister was safe with Stansfield in charge. His wardens behaved; rapes were rare. Stansfield himself did not choose his concubines from the virtuous daughters of poor families.

“You don’t care for tea, do you?” Thomas asked.

“No,” Akansh shook his head. “But I care for the land. My father gave me a strip to grow rice. That’s enough.”

“I understand,” Thomas said quietly. “My father was here too. A pioneer. He believed Kangra tea was the best in the world. He chased the tigers and planted the first bushes.”

“And now?” Akansh asked, his curiosity rising.

“Now I sell his tea for others’ profit,” Thomas sighed. “Maybe we’re not so different.”

He might have said more, but stopped mid-sentence.

They looked outside—because they both heard it.

A low, menacing rumble.

They ran out and saw hell break loose.

The earth screamed. Walls collapsed. Roofs split open. Mothers screamed. Huts and stables crumbled. Horses were crushed.

Cows screamed—a sound Thomas would never forget. He’d never known cows could scream.

“My sister!” Akansh shouted and ran.

Thomas followed.

Kimaya lay near her hut, bleeding, pinned beneath a wooden beam. Together they moved it. Akansh lifted her but collapsed, his ankle twisted at a grotesque angle. Thomas scooped her up.

Then came the flood.

The aqueducts burst. Water raced through streets, plantations, homes. Mud followed. Then rock.

“This way!” Akansh shouted.

They ran from the hills. Behind them, the earth swallowed the plantation in silence and stinking mud.

The mud made no distinction.

It drowned animals and humans alike, British and Indian, in a single mass grave.

And for a moment, all was silent.

***

Three days passed after the earthquake of Kangra.

Kimaya would live, though perhaps without her leg. Akansh and Thomas had dug bodies, hauled the injured, burned the dead.

The workers wanted proper burials. Thomas couldn’t allow it. Disease would spread.

He had to tread carefully. For now, British and Indians worked side by side, mourning their dead, tending the wounded. But the mood could shift. As much as he hated it, he had to send for the army.

Side by side, they stood. Sahib and servant. Equals in their grief.

“This is the end of my father’s dream,” Thomas said.

“The plantation will recover. Assam did after an earthquake,” Akansh replied.

“This isn’t Assam. Kangra isn’t as valuable. The board won’t rebuild.”

“What will you do?”

“Return to England,” Thomas sighed. “I’ve never even seen it. Perhaps it’s time.”

“And you, Akansh?” He looked at the man beside him. “What will you do?”

“I’ll go back to Bombay. Finish law school. One day, maybe, I’ll buy land. But the funny thing is… I care for this tea now.”

“But you know,” Thomas said, “they’d never let an Indian enter the tea business.”

“You know what, sahib?” Akansh said, “You British—you won’t be here forever.”

“You’re right,” Thomas gestured to the ruined plantation. “This can’t last. One day the British will leave. And then it will be up to you to clean our mess.”

Akansh looked at the devastation. Mud. Debris. Death. Silence.

Yes. It was a mess.

“One day,” he said, “your dream of Kangra tea will live on. We will rebuild it.”

Chapter Six

Where to go next?

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About the author

I am a historian, a writer, and a copywriter. I am the author of Slavic Ancient Origins, a book on the ancient history of Slavic nations.

- Rebel History, a channel on history often left untold,

- Alpine Skier, a channel for those, who love the white mountains,

Furthermore, I work for clients as a freelancer, including the Skiers Planet, whose articles I share with my readers.

My Story

I come from a city robbed of its history by the post-war era.

A city in the North of Bohemia, Liberec.

That might have been the source of my fascination with history from a young age.

At the age of twelve, I was reading biographies of Roman emperors by Allan Massie and Fury by Colin Falconer.

You can imagine the mess these books made in a teenager’s head.

But I was eager to learn, and my passion grew.

Writing: a digression or the highway?

As a child, I always carried a notebook and pen and wrote. I usually wrote “novels” - mostly unfinished, as I always succumbed to the desire to follow the new shiny idea. But I did finish one novel at the age of 10 and got it into a public library. The second novel waited ten years until its last lines were written. And I have never published it. As I grew up, I stopped believing. I have decided that I was not good enough and that writing is not a decent career, anyway.

Writing was always supposed to be a mere hobby. A digression that can never sustain me in life.

Thus, I entered the Faculty of Education to study English. You know, one can always earn a living by foreign languages.

However, when I sat in my first history class in 2006, and the teacher addressed us as “historians,” I felt my childhood passion grow again. Sure, writing academic texts is not “writing,” per se. But it is as close as can be and still be called a decent career. So, I pursued academic writing career as a historian.

Really? Can I be a historian? Can I dedicate my life to history as such? Let’s do this!

When you are twenty, you rarely think about what you will do in life. You should, but you don’t. At the age of twenty, you dream. My dream was to earn my living as a historian—to enter Ph.D. studies, and then… then we’ll see.

In 2013, I started my PhD studies in history at the Faculty of Education. At the same time, I began to teach English at a primary school.

Soon, I understood that I didn’t want to teach. I dedicated all my energy to my PhD studies and looked forward to my maternity leave when no daily job would take the precious time I wanted to spend writing my thesis.

At home with a child, I relished that all I had to do was take care of my youngster and finish my Ph.D. I studied with a kid on my lap, wrote papers, participated in conferences, and started teaching history at the Faculty of Education.

It was a paradise for me, and I did not want to lose it.

But even then, the dream grew a little darker. I knew that an academic career could not sustain me; University teachers in the Czech Republic are paid miserably.

And I soon discovered there was no place for creativity in the academic papers.

In 2020, I got my Ph.D. and realized with terror that I never thought beyond this moment.

And as my maternity leave drew to an end, I had to figure out what to do.

And first and foremost, what to do with history that I loved more than anything.

A Freelance Historian?

I have decided to run a freelance historian’s business. To teach history privately. I did not know what precisely to do, but I had a dream.

I heard from all sides how crazy the idea was.

But I had to try…

My first historical project grew in small steps. I had to learn everything from scratch: website building, marketing strategy, social media, graphics, e-book writing, podcasts, and running my own new business as a copywriter at the same time. Not to mention the kids.

And somewhere along the way, I realized that I was a writer. That people loved what I wrote, and suddenly I remembered. All this, teaching, academic career, copywriting, all of it was a digression. Writing was the highway; writing was my calling.

So, I sat down and started writing a book. I wrote for magazines and discovered that I could write about stuff I loved, not just the things I had studied.

And so, I finally call myself a writer

I write books about history, both non-fiction and fiction.

I am writing about skiing for people who love it.

And I write about anything else because creativity knows no bounds.

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Table of Contents

1. What if you’d never seen a lightbulb?

2. The day Caesar crossed the Rubicon — and nobody knew

3. The train in the woods

4. Not Roman, not holy, not an empire — but deadly serious

5. The bloody history of your morning tea

6. Where to go next?