21 Historical Badasses No One Ever Talks About

They say that fortune favors the bold, and that goes double for history. You never hear about someone conquering an outsized army, saving untold numbers of lives or changing everything we thought we knew about something by being super chill; so most of the figures in our history textbooks are at least portrayed as badasses. Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders. Abraham Lincoln and his vampire hunting. George Washington and his approximately 30 goddamn dicks. At least one of those is definitely real.

But there are plenty of badasses in history that we never hear about. Often, it’s because they were a woman or racial minority, and the white men who have usually served as historians had a medical condition that made those kinds of badasses invisible. Other times, they just never attracted much attention for whatever reason, even if they did stuff that handily outshone more famous figures. When user sgtxsarge asked r/AskReddit, “Who are some badasses in history that school didn’t teach you about?,” Reddit proved just how many did.