This is damn interesting.

In 1946, the United States sent a political delegation to the Kingdom of Denmark.

Their objective? Acquire the island of Greenland.

Greenland is perhaps best known as the landmass with the most misleading name in history.

Greenland is very much not green.

The large island lies north of Canada near the North Pole, so most of the land is kicked in

permanent ice all year long, thousands of feet thick. It is almost entirely frozen and inhospitable.

As you may know, the name Greenland was specifically designed to draw in gullible settlers.

As the story goes, in 982 AD in Icelander named Eric the Red was exiled due to

some killings, so he and his entourage sailed northwest, where they were rumored to be

unclaimed lands.

They named their new settlement Greenland

in hopes of tempting other Nordic settlers

to sail right on past Iceland

in favor of these allegedly greener shores.

The strategy was only modestly successful.

Ownership of the island was ambiguous for centuries,

but in 1933, the Permanent Court of International33, the permanent court of international justice,

a buddy which no longer exists, decided to grant official control of Greenland to Denmark, which

would govern the island from 3,000 kilometers away, which takes us back to the U.S. delegation

offering to buy Greenland in the 1940s. Despite the island's cold and hostile demeanor, the U.S. was prepared to pay

$100 million, about $1.2 billion in today's dollars. The delegation explained that the U.S.

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