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TIL During the Little Ice Age, the Thames River would freeze over so severely during the winter months, Londoners would come together and have celebratory fairs (open markets) on the ice, the first recorded in 1608.

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A5Xa TIL 35 years before the Holocaust, Germany committed one of the first genocides of the 20th century in modern-day Namibia. German forces sealed off the Namib desert leaving up to 100,000 native Africans to die of starvation and exposure.
kpLg TIL that after enlisting in 1942, Audie Murphy was rejected by the Marines for being too short and the navy for being too skinny. The Army accepted him, but did not want to send him into combat because he looked so young. He went on to receive every military award for valor available from the Army.
KYONG TIL the most expensive religious text ever sold was an handwritten printer’s manuscript of the Book of Mormon. It was sold for $35 million in 2017
QJ4NL TIL Peter Freuchen was an Arctic Explorer who, after getting trapped by an avalanche used his feces to fashion a dagger to free himself.
AN9gl TIL that Vodafone paid over 185 billion euros in stock to purchase German company Mannesmann at the peak of the telecommunications bubble in 2000. Vodafone today has a market cap of around 22 billion euros.