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TIL: Samuel Adams received a female slave as a wedding gift. He accepted the gift, then promptly freed her.

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p8aQb TIL that botanists in Kew Gardens (UK) bought a £1.29 bag of supermarket porcini mushrooms sourced from China and found three species of mushroom previously unknown to science.
7rOlx TIL Ronnie James Dio claimed to have never received any vocal training. He instead attributed his singing ability to the use of breathing techniques he learned while playing trumpet.
8e7YZ TIL: That two days before Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, the BBC was taken off air with little warning, the last programme to be shown being a Mickey Mouse cartoon. The government was concerned that the VHF transmissions would act as a a beacon to enemy aircraft that could bomb London.
xpaD TIL Alice in Wonderland is not full of drug references, it is a story about a world where irrational mathematics are the basis of reality. It was written by a math professor who thought these new forms of math were ludicrous.
0dgJj TIL that Big Bird (played by Caroll Spinney) was in talks to go to space on the Challenger shuttle. The most probable reason why Big Bird wasn't on the shuttle was due to the costume itself taking too much space.