› added 4 years ago

60

TIL about Gordon, or "Whipped Peter", an enslaved African American. The pictures of his scourged back provided Northerners with visual evidence of brutal treatment of slaves. Abolitionists distributed the pictures throughout the United States and internationally to show the abuses of slavery.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

468o TIL 78% of NFL players are bankrupt just two years after finishing their careers.
kOjXW TIL that a man called Washington Irving is primarily responsible for perpetuating the idea that the Earth is flat. Evidence would suggest that the world has been known to be a sphere since as early as the Ancient Greeks, Romans, and even Chaucer.
wLLW1 Because most early rotary engines turned counterclockwise (from the front, clockwise from the pilot's view). The physics of rotating objects resulted in left turns being easier than right turns. That led to standard manoeuvres using left turns. And that resulted in the prime/most experienced pilot sitting with a view out of the left window, once airplanes grew large enough to have side-by-side pilots.
loMo1 TIL in 1922, the Cardinals and Cubs traded two players in the middle of a double header. The players just switched uniforms, as names didn’t become standard on uniforms until the 1960s.
dvNd TIL when the allied forces were signing the Japanese Instrument of Surrender, the Canadian general blind in one eye mistakenly signed below his signature line, forcing every person after him to sign one space below. The Japanese found it unacceptable.