› added 4 years ago

70

TIL that as a teenager, former President of the United States Richard Nixon would often get up at 4 AM to go buy vegetables for his impoverished family

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

Wkd6A TIL in 1959, rather than integrate, Prince Edward County in Virginia closed all of their public schools for FIVE YEARS. White children attended state-subsidized "private schools". No provision was made for educating the county's black children.
xEmg TIL Australia straight-up lost a prime-minister in 1967. He still hasn’t been found.
OJMY TIL the inventor of television had the idea for how it would work at the age of 14 while plowing potatoes. He built the first working prototype 7 years later but died at the age of 64 in relative obscurity due to a series of legal battles.
Oo8kX One night in 1987, a Canadian man named Kenneth Parks drove for 14 miles from his house to his in-laws. He then broke in and made his way upstairs, bludgeoning his mother-in-law with a crowbar that he’d gotten from the boot of his car before stabbing her repeatedly to death. He then proceeded to choke and stab his father-in-law, who miraculously survived. Parks then drove himself to the police station and turned himself in. It sounds like a fairly cut and dry murder case, but after going to trial, Kenneth Parks walked free. Thanks to a combination of a lack of motive, his consistent version of events, and data gathered from EEG readings, no charges were pressed against him because all evidence pointed to the unlikely and bewildering truth that Parks had been sleepwalking. It remains one of the most remarkable cases of homicidal sleepwalking in history.
a8oJN TIL that in 1807, Napoleon Bonaparte was swarmed by hundreds of rabbits during a celebratory hunt, forcing him to retreat to his carriage.