› added 9 years ago

324

TIL King Amanullah Khan of Afghanistan (1919-1929) once gave a public speech in which he said “Islam did not require women to cover their bodies or wear any special kind of veil”. At the conclusion of the speech, Queen Soraya tore off her veil (hejab) in public.

Read more wikipedia.org

via ift.tt

dD8kj TIL that women were encouraged to hand men who hadn’t enlisted to fight in WW1 white feathers, as a symbol of cowardice.
4X0Nb TIL According to apocryphal acta, Pope Clement was martyred by being tied to an anchor and thrown from a boat into the Black Sea. However, the oldest sources on Clement's life, Eusebius and Jerome, note nothing of his martyrdom.
m1a7E TIL that Windows 95 saved Southwest Airlines. When the CrowdStrike software glitch caused computers around the world to crash in 2024, Southwest was able to continue flying when rival airlines were grounded because it still uses Windows 95, which CrowdStrike didn't affect.
yQE78 TIL Alaric, famous for sacking Rome in 410, was able to do so because he enjoyed the poetry of Claudian. Claudian had described a route through the alps into Italy in his poems, which Alaric found and was thus able to use and evade direct contact with the Roman army for 6-9 months.
rvde TIL of the Byford Dolphin diving bell accident, where a human error caused a decompression chamber to go from 9 atmospheres of pressure to 1 in less than a second. Out of the 5 dead, one was ripped apart so violently pieces of him were found over 30 feet away.