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188

TIL Bucharest was founded by Vlad the Impaler.

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6pG7 TIL that in the 60s the US struck a deal with the UK to buy an unpopulated Indian ocean island for a military base. The UK didn’t have an unpopulated island, so it forcibly expelled the inhabitants of the British Indian Ocean Territory until it WAS uninhabited.
4XrJa TIL that Lurleen Wallace, the first female governor of Alabama, was elected after term limits prohibited her husband, noted segregationist George Wallace, from running again. She had married at 16 and had never held a paying job prior to becoming governor.
neQ5r TIL the Roman Empire mined so much silver that at peak production they were mining 200 tonnes per year. This was 5 to 10 times larger than the combined amount of silver available to Medieval Europe & Abbasid Caliphate around 800 AD.
9Ynvp TIL anthropologists consider society’s reaction to human sex trafficking to be a “moral panic,” with inflated data points and well-publicized “horror stories” that have little basis in reality.
NamM TIL “hocus pocus” may have been coined by Protestants to mock the Catholic transubstantiation incantation used to turn bread and wine into flesh and blood, “hoc est corpus.”