› added 10 years ago

116

TIL that the Queen of Denmark illustrated the artwork for the Danish edition of The Lord of the Rings

Read more io9.com

via reddit.com

lEmA TIL Congress added the “Under God” phrase to the Pledge of Allegiance during the Cold War. This symbolized the resistance to communists, who were atheists.
Me1jm TIL The Hunchback of Notre-Dame was written by Victor Hugo as part of a campaign to preserve Gothic Architecture around Paris. Prior to the novel, the cathedral was in bad shape and at risk of eventual demolition. As a result of tourism from the book, Paris started restoration work instead.
QN8LX TIL that in 2014, Diren Dede, a foreign exchange student from Hamburg, Germany, was shot and killed after he had went into the garage of Markus Kaarma, a landowner who was facing burglaries so frequently that he had set up a camera and left the garage door open to try to catch the thief.
dxDd TIL of the 20,000 Japanese soldiers fighting in the Battle of Iwo Jima in WWII, only 1,083 survived.
xLKb TIL that Isaac Asimov wrote over 500 books, spanning nine out of the ten Dewey Decimal classes