› added 10 years ago

244

TIL the first black president in North America was Vicente Guerrero, the second president of the Republic of Mexico in 1829. He is known for abolishing slavery in Mexico forty years before Lincoln would do the same on the US.

Read more beyondvictoriana.com

via reddit.com

Lk6Gp TIL in 1926, Poland sent the US a birthday card with over 5 million signatures. Polish citizen Leopold Kotnowski visited the White House to present the card for America’s 150th birthday. It has 30,000 pages full of art, photos, poems and pressed flowers.
wokno TIL that Slash, guitarist of Guns N' Roses, helped fund the dinosaur exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History (see "project funding")
Brvje TIL that the original version of Les Paul guitar nicknamed "the Log" was crafted in an Epiphone factory. Les Paul then approached Gibson but got rejected calling the prototype, "broomstick with a pickup. " It would take a decade before Gibson finally accepts the idea.
DQp5P TIL the casualty number estimate for Japan’s land invasion came from William Shockley a known Race Eugenicist
jNDvR TIL about ghost shift counterfeiting. Foreign contractors make more products than they're supposed to, and sell the rest as exact 'counterfeits' of the real products