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TIL Valentine's Day may have roots in the Roman festival of Lupercalia. At the festival, naked priests, smeared in the blood of a goat would parade through the streets with strips of bloody goat hide, whipping any women they saw. Men randomly drew women's names from jars to be coupled with.

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larB TIL India was the first country to develop extraction and purifying techniques of Sugar in 350 AD. The technique then reached Persia and from there the knowledge was transferred to the World.
Wny9 TIL the crack in the Liberty Bell is from a repair job. In 1846, metal workers widened the thin crack to prevent it from spreading further and to restore the tone of the bell by using a technique called “stop drilling”. But the repair job produced a second crack that silenced the bell forever.
9WP7 TIL that the Normandy beach landing scene in Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan cost $12Million alone, employed use of over 1,500 extras and has been rated ‘the best battle scene of all time’ by Empire magazine
NN1Q TIL Irish Monks and Scholars were instrumental in contributing to the spread of Christianity in Britain and continental Europe. Irish missions had such a profound influence in Germany and the Frankish Empire that Ireland became known as the “Isle of Saints and Scholars” to continental Europeans
78ZjL TIL that Queen Joanna of Naples and Sicily headed directly into Avignon as it was being ravaged by the Black Plague, in an effort to meet the Pope and clear her name in the suspicous death of her husband