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TIL Voltaire's joke that the Holy Roman Empire (HRE) was "neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire" was mostly true. The center of the Church at the time was actually the Vatican, the HRE's people were mostly Germanic and not Roman, and the nation was never truly unified at any point in its history.

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e0dYE TIL Joseph Stalin was huge film buff. He would always watch movies late at night in his private cinema. He often criticized films and even went on to right the soundtrack for some movies. He loved John Ford Westerns
0dGwN TIL that Texas used to be part of Mexico until 1836. Then it became an independent country for 9 years before being annexed by the United States in 1845.
QJE5L TIL the space shuttle was originally designed to collect Soviet satellites and return them to the USA for reverse engineering
XENWk TIL of "Limerence" - a state of mind from romantic or non-romantic feelings for a person that includes obsessive thoughts and fantasies and a desire to maintain a relationship with the person and have one's feelings reciprocated. It is also defined as an involuntary state of intense desire.
oRpRK TIL before becoming a renowned writer, Eudora Welty worked as a photographer for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s, documenting rural life in Mississippi. Her photography often reflected the same keen observation of people and their environments as her fiction.