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TIL that 70 years before Brown vs. Board of Education, Joseph and Mary Tape filed suit against a San Francisco school principal and the city's board of education for denying their American-born 8 year-old daughter Mamie an education due to her Chinese heritage. They won.

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nM9Y TIL of Arithmomania, a compulsion suffered by vampires to count seeds or grains of rice, ergo why on the American TV show Sesame Street, the character Count von Count is always shown counting various objects
YLVv TIL that a town is Minnesota selects their mayor by drawing a name out of a hat. Currently a four year old is mayor.
70pP TIL in 1959, a segregationist school board shuttered its district rather than allow black students; whites took school vouchers and attended a local private academy (which did not integrate until 1986)
69WNY TIL that the civilization of Easter Island was not destroyed because the people cut the trees down. In fact, it was the europeans and their South American descendants who caused the collapse the population in this island through disease, slavery and kidnapping the few remaining locals it had.
pd1Q TIL that Samuel Morse, in the process of writing Morse Code, modeled the letter “V” as “dit-dit-dit-dah”. This was a reflection of the first 4 notes in Beethoven’s Symphony No.5 also known as the “Victory symphony”.