› added 7 years ago

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TIL Le Bateau ("The Boat") by Henri Matisse, caused a minor stir when the Museum of Modern Art, New York, which housed it, hung the work upside-down for 47 days in 1961 until Genevieve Habert, a stockbroker, noticed the mistake and notified a guard.

VBJ88 TIL: Thanksgiving is actually about the Union's victory in the Civil War and was made a national holiday by Abraham Lincoln in the "Thanksgiving Proclamation" of 1863
m1eNM TIL that an accent called diaeresis is sometimes used in English. It looks like two dots over a letter and is written in alternative spellings of certain words, e.g. "naïve" instead of "naive".
Z8YyG TIL that in the 1650s the Holy Roman Emperor allowed the Lutherans to build three churches. Petulantly, he stipulated that the churches be constructed in one year using only wood, straw and loam. In response, the Lutherans constructed the ornate Churches of Peace, now UNESCO world heritage sites.
newe9 TIL that in 1950, Republican Margaret Chase Smith became the first to denounce McCarthyism on the Senate floor. She also claimed that though a GOP victory in the '52 election was needed, she couldn't support a campaign founded on "the Four Horsemen of Calumny -- Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear."
OoRAY TIL Jeremy Bentham's dressed skeleton is on display in the UCL Student Union. Bentham donated his body to science, but requested that after dissection, they preserve and dress his body in his own clothes, and bring him to meetings and social events. He died in 1832 and was moved to UCL in 1850.