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TIL by the 1860s the population of freemen had already swelled to 500,000 in contrast to the nearly 4 million enslaved people, and they were some of the leading critics of the practice.

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bdG0 TIL Actor Jon Bernthal took a long vow of silence, to prepare for his role as a mute in the movie ‘Pilgrimage’ which allowed him to discover some important lessons about human nature. “I learned how much time people spend talking and they’re not really saying anything, they’re just passing time.”
N7Xp1 Today I learned that Lamborghini donated a Huracán Rwd to Pope Francis. The car will be auctioned, with proceeds being donated to charitable causes across the globe.
Z8jOp TIL that while young Robert E. Lee worked surveying the boundary between Ohio and Michigan, he jokingly referred in a letter to a snake he killed in a lighthouse as the lighthouse's keeper. Lee's biographer Douglas Southall Freeman misinterpreted this as an admission that Lee killed a human keeper.
Wkv74 TIL of the "Tumi" scalpel, believed to be the oldest surgical instrument to exist (8000 BC). It was used for trepanation, the art of drilling a hole into the skull. By opening the skull, tribes believed that it would allow the demons that caused headaches, melancholy or epilepsy to escape the body.
Wknoo TIL of Clifford Johnson who survived the Cocoanut Grove fire and became the most severely burned person to survive his injuries at his time while trying to save his date. 21 months later he would marry his nurse that treated him at the hospital and die in fiery car crash 15 years later.