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TIL about the Hundred Flowers Campaign (1956–57) in China, where the government briefly encouraged open criticism and debate, only to later suppress dissent through arrests and crackdowns.

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g0XA TIL George Smith (1840-76)(modest family, left school at 14) had a keen interest in Assyriology and was so often seen at the British Museum that he was employed as classifier. He taught himself Sumerian and literary Akkadian and became the one to discover the oldest story we have: Epic of Gilgamesh.
b9P7E TIL that Svetlana Savitskaya—the second woman in space—arrived at Mir (first modular space station) in 1982, she was greeted with an apron as a welcome present, and jokingly told to get to work in the kitchen by her fellow cosmonauts.
gj7L TIL in 2011 A Wisconsin Judge ruled that people do not have a fundamental right to produce and consume foods of their choice.
oRnLr TIL The oldest known collection of jokes was created by Philip the 2nd of Macedon, he paid for a social club in Athens to write down its members' jokes (circa 4th century BCE). The oldest joke book we still have is the Philogelos which contains 265 jokes and dates likely to the 4th or 5th century CE
JYX6Q TIL the birth control pill used to be known as the "red pill"