› added 1 year ago

50

TIL Julia Chinn (c. 1790 – July 1833) was an American plantation manager and enslaved woman of “mixed-race” (an “octoroon” of seven-eighths European and one-eighth African ancestry), who was the common-law wife of the ninth vice president of the United States, Richard Mentor Johnson.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

AXyl TIL Nigerians make up less than 1 percent of the black population in the United States, yet make up one-quarter of the black students at Harvard Business School; over a fourth of Nigerian-Americans have a graduate or professional degree, as compared with only about 11 percent of whites.
XEpVj TIL After 3 years at Harvard, Gabe Newell dropped out to join Microsoft in 1983. He later said: "I learned more in 3 months at Microsoft than in my entire time at Harvard"
69P07 TIL Ernst Hanfstaengl, a confidant of Hitler, defected to the US after he fell out of favor. He had been ordered to parachute over Spain and be an agent for Franco in the Spanish Civil War, but he was convinced it was a plot on his life. Albert Speer claimed that it was an elaborate practical joke.
QJ7pe TIL In 1936 part-time inventor Anton Loibl, a Nazi, and Hitler's chauffeur, invented bicycle reflectors. The SS went into business with him. The Nazis then brought in traffic laws requiring all bicycles to have reflectors, creating a cash windfall for the SS
Ngr1 TIL that while in the Army Clint Eastwood was in a plane that ran out of fuel and crashed into the Pacific, where afterwards he and the pilot swam 3 miles (5 km) to the California coast.