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TIL that Jefferson's original draft of the Declaration of Independence explicitly condemned slavery. The Continental Congress insisted on removing these passages before the document was published.

Read more jeffersonpapers.princeton.edu

via reddit.com

wBpo TIL that in the original story Pinocchio squished the cricket to shut it up. It continued nagging him as a ghost.
grlWb TIL that actor Terrence Howard developed his own mathematics system, Terryology, claiming to have "proved" that 1x1 doesn't equal 1.
OroY TIL 1816 was called “The Year Without a Summer” after the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia. Crop failure forced Joseph Smith to leave Vermont, and his journeys resulted in “The Book of Mormon,” the dreary rain in Switzerland drove Mary Shelley to stay indoors, where she wrote “Frankenstein.”
r0E1 TIL that a 1964 Olympic champion, Ewa Kłobukowska, failed the newly-introduced gender test before the European Cup in 1967 and was consequently banned from competing and stripped of her records; a year later, she gave birth to her first child.
4kppw TIL Charles Dickens had a talking pet raven named Grip, who terrorized his dog, buried valuables in the yard, and died eating "a pound or two" of lead paint. As a character in one of his novels, Grip is believed to have inspired Poe's famous poem, and is on display in a Philadelphia public library