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TIL John Wilkes Booth thought it was God's will that he assassinate Abraham Lincoln. He also believed slavery was God's greatest blessing to the nation, since he believed he viewed slavery the same way as the original framers of the constitution.

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wmB1 TIL the scent of rain is called “Petrichor”, and it occurs when rain hits dry earth.
WQ4X TIL that from 1904 to 1925, a cartoon called “Dream of the Rarebit Fiend” ran in a New York paper. It featured bizarre nightmares, and among other things pioneered the idea of giant characters destroying a city. It has been called “perhaps the most bizarre newspaper feature in American history”.
Zp8xB TIL that the phrase, "The empire on which the sun never sets." originally referred to the Spanish Empire.
WkL8N TIL that people sentenced to death by beheading were advised to give the headsman a gold coin to ensure he did not botch the beheading and cause a painful death by multiple strokes
0wJ4j TIL the first ever synthetically produced color pigment, Egyptian blue, was created around 2,200 B.C. In 2006 scientists discovered it glows under fluorescent lights, allowing us to detect it on artifacts where it is no longer visible to the naked eye.