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71

TIL that the white house used to be open to the public and that in 1829 a rowdy crowd of 20,000 people celebrating Andrew Jackson's inauguration had to be lured out of the White House with washtubs filled with orange juice and whiskey.

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b6EVj TIL Franklin Pierce, the 14th US president, believed that the abolitionist movement was a fundamental threat to the nation's unity, so much that he alienated anti-slavery groups by signing the Kansas–Nebraska Act and enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act.
x6577 TIL name of the Halliburton Company is inscribed on the dome of the Oklahoma State Capitol Building
nr9Y TIL in 1962 the US detonated a nuclear bomb in space
VBXaQ TIL Two of the Jackson 5 brothers fathered children with the same woman, making the children both cousins and siblings.
Qmkp TIL famed sci-fi author Isaac Asimov refused the invitation to renowned A.I. pioneer Marvin Minsky’s lab at MIT in the 1960s because he was “Writing about really intelligent robots of the future and was sure that if he came and saw the clumsy ones that we were making it would spoil his imagination.”