› added 9 years ago

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TIL of Thomas(ine) Hall– a hermaphrodite in Colonial America. A trial was held where it was ruled (s)he was both “a man and a woeman”, and, to conform to the strict gender roles of the time, (s)he was order to wear, at all times, a man’s shirt and pants with a woman’s apron and bonnet.

oBDAA TIL of Nathaniel Gordon, the only person in the United States to be executed for attempting to sell human beings. Abraham Lincoln refused to commute Gordon’s sentence, despite thousands of people petitioning him for clemency.
4Ejg TIL in 1961 a B-52 broke up over Goldsboro, NC dropping two 3.8MT H-bombs, each exceeding the yield of all detonations in worldwide history by TNT, gunpowder, conv. bombs, and the WWII nuclear blasts combined. One came perilously close to detonating and creating “a very large Bay of North Carolina.“
6EY17 TIL that in the early 2000’s people complained that their Mac laptops mysteriously started giving off the smell of really bad body odor. Turns out the culprit was an adhesive used on the keyboards that started to break down after a few years, outgassing a foul smell in the process.
GXd4 TIL “House of the Rising Sun” was originally written from the perspective of a woman. The “House” most likely referred to a brothel where she went to work off the gambling debts of her “sweetheart”
4kvZ6 TIL when Lee Harvey Oswald arrived in Moscow, he said to the interpreter about his communist beliefs and intention to obtain the nationality of the USSR. For his twentieth birthday, two days after Oswald's arrival, this interpreter gives him a copy of Dostoevsky’s novel "The Idiot".