› added 6 years ago

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TIL After Col. Shaw died in battle, Confederates buried him in a mass grave as an insult for leading black soldiers. Union troops tried to recover his body, but his father sent a letter saying "We would not have his body removed from where it lies surrounded by his brave and devoted soldiers."

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NGQJ TIL that the NYPD actively profiles citizens in order to meet “performance standards” aka quotas or else officers get penalized for not having enough “stop and frisk” arrests and summons
LkVkZ TIL that between 1937 and 1939, 100k Irish children were encouraged to seek out the oldest person they knew and gather their stories. This has been compiled into an archive searchable by any topic ranging from the supernatural to natural remedies.
v1nJD TIL research found that 94% of British people said they had conversed about the weather in the past six hours, and 38% said they had in the past 60 minutes. This means at any moment in the UK, a third of the population is either talking about the weather, has already done so or are about to do so.
dEEZ TIL - In the late 1980s, Iraq began building the largest artillery piece in history, a gun that could have put satellites into Orbit, and conceivably hit any spot on the planet. However, the mysterious assassination of its Canadian designer, and the first Gulf War, ended the project
xVJW7 TIL the Supreme Court case which created the "fire in a crowded theater" quote was about draft protesters being arrested, and it was overturned more than 40 years ago.