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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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DdWj TIL Regardless of bladder size, all mammals pee for approximately 21 seconds
9wxQp TIL that Jumbo the Elephant from PT Barnum's circus died while trying to save a midget from being run over by a train. Also, he wasn't called "Jumbo" because he was big but the other way around: big things are called "jumbo" because of him.
eyKL TIL that during prohibition a jury that had heard a bootlegging case was itself put on trial after it drank the evidence. They said they did it to determine whether or not it contained alcohol.
rRVPd TIL of the Beijing Weather Modification Office, used by the government to control the weather on demand. Examples include creating real snowfall for New Years Day and moving clouds away from the Olympic Stadium to prevent rain by firing chemicals into the sky.
5jnr TIL Richard Nixon possessed 3,700 hours of taped conversations while he was in the White House. Very few people have listened to more than a few hours of them. The tapes “go a long way toward showing Nixon’s underappreciated geopolitical genius and how he became the victim of his own emotionalism.”