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TIL Sarah Josepha Hale, the author of "Mary Had a Little Lamb," campaigned for decades to make Thanksgiving a national holiday, writing to five presidents. Lincoln finally agreed in 1863.

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W7184 TIL How a banana works
PMwG TIL that in the 1970s, Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio (now Pope Francis I) hid some of the Argentine military dictatorship’s political prisoners from a human rights watch group. The military routinely executed political prisoners by throwing them from an airplane into a river and sold their orphaned kids.
j6yPQ TIL Finches and canaries were used in the coal mine industry to detect carbon monoxide. This practice ceased as of 1986
e0476 TIL of Alcock & Brown, the first aviators to fly across the Atlantic non-stop. Despite the cloud only lifting three times during their journey, Brown had managed to navigate them to within 20 miles of their original target destination using just a sextant and calculus.
NXeyJ TIL that words which take on completely different meanings when their first letter is capitalised (eg. Turkey the country vs turkey the bird) are called capitonyms