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TIL after being sent to Baltimore in his youth, Frederick Douglass learned the alphabet from the mistress of the house he moved into. When the mistress' husband put an end to the lessons, Douglass began trading bread to hungry neighborhood children who, in turn, helped him learn how to read & write

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kJk6B TIL of US Congressman Francis E. Walter, who during WW2 decided to present President Roosevelt with a letter-opener made from a bone in the arm of a Japanese soldier
b9JVj TIL that hours before Lincoln’s assassination, he dreamt that he walked into the East Room of the WH to find a covered corpse guarded by soldiers and surrounded by a crowd of mourners. Lincoln asked one of the soldiers who had died, the soldier replied, “The president. He was killed by an assassin.
E1rBx TIL that Studio Ghibli movie "My Neighbor Totoro" has generated $1.5 billion in revenue, $1.1 billion of which was from merchandising alone.
p8X8 TIL upon being elected mayor of Reykjavík, Jón Gnarr said he would only consider working with politicians who agreed that the HBO series “The Wire” was the best thing to happen to television.
e0jQk TIL In 1858, Swiss astronomer Johann Rudolf Wolf published his formula for determining the daily sunspot number: k(10g + f); where g is the number of sunspot groups; f is the number of individual sunspots; and k is a calibration factor, different for each observer