› added 6 years ago

370

TIL that Star Trek's William Shatner and Nichelle Nichols performed the first interracial kiss on TV. At the time polls showed that fewer than 20 percent of Americans agreed with interracial relationships.

Read more smithsonianmag.com

via reddit.com

R7GW4 TIL that after 20 years in a coma, a man was claimed to be aware and suffering from locked-in syndrome. These claims were proven to be a hoax.
ADvra TIL of Vasili Mitrokhin, a KGB archivist who kept a vast collection of handwritten notes on top secret files. When he defected to British Intelligence in 1992, he brought six trunks of notes with him that exposed most KGB activities in the West during the Cold War
x6kDo TIL that boxer Harry Greb tricked his way into a shot at the Middleweight championship by paying several waiters to serve him water in coloured tumblers at a speakeasy. He then pretended to be drunk and thus no threat to the champion. Greb got his match and won the title.
JYn4v TIL That on September 11th, 1973, Salvador Allende, the first Marxist to be democratically elected to President of Chile, was overthown in a CIA-backed military coup; a 17 year-long US-backed military junta led by Augusto Pinochet followed, in which thousands of dissidents were persecuted.
5YlXP TIL the island of Faisans in the middle of the Bidasoa river, on the border of Spain and France, switches countries every six months. This was agreed to as part of the signing of the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659. This sort of joint sovereignty is called a condominium.