› added 8 years ago

241

TIL the writer and producer of the PBS show “Ghostwriter” had planned to reveal Ghostwriter to be a murdered runaway slave during the Civil War. He was killed by slave catchers and their dogs as he was teaching other runaway slaves how to read in the woods.

Read more fort-greene.thelocal.nytimes.com

via reddit.com

Y7ZWG TIL that Alexei Nikolaevich, son of the last Russian tsar and heir to the throne, had a severe case of hemophilia inherited from his mother, which in turn she had acquired through the line of her maternal grandmother Victoria of the United Kingdom.
4kXNX TIL hiccups are an evolutionary remnant of amphibian respiration and came before lung respiration. This is supported by the fact that amphibians take in water and air through their gills through a similar mechanism to how we hiccup.
Z8mwo TIL Canada didn't become fully independent from the UK until 1982
goLb TIL that US taxpayers paid more to Israeli defense budget than Israelis
neN57 TIL that Marvel successfully argued in court that Mutants are not people and thus got to pay the lower rate on X-Men "toys" instead of the higher rate for dolls because they are not human.