› added 3 weeks ago

6

TIL that in 1828, a surgeon who had previously been in Andrew Jackson's militia during the War of 1812 started keeping track of every "violent and abusive quarrel" Jackson had caused or partaken in. The final list accumulated to nearly 100.

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YXdZ TIL in 2013 there’s going to be a comet so bright that it may be visible during daylight hours.
b6G6j TIL Jim Jones was an advocate for racial equality, racially integrating his church in the 1950s and working with civil rights leaders, before leading over 900 of his followers to their deaths in the Jonestown massacre.
R7bo8 TIL the last claim under the 1866 Homestead Act, which entitled a person to free frontier land if they lived on it for five years and built a farm, was made on 80 acres near the Stony River in Alaska in 1979.
d8PA7 TIL Bryan Ferry (of Roxy Music) was on a flight to Nairobi when a mentally ill passenger broke into the cockpit and attacked the pilots. During the struggle the plane dropped 12,000 feet in 25 seconds, which is the fastest rate of descent from which any civil aircraft has ever recovered.
dJZ9 TIL after escaping from slavery, an illiterate Harriet Tubman was spotted by a former master on a train. She decided to pick up a nearby newspaper and pretended to read it. The master ignored the black woman reading because he knew Tubman couldn’t read.