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TIL President Ulysses Grant wanted to annex Santo Domingo (or what we call the Dominican Republic). He feared a European power taking it over and hoped it'd be a safe haven for black Americans. But the annexation treaty died in the Senate and it was never pursued again.

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yvkJ TIL that there was a female member of the Jackass crew who suffered a severe injury during one of the stunts, after that members of the show decided to no longer use females for stunts. Johnny Knoxville said “It was like watching your sister get hurt, and we don’t want to see girls getting hurt”.
k7B4 TIL Andy Weir, the author of The Martian, was so keen on getting every detail right, he wrote programs to calculate the orbital paths of spaceships that appear in the book.
kJ0gg TIL: Ken Kutaragi, designer of the PlayStation, also designed the SNES audio chip.
R5lv7 TIL Calico cats are almost always female, but a male calico with a rare chimerism condition was banned from cat shows
6EooZ TIL about the Soong sister's of China. They lived through years of war and revolution and helped shape the history of their nation. They married major public figures of opposing political factions and became prominent political figures in their own right.