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TIL the Cold War was partially prompted by an event in Ottawa when a Soviet cipher clerk working at the Soviet embassy to Canada defected & exposed the Soviet spy network in Canada, leading to allied countries discovering Soviet spies & informants within their own governments

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E1W8x TIL Memorial Day was started by former slaves as Decoration Day during the Civil War to celebrate emancipation and those who fought for justice. During the Jim Crow era, the holiday was whitewashed into the apolitical Memorial Day to erase the "divisive" issues of slavery and Black citizenship
9wyEr TIL that in 1947, Logician Kurt Gödel supposedly found a loophole in the US Constitution that would allow the American democracy to legally be turned into a dictatorship. Even todya, it is not known precisely what this loophole entailed.
6EjgQ TIL that when trains were first introduced in the U.S, many people believed that, "women's bodies were not meant to go at 50 miles an hour" and that their "uteruses would fly out of [their] bodies if they were accelerated to that speed"
nlW7 TIL Bath Salts were a huge drug problem in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s, but the government kept the problem quiet through control of the state-run media. Bath Salts are called “Jeff” in Russia. (resubmitted with correct link)
BgLKL TIL the first webcam, created in 1991 at the University of Cambridge, was used to monitor a coffee pot in real time so researchers could check if there was fresh coffee without leaving their desks.