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TIL Robert E. Lee owned a plantation across the river from Washington DC until the start of the Civil War. The Lees fled the home and the Union army occupied their land, ultimately burying Union war dead there to spite Lee for his treason. It is now Arlington National Cemetery.

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Y7jm7 TIL In 1938 the timid Neville Chamberlain signed a treaty allowing Hitler to keep European land after a German invasion. By appeasing Hitler, Chamberlain believed he was preventing war. Historians widely regard this as a bad move. Almost exactly one year later, Hitler invaded Poland.
wLZaY TIL about the last place on earth where orangutans, rhinos, elephants and tigers still live together in the wild - the Leuser ecosystem in Indonesia. It spans 6 million acres (about 3 times the size of Yellowstone). And it’s heavily endangered from deforestation & human activities/encroachment
Lk7Am TIL the HMAS Melbourne was initially sold for scrapping, however China bought the rights to scrap and instead fully documented and analyzed the designs for their own carrier program. Decommissioned in 1982, reports suggest it was not scrapped until 2002, having been used for training in those years.
4E7a TIL the day before volcanologists Maurice and Katia Krafft died in a pyroclastic flow, Maurice’s last words were “I am never afraid because I have seen so much eruptions in 23 years that even if I die tomorrow, I don’t care”
R7wyl TIL the Newseum, a neighbor to the Smithsonian, closed due to funding. It stood for the freedom of journalism, and displayed items from a German WW2 Tower to the Unabomber’s cabin to the antenna on top of the World Trade Center.