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149 short, true stories behind the things you use every day. Each one names its source.
In 1943 the US banned sliced bread.
Answer to read the story.For seven weeks, partly to save on wrapping. Read the story
Oxford's mayors paid for a 1355 tavern brawl until 1825
On February 10, 1355, two students at an Oxford tavern complained about the wine.
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Cleopatra's Needle is some 1,400 years older than Cleopatra
London's Cleopatra's Needle was set up for the pharaoh Thutmose III around 1450 BC, and it reached Alexandria after Cleopatra was dead. Egypt gave it to Britain in 1819.
The shortest war on record was over before 10 a.m.
On August 27, 1896, British warships opened fire on the sultan of Zanzibar's palace at 9:02 in the morning. By about 9:40 it was over.
The Pantheon's dome has stood 1,900 years without steel
The dome of the Pantheon in Rome is 142 feet across and has no steel inside it. It was finished around AD 125 and is still the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world.
Shot in the chest, Theodore Roosevelt gave his speech anyway
On October 14, 1912, a man in a Milwaukee crowd shot Theodore Roosevelt, who was running for president again.
The first known photo of a person shows a near-empty street
In 1838 Louis Daguerre pointed a camera out of his studio window at a busy Paris boulevard.
Bluetooth was only a code name, taken from a Viking king
In 1997 an Intel engineer suggested naming a new wireless link after Harald Bluetooth, a 10th-century king who united Denmark.
His sea watch passed the test, and the judges called it luck
In 1714 Britain offered £20,000 for a way to find a ship's longitude at sea.
Scrolls burned by Vesuvius are being read without unrolling
From 1752 workmen digging under Herculaneum found more than 1,800 papyrus scrolls, carbonized by the eruption of AD 79.
A dead pig set off a 13-year US-British standoff
In June 1859 an American farmer on San Juan Island, off the coast of Washington Territory, shot a pig that kept getting into his garden.
149 stories. Ten free a day.
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