re: Another Historical Photos Thread

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When USPS started its parcel post service, poor families are recorded as having used it to mail relatives their children. (Until 1915)
In one particular instance, a girl was delivered to her grandmother who lived 73 miles away.

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The Mt. Pelée volcanic eruption wiped out almost the entire 35,000-strong population of St. Pierre, a town in Martinique, a French-Caribbean island.
One of the only survivors was Ludger Sylbaris who had been sentenced to solitary confinement in a cell that was half underground with very poor ventilation. 1902

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When a railway line was being constructed in Uganda in 1898, two lions were responsible for curbing its progression by killing the construction company’s employees at night.
The final casualty count was found to be 135.

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In 1941, when Soviet anthropologists exhumed a Turkic ruler’s tomb, they found an inscription containing a warning.
The warning said that whoever dared disturb his tomb would unleash invader more terrible than him. Three days later, Nazi Germany invaded the USSR with over four million soldiers.

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During the Cold War, one of the Russian spies in America accidentally spent a hollow coin used for secret communications.
The coin was paid to a paperboy who discovered the message—and handed it to authorities. A defected Russian spy was then asked to help decode the message, which turned out to be instructions for him after arriving in America as a Russian spy.

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On the day of his assassination, Archduke Franz Ferdinand had narrowly missed a previous attempt which had injured his men.
He decided to visit them in the hospital and his driver took a wrong turn and stopped a few meters away from the assassin—who promptly shot the Archduke.
This incident would be the jumpstart to WWI.

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Gavrilo Princip, who shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, got the chance to assassinate him because the archduke’s driver made a wrong turn.
Had the driver gone the right way, World War I might not have happened, and the history of the 20th century could have been completely different.

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English soldier Henry Tandey came face to face with young Adolf Hitler on a French battlefield during WWI but decided to spare the wounded soldier’s life.
Had Tandey shot Hitler that day, the world would have been saved from one of the most reviled dictators and mass murderer of all time.

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