The Chinese words for “520” sound very like Wo Ai Ni, the Chinese words for “I love you.” And thus May 20 has become an unofficial “Internet Valentine's Day” in China. May 20 has a very different meaning in the tiny unincorporated town of Codell Kansas, where May 20 is “Cyclone day,” commemorating the day on which tornadoes struck the town in three consecutive years from 1916 - 1918. Clearly there are a variety of reasons that May 20 is a date in history that deserves to be remembered.
On September 1, 1774, General Thomas Gage gave orders that would nearly lead to battle seven months before the shots rang out at Lexington and Concord.
One of the great questions of antiquity is what ancient knowledge might have been lost with the destruction of the famed Great Library of Alexandria. We can only guess at the answer, but the question itself reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the library- what it was, where it was, why its was, and what happened to it.
In the US alone souvenir shops sold more than 21 billion dollars of merchandise in 2022. It is human nature to try and preserve memories, and one of the many ways we do that is to purchase keepsakes, mementos, or souvenirs - that remind us of where we’ve been. And evidence of that human instinct goes way back, well before anyone “exited through the gift shop”.