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In 1864, a slave-turned-soldier named Spotswood Rice wrote the following letter to his former owner, Katherine Diggs, warning her that she would soon be seeing him again: he was returning to Missouri, together with an army of black soldiers, to rescue his still-enslaved children.
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“I would rather be a dog’s or a pig’s wife than yours!”. A letter written by a Sogdian woman named Miwnay to her husband. Miwnay was abandoned by her husband in Dunhuang for 3 years and forced to be a servant with her daughter Shayn in a Chinese household. 313-314 CE, British Library
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Beethoven kept his hearing loss a secret. He once wrote this letter to his brothers confessing it and explained that people mistakenly thought he was antisocial: he longed for human contact but became a recluse out of shame for his condition and all this made him contemplate suicide
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A miniature from the fol. 82v of the Book of Hours, depicting a hedgehog with grapes on its quills. It was believed in medieval times that hedgehogs had spikes so they could roll over fruit to carry home to their children. From Paris, ca. 1420-1425 CE, now housed at the Morgan Library
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On the left: a 2400-year-old letter from Tushratta, king of Mitanni, to Amenhotep III requesting solid-gold statues as bride-price for his daughter. Right: another letter from Tushratta to Queen Tiye, complaining that the received statues were not solid gold, but merely gold-plated wood
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