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- When Elizabeth I of Russia died in 1762, 15,000 dresses were found in her closets. She used to change what she was wearing two and even three times an evening.
- Napoleon, the famous French general, was not born in France. He was born on the Mediterranean island of Corsica of Italian parents.
- When he resigned in 1923 because of illegal behavior in the Teapot Dome Affair, Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall was offered an appointment to the Supreme Court by President Harding. In 1931, Fall was tried and found guilty of conspiracy to defraud.
- Jahangir, a 17th-century Indian Mughal ruler, had 5,000 women in his harem and 1,000 young boys. He also owned 12,000 elephants.
- China was the first country to introduce paper money (in 812), but it wasn't until 1661 that a bank (Banco-Sedlar of Sweden) issued banknotes.
- If the arm of King Henry I of England had been 42 inches long, the unit of measure of a "foot" today would be fourteen inches. But his arm happened to be 36 inches long and he decreed that the "standard" foot should be one-third that length: 12 inches.
- Napoleon's nemesis, the Duke of Wellington, was an accomplished yo-yo player. At that time, the yo-yo was known as a "bandalore."
- When Thomas Jefferson became U.S. President in 1801, 20 percent of all people in the young nation were slaves.
- The Marquis de Lafayette, America's Revolutionary War ally, named his only son George Washington Lafayette.
- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the fathers of communism, wrote 500 articles for the "New York Tribune" from 1851 to 1862.
- While Theodore Roosevelt was campaigning in Milwaukee in 1912, a would-be assassin fired a bullet into the right side of his chest. Much of the force of the slug was absorbed by the President's eyeglasses case and by the 50 page speech he was carrying double-folded in his breast pocket. Nevertheless, the bullet lodged itself just short of his lung, and, dripping in blood, Roosevelt pulled himself up to the podium. He asked the crowd to please "...be very quiet and excuse me from making a long speech. I'll do the best I can, but there's a bullet in my body... I have a message to deliver, and I will deliver it as long as there is life in my body." He spoke for 90 minutes, but was unable to refer to his text due to the gaping hole which the bullet had torn through it.
- Karl Marx was targeted for assassination when he met with two Prussian officers in his house in Cologne in 1848. Marx had friends among the German labor unions, and he was considered a threat to the autocrats. Dressed in his bathrobe, he forced the officers out at the point of a revolver, which, it turned out, was not loaded.
- Ishi was believed to be the last of the Yahi, a tribe of Native Americans living in California that were wiped out by disease and massacres. In the early part of the twentieth century (1911), he became a sensation when he wandered out of the woods near Oroville. Ishi was taken to the University of California at San Francisco where he lived and worked (as a janitor) in the anthropology museum, helping researchers to document the Yahi language, until his death from tuberculosis in 1916. His name, Ishi, was given to him by the anthropologists. Linguists believe it was his tribe's word for "man."
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