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1,670 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 16 of 28.

901. Pancho Villa learned to read in prison and starred as himself in Hollywood filmsBorn José Doroteo Arango, the bandit who became Pancho Villa had barely basic literacy until a Zapatista tutored him in a Mexico City jail. He escaped on Christmas Day 1912, rode …
902. India's warrior queen of 1857 first fought the British with lawyers and lettersRani Lakshmibai of Jhansi is remembered as a sword-wielding rebel who died in battle in 1858. Before any fighting, she spent years challenging Britain on paper, hiring an Australi…
903. Louis Riel founded a Canadian province and was hanged for treasonLouis Riel led the Métis of the Red River in a resistance that forced Ottawa to negotiate the birth of Manitoba. Fifteen years later he led a second, armed uprising, lost at Batoc…
904. The man who faced down an empire was once too shy to speakAs a schoolboy in Rajkot, Mohandas Gandhi was tongue-tied, avoided games and kept company mainly with books. In London he had to join a public-speaking group just to manage a cour…
905. The Red Cross founder went looking for an emperor to fix a business dealIn 1859 Henry Dunant travelled to northern Italy hoping Napoleon III would sort out water rights for his Algerian mill company. He arrived at Solferino on the evening of a battle …
906. A failed exam candidate decided he was Jesus's younger brother and shook ChinaHong Xiuquan failed China's imperial examinations four times, in a system passing fewer than one candidate in a hundred. After a breakdown he dreamed of a heavenly father and elde…
907. A salt smuggler who failed his exams crowned himself emperor in Chang'anHuang Chao came from a family grown rich smuggling salt past a state monopoly. After repeatedly failing the imperial examinations he turned rebel, and in 881 his army took the Tan…
908. Jane Addams dropped out of medical school and invented American social workJane Addams wanted to be a doctor so she could live among the poor. Illness and a breakdown ended that plan after one year. Instead, after visiting a London settlement house, she …
909. Before the Revolution, Jean-Paul Marat was a physicist who challenged NewtonJean-Paul Marat is remembered as the firebrand journalist of the French Revolution, killed in his bath in 1793. Years earlier he was a London doctor, a court physician and an expe…
910. An eye injury in a wheel factory turned John Muir toward the wildernessIn March 1867 a file slipped in an Indianapolis wagon-wheel factory and pierced John Muir's eye. He spent six weeks in a darkened room fearing blindness. When his sight returned h…
911. José Rizal trained as an eye doctor because his mother was going blindJosé Rizal switched from philosophy to medicine when he learned his mother was losing her sight, and became an ophthalmologist. He also wrote two novels that inspired a revolution…
912. Nigeria's favourite sitcom writer became the voice of the oil-polluted OgoniKen Saro-Wiwa wrote a television comedy watched by an estimated 30 million Nigerians and a war novel in what he called Rotten English. Then he devoted himself to the Ogoni people,…
913. Harriet Tubman led a Civil War raid that freed more than 700 peopleAfter escaping slavery in 1849, Harriet Tubman went back south about 13 times and guided roughly 70 people to freedom, later boasting she never lost a passenger. In the Civil War …
914. Harvey Milk worked on Barry Goldwater's campaign before becoming a gay iconHarvey Milk spent his thirties as a buttoned-up Wall Street researcher who kept his private life hidden and even recruited volunteers for conservative Barry Goldwater. A decade la…
915. Helen Keller was a socialist, suffragist and ACLU co-founder, not just a miracleMost people remember Helen Keller at a water pump, learning her first word. Fewer know the adult: a Radcliffe graduate who wrote 14 books, joined the Socialist Party in 1909, help…
916. Booker T. Washington chose his own surname on his first school dayBorn enslaved in Virginia and known only as Booker, he was freed at nine and taught himself to read. Asked for a surname at school, he picked Washington. By 1881 he was leading th…
917. Before Che Guevara was a revolutionary, he was an asthmatic rugby-playing medical studentErnesto Guevara battled acute asthma all his life yet swam, cycled tirelessly and played rugby for several Argentine clubs. As a medical student he crossed South America and retur…
918. A Javanese prince passed over twice for the throne led a five-year warDiponegoro, eldest son of a Yogyakarta sultan, was twice denied the crown with Dutch backing. Many Javanese came to see him as the just ruler foretold in prophecy, and from 1825 h…
919. Elizabeth Cady Stanton opposed the Fifteenth Amendment because it left women outElizabeth Cady Stanton drove the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, the first gathering called solely to discuss women's rights. With Susan B. Anthony she ran a record-breaking petitio…
920. Emiliano Zapata was no poor peasant, and his village trusted him anywayLegend casts Zapata as a landless farmhand, but his family was well known and reasonably comfortable in Anenecuilco. In 1909 the village elders handed him leadership of their cent…
921. Emma Goldman's father burned her French book; she became a famous lecturerAs a teenager in Saint Petersburg, Emma Goldman begged to go back to school, and her father threw her French textbook into the fire. She educated herself anyway, emigrated to Amer…
922. Emmeline Pankhurst insisted she was born on Bastille Day. She wasn'tHer birth certificate says 15 July 1858, but Emmeline Pankhurst claimed the day before, Bastille Day, feeling kinship with revolutionary women. She went on to found the Women's So…
923. Frederick Douglass learned to read after his enslaver forbade itWhen Sophia Auld began teaching twelve-year-old Frederick the alphabet, her husband stopped her, warning that literacy would make an enslaved boy want freedom. Douglass later call…
924. Georges Danton, the Thunderer, went from unknown lawyer to revolutionary giantOn the eve of 1789 Georges Danton was an obscure lawyer with a face scarred by smallpox. His booming speeches to crowds at the Palais Royal soon earned him the nickname the Thunde…
925. The man who chaired India's constitution drafting was once barred from sitting inside classAs a Mahar child, B. R. Ambedkar had to sit apart from classmates and wait for someone of higher caste to pour him water. He went on to earn doctorates from Columbia and the Londo…
926. Betty Friedan's revolution began with a survey for her college reunionPreparing for her fifteenth Smith College reunion in 1957, Betty Friedan quizzed fellow graduates about their lives. Their quiet discontent became the problem that has no name, in…
927. Jinnah was the lawyer who defended India's fiery nationalist TilakBefore Gandhi, the best-known Indian politician was a mathematics teacher from Ratnagiri whose slogan declared self-rule his birthright. The British tried Bal Gangadhar Tilak for …
928. A slave-owning Spanish colonist became the Indies' fiercest defenderBartolomé de las Casas arrived in Hispaniola in 1502 as a settler, joined raids and held Indigenous labourers. In 1514, while preparing a Pentecost sermon on a passage from Eccles…
929. An enslaved saddler from Kufa helped topple an Islamic dynastyAs a young man, the Persian later known as Abu Muslim worked as an enslaved saddler in the Iraqi city of Kufa. Within a few years he had launched the revolt that overthrew the Uma…
930. Burma's independence hero set out for China and ended up in TokyoIn 1940, with a price of 500 rupees on his head, Aung San slipped out of Burma on a Norwegian cargo ship under a false name, hoping to reach communist contacts in China. He drifte…
931. A former cowherd defied the Abbasid caliphs from a mountain fortressBabak began as a village cowherd who played the lute. A snowstorm changed his life: a rich rebel leader named Javidhan sheltered in his mother's poor house, admired the boy's shre…
932. A history teacher with no military training became Vietnam's great generalVõ Nguyên Giáp studied law, failed a postgraduate exam and ended up teaching history in Hanoi. He had no military training before the Second World War. His first armed unit in 194…
933. Korea's greatest admiral had never fought at sea before his first victoryWhen Japanese troops landed at Busan in 1592, Yi Sun-sin had spent his career fighting raiders on Korea's northern land frontier and had never commanded a naval battle. Within wee…
934. A warlord had to call three times before Zhuge Liang would see himAround 207 AD the warlord Liu Bei heard of a brilliant recluse nicknamed the Sleeping Dragon, farming quietly near Xiangyang. Advised that such a man must be visited rather than s…
935. Lawrence of Arabia began as a teenage brass-rubber scouring Oxford building sitesYears before the Arab Revolt made him famous, T. E. Lawrence was a schoolboy cycling from parish church to parish church, rubbing monumental brasses and rescuing finds from Oxford…
936. Tran Hung Dao twice drove Kublai Khan's armies out of VietnamThe Mongols conquered most of Asia, but in Dai Viet they met Tran Hung Dao. He lost battles, lost the capital, and even fielded a question from his emperor about surrendering. He …
937. Ulysses S. Grant got his famous initials from a congressman's paperwork mistakeHis parents named him Hiram Ulysses Grant. When a congressman nominated him to West Point in 1839, he wrote the name wrong, and the army enrolled U. S. Grant. Classmates promptly …
938. The founder of the Scouts once hid military plans inside drawings of butterfliesBefore he started the Boy Scouts, Robert Baden-Powell was an army intelligence officer who claimed he posed as a butterfly collector, sketching enemy fortifications into the patte…
939. Scipio got an army command no Roman without a consulship had ever heldIn 210 BC Rome handed its Spanish war to a man in his mid-twenties who had never been consul or praetor. Publius Cornelius Scipio took Carthage's Iberian empire, carried the war t…
940. Albania's national hero took his famous name from the Ottomans he foughtGjergj Kastrioti spent twenty years serving the Ottoman sultan, who called him Iskender Bey, Lord Alexander. In 1443 he switched sides, rallied the Albanian lords, and became the …
941. Subutai conquered more territory than any other commander in historyA blacksmith's son who joined Temujin's army at 14, Subutai became the chief strategist of Genghis Khan and Ogedei. Across more than 20 campaigns he took more land than any genera…
942. Sulla seized Rome by force, ruled as dictator, then simply resignedNo general of the late Republic before Lucius Cornelius Sulla had turned his legions on Rome itself and come out the winner. He purged his enemies, revived a dictatorship unused f…
943. Sun Tzu may not have written The Art of War, or even existedThe world's most famous book on strategy carries the name of a general whom the most detailed early chronicle of his supposed great victory never mentions. Chinese scholars began …
944. A retired Dutch merchant came back to sea and humbled the English navyBy 1651 Michiel de Ruyter had made enough trading to Morocco, Brazil and the Caribbean to retire to his hometown. His retirement lasted less than a year. War with England pulled h…
945. Japan's sword saint reportedly won his most famous duel with a carved oarMiyamoto Musashi claimed 62 duels without a loss and fought with two blades at once. For his most celebrated match he is said to have turned up late, carrying a wooden sword whitt…
946. Hindenburg disliked the Nazis, yet his signature gave Hitler powerRecalled from retirement in 1914, Paul von Hindenburg won at Tannenberg and became Germany's national idol. As president he opposed Hitler, yet in 1933 he made him chancellor, the…
947. Pompey built a private legion from his father's veterans and marched it to SullaIn his early twenties, Pompey recruited and equipped an entire legion from his father's veterans and marched it to join Sulla. The dictator hailed him as imperator and later dubbe…
948. Louis XIV snubbed a scrawny young prince who later crushed his army at BlenheimIn 1683 a slight 19-year-old raised at Versailles asked Louis XIV for a company to command. The king refused, sneering at the young man's insolent stare. Prince Eugene went to fig…
949. Pershing applied to West Point for the free schooling, not the armyA Missouri farm boy who taught Black children in his hometown sat the West Point exam because the education was free and better than anything nearby. John Pershing ended up leadin…
950. Khalid ibn al-Walid beat Muhammad's forces before becoming the Sword of GodAt the Battle of Uhud in 625, a Meccan cavalry commander found a gap in the Muslim lines and turned the fight. A few years later that same man converted, earned the title Sword of…
951. The famous 300 at Thermopylae were never fighting aloneLeonidas is remembered for leading 300 Spartans against Persia, but he marched with about 1,200 men and commanded several thousand allied Greeks. When the pass was betrayed, he st…
952. Mark Antony harnessed lions to his chariot to flaunt descent from HeraclesMark Antony claimed Heracles as an ancestor, stamped lions on his coins and drove a lion-drawn chariot. Once Julius Caesar's right-hand man, he split the Roman world with Octavian…
953. Hitler's chosen successor ended the war branded a traitor by HitlerIn 1939 Hitler named Hermann Göring his heir. By April 1945, when Göring telegrammed to ask whether he should take over the Reich, Hitler called it treason, stripped him of every …
954. Hernán Cortés conquered the Aztec Empire after disobeying a recall orderIn 1519 the governor of Cuba cancelled the expedition Hernán Cortés was about to lead, at the last minute. Cortés sailed anyway. Using a lawyer's grasp of Castilian law, he wrote …
955. Britain's greatest admiral suffered seasickness for his whole careerHoratio Nelson lost the sight of one eye, then his right arm, and finally his life at Trafalgar, Britain's greatest naval victory. Less famously, he never stopped getting seasick.…
956. The admiral who planned Pearl Harbor believed Japan could not beat AmericaIsoroku Yamamoto studied at Harvard, spoke fluent English and toured American industry, and came away convinced Japan had little chance in a war with the United States. He opposed…
957. Jan Žižka fought three crusades and never lost a battleA minor Bohemian nobleman whose name disappears from surviving documents for twenty years, Jan Žižka reappeared as the Hussites' general and beat every army sent against him. His …
958. Joan of Arc probably never heard anyone call her Jeanne d'ArcThe name the world knows her by is first recorded in 1455, twenty-four years after she was burned. In her lifetime she signed herself Jehanne and called herself the Maiden, and sc…
959. The Duke of Marlborough never lost a battle, yet still lost his jobJohn Churchill triumphed at Blenheim in 1704 and in a string of later clashes with France, and is remembered as a general who was never beaten in battle. What undid him was court …
960. Church bells ring at noon partly because of John HunyadiIn 1456, as John Hunyadi defended Belgrade against an army led by the Ottoman sultan himself, the pope ordered church bells rung at midday to call Christians to prayer for the fig…

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