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1,092 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 17 of 19.

961. Helmut Kohl called his escape from wartime combat the mercy of late birthSworn into the Hitler Youth at 15, days before Germany's surrender, and drafted without ever seeing combat, Helmut Kohl later spoke of the mercy of late birth. He went on to becom…
962. The Gracchi brothers' land crisis may never have happened, but their murders matteredTiberius and Gaius Gracchus championed Rome's poor farmers and were both killed for it. Their reforms rested on a belief that the Italian countryside was emptying, yet modern arch…
963. A teenage king inherited three wars and turned Sweden into a great powerGustavus Adolphus took the Swedish throne at 16 with his country fighting Denmark, Russia and Poland at once. Within two decades Sweden was a major European power, and its king, c…
964. Gwanggaeto's deeds are carved on the largest engraved stele in the worldIn 414 a Korean king named Jangsu raised a giant stone at his father's tomb and covered it with his conquests. The father, Gwanggaeto the Great, had turned Goguryeo from a battere…
965. Hadrian gave up conquests on purpose and built walls insteadMost Roman emperors wanted more territory. Hadrian handed back Trajan's gains in Mesopotamia, Armenia and beyond, and poured his energy into defensible frontiers, the most famous …
966. Rastafarians revere Haile Selassie as divine, though he stayed Ethiopian OrthodoxTo followers of Rastafari, which arose in the 1930s, Haile Selassie is the returned Jesus. The man himself remained a member of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. He ruled Ethiopia fo…
967. George III was the first Hanoverian king who truly felt BritishHis grandfather and great-grandfather were German princes who happened to rule Britain. George III was different: born in London, raised speaking English, and never once setting f…
968. Before he led a revolution, George Washington measured land for a livingThe first American president never got the English schooling his older half-brothers enjoyed. Instead the teenage Washington learned mathematics and surveying, drew maps with real…
969. France's wartime Tiger spent four formative years teaching and doctoring in AmericaThe man who drove a hard bargain with Germany at Versailles once taught French in Massachusetts and gave riding lessons at a girls' school in Connecticut. Georges Clemenceau fled …
970. Getúlio Vargas ruled Brazil as provisional leader, president and dictator in turnFew politicians have governed one country under so many labels. Getúlio Vargas seized power after losing an election, won office under a new constitution, cancelled it to rule by …
971. Genghis Khan's third son was chosen as heir to stop his brothers fightingGenghis Khan had older sons, but Jochi and Chagatai could not stop quarrelling, so the succession passed to the third, Ögedei. He turned out to be more than a compromise. Under hi…
972. The pagan grand duke who dangled baptism in front of the PopeGediminas ruled a realm where Orthodox Christians outnumbered pagans more than two to one, yet he stayed loyal to the old gods until he died. What he offered Rome instead was the …
973. Much of what we know about Genghis Khan comes from a critic who knew himThe most treasured account of Genghis Khan's youth portrays him as indecisive, frightened of dogs and guilty of killing his own half-brother. Its anonymous author was plainly no f…
974. Lord Curzon crossed Asia in a metal corset before governing IndiaA riding accident in his teens left George Curzon strapped into a metal brace for life. It did not slow him down. Between 1887 and 1895 he roamed Russia, Persia, the Far East and …
975. Franz Joseph ruled for almost 68 years and outlived most of his familyFranz Joseph took the Habsburg throne at eighteen in 1848 and died in the middle of the First World War. In between, his brother was executed in Mexico, his only son died by suici…
976. Germans never called Frederick Barbarossa that during the Middle AgesThe nickname Barbarossa, Italian for Red Beard, was coined by Florentines in 1298, more than a century after his death, to tell him apart from his grandson. Medieval Germans never…
977. The emperor called the Wonder of the World was excommunicated four timesFrederick II spoke six languages, wrote poetry, studied nature, and ruled from Sicily to Germany. Contemporaries called him Stupor mundi, the Wonder of the World. Popes had other …
978. The music-loving prince who became Prussia's most famous soldier kingAs a boy, Frederick cared more for music and philosophy than for warfare, infuriating his harsh father. Once crowned in 1740, he went on to seize the wealthy Austrian province of …
979. Prussia's Soldier King docked officials six months' pay for skipping a meetingFrederick William I inherited a treasury his father had drained on palaces and a royal title. He answered with relentless thrift, a rulebook of 297 paragraphs for civil servants, …
980. Gaiseric turned a minor Germanic tribe into a Mediterranean naval powerLame from a riding fall, sparing with words and scornful of luxury, Gaiseric led the Vandals out of Spain, across the Straits of Gibraltar and into Roman Africa. Within a generati…
981. Indonesia's best-known face of Gajah Mada may come from a piggy bankIn the 1940s the writer Mohammad Yamin picked up a terracotta coin bank at the old Majapahit capital, decided its chubby, curly-haired face belonged to the great general Gajah Mad…
982. France's first Socialist president of the Fifth Republic began on the far rightFrançois Mitterrand held the French presidency for fourteen years, longer than any republican head of state before him, as the Fifth Republic's first left-wing president. Yet he g…
983. The last Holy Roman Emperor dissolved his own empire and kept rulingIn 1806, facing an ultimatum from Napoleon, Francis II announced that circumstances made it impossible to keep his coronation oath and declared the bond with the empire's states d…
984. Franco joined the army only because Spain's navy stopped recruitingFrancisco Franco came from six generations of naval officers and expected to follow them. But after losing much of its fleet in the Spanish-American War, Spain's naval academy too…
985. Francisco Morazán fought to keep Central America one nation, and lostFor about a decade, five future countries formed a single federal republic, and its dominant figure was Francisco Morazán. A largely self-taught Honduran, he served as the federat…
986. Franklin Roosevelt won his first race by motoring around rural New YorkIn 1910, a young Democrat named Franklin Roosevelt ran for a state senate seat in a solidly Republican district. Acting as his own campaign manager, he toured the countryside by a…
987. Ferdinand of Aragon bragged about deceiving the King of France repeatedlyWhen told that the French king accused him of cheating him twice, Ferdinand of Aragon reportedly scoffed that the man was wrong: he had done it more than ten times. The boast suit…
988. Ferdinand Marcos built a political career on war medals he never earnedCampaigning in 1962, Ferdinand Marcos billed himself as the most decorated Filipino veteran of the Second World War. Researchers later found most of his combat stories inaccurate …
989. Before leading a revolution, Fidel Castro ran a failing law practiceFresh out of law school in 1950, Fidel Castro co-founded a practice serving poor Cubans. It lost money. Indifferent to material things, he let bills go unpaid until his furniture …
990. Haiti's Papa Doc began as a doctor fighting tropical disease among the poorIn the 1940s, François Duvalier treated Haitians suffering from typhus, yaws and malaria, and grateful patients nicknamed him Papa Doc. He kept that affectionate name for life. Ye…
991. The Mona Lisa hangs in Paris because Francis I lured Leonardo to FranceWhen Francis I became king in 1515, French royal palaces held only a scattering of fine paintings and not one sculpture. He set out to change that, persuading an ageing Leonardo d…
992. The Song founder who retired his own generals over a lavish banquetZhao Kuangyin seized China's throne in 960 through an army mutiny, then made sure nobody could repeat the trick. Soon after becoming emperor he threw a feast for his top commander…
993. Yang Jian survived a death trap with a blank face, then reunited ChinaA suspicious emperor once summoned Yang Jian to court with orders to kill him if his face showed any trace of worry. He walked in perfectly composed and walked out alive. Within a…
994. A five-year-old's boast about a golden house helped make him emperorAsked at a royal gathering whether he would like to marry his older cousin, the five-year-old prince Liu Che reportedly promised to build her a house of gold. His aunt treated the…
995. An elder brother begged for days to give Xuanzong the Tang crownBy Confucian custom the throne belonged to the eldest son, but Li Chengqi wept and pleaded for days to step aside for his younger brother Li Longji, arguing that in dangerous time…
996. Reading Chinese carried Cixi from junior concubine to ruler behind the curtainMost Manchu women in the Qing palace could not read Chinese. Cixi could, and an ailing emperor began having her read state papers and write out his instructions. That apprenticesh…
997. The trained roofer who organised the Berlin Wall and later ruled East GermanyErich Honecker, a miner's son who once trained as a roofer, spent almost a decade in Nazi prisons, was released by Soviet troops in 1945, and sixteen years later organised the bui…
998. A Spanish-raised prince who barely spoke German ended up building Habsburg AustriaFerdinand I grew up in Castile as his Spanish grandfather's favourite and did not learn German until adulthood. Yet he became the Habsburg who ruled Austria, won the crowns of Boh…
999. Japan's great modernising emperor was a teenage poetry student when it beganThe reign that turned feudal Japan into a world power started with a fourteen-year-old boy studying verse in a Kyoto palace. Mutsuhito, remembered as Emperor Meiji, took the thron…
1000. The Tang emperor whose greatness rested partly on putting up with criticismLi Shimin, who ruled China as Emperor Taizong from 626 to 649, became the model every later emperor was measured against. The historian Bo Yang credited one unglamorous habit abov…
1001. The Russian empress who seized power in a coup, then executed nobodyElizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great, grabbed the throne in 1741 with the army behind her and ruled for two decades without sending a single person to execution. She built the W…
1002. Married at seventeen, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf became Africa's first elected woman presidentEllen Johnson Sirleaf married at seventeen, raised four sons and kept books for a car-repair shop. She went on to earn a Harvard public administration degree, survive a ten-year p…
1003. A Sufi scholar held off a European army for seventeen yearsAbdelkader was raised to be a religious scholar, memorising the whole Quran by fourteen. Instead he spent seventeen years leading Algerian tribes against France's invasion, and hi…
1004. A peasant-born village rascal founded one of China's great dynastiesLiu Bang's father called him a little rascal. He dodged work, ran into trouble with the law and leaned on his brother for food. Yet this peasant's son, a minor village sheriff und…
1005. Japan's longest unbroken premier won a Nobel for pledges he quietly bentEisaku Satō led Japan from 1964 to 1972, longer without a break than any other prime minister. He won back Okinawa and announced that Japan would never make, own or admit nuclear …
1006. Eleanor of Aquitaine wore two crowns, yet almost nothing she wrote survivesEleanor of Aquitaine was queen of France, then queen of England, and mother of two English kings. She ranked among the richest people in 12th-century Europe. Yet no one wrote her …
1007. The shy girl her mother called Granny became the First Lady of the WorldAs a solemn child, Eleanor Roosevelt was nicknamed Granny by a mother embarrassed by her supposed plainness. Decades later, when the United Nations adopted the Universal Declarati…
1008. Born third in line and never expected to rule, she reigned seventy yearsWhen Elizabeth was born in 1926, her young uncle was expected to marry and push her down the succession. His abdication a decade later made her heir. She went on to reign for 70 y…
1009. Adulthood mixes biology, law, and coming-of-age ritesBiologically, an adult is an animal that has finished growing and can reproduce. Legally, a human adult has reached the age of majority and is treated as independent and responsib…
1010. Boy once meant servant—and later a racial slurA boy is a young male human, from birth through adolescence, until adulthood makes him a man. The Middle English word boi meant both boy and servant, and from 1821 in the United S…
1011. UN law calls nearly everyone under eighteen a childBiologists place childhood between birth, or infancy, and puberty, but lawyers usually mean anyone under the local age of majority. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child dr…
1012. Girl entered English as gerle around 1250–1300English picked up girl between 1250 and 1300 from the Anglo-Saxon gerle, also spelled girle or gurle. For two centuries it could mean a child of either sex, and only from about th…
1013. Infant literally meant the one who cannot speakThe word infant comes from Latin īnfāns, a baby or child whose literal meaning is unspeaking. It usually covers the first year of life, sometimes the first two, and gives way to t…
1014. Middle age usually means the forties through mid-sixtiesMiddle age sits halfway between young adulthood and old age, and the usual bracket runs from 40 to 64. Other definitions stretch it from about 40 or 45 to 65 or 70, and most peopl…
1015. Old age is social as much as biologicalOld age covers the years as people approach and pass life expectancy, yet which birthday counts as old has shifted across cultures and eras. Older bodies regenerate less and suffe…
1016. Young adult brains keep maturing past age twenty-fiveYoung adulthood follows adolescence, sometimes overlapping it, and nobody agrees exactly where it ends. The US Census Bureau counts ages 18 to 34, cancer researchers stretch the s…
1017. Adolescence bridges puberty’s hormones and legal adulthoodFrom Latin adolescere, “to mature,” adolescence spans puberty toward adult status—often the teens, though biology and law disagree on edges. Girls typically enter puberty around 1…
1018. Homes began in caves long before mudbrick courtyardsA home is a lasting or semi-lasting shelter for people—and sometimes pets—where sleep, cooking, and hygiene happen. Forms range from apartments and yurts to virtual spaces. Eviden…
1019. Japan’s Keiunkan inn has welcomed guests since 705 CEHotels sell short-term lodging, from spare mattresses to suites with kitchens. Medieval inns and later coaching inns paved the way; modern hotels diversified into motels, boutique…
1020. The 1926 Frankfurt Kitchen taught the modern fitted layoutA kitchen is where food is stored, prepared and cooked, whether a home room with stove, sink, refrigerator and modular cabinets or a heavy-duty commercial operation. Early medieva…

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