7 Amazing Rags to Riches Stories

The life of Empress Catherine I of Russia could easily be confused with something out of a fairy tale. The future queen was born in 1684 into a family of Lithuanian peasants, and was orphaned at the age of 3 after both her parents died from the plague. Taken in by a pastor, she spent her youth as a housemaid in Marienburg in modern day Latvia. After Russia conquered the city in 1702, 18-year-old Catherine was captured and taken to Moscow. She became a servant in the home of a high-ranking government official, and it was there that she met the Russian Emperor Peter the Great. Despite being uneducated and illiterate, Catherine charmed the emperor with her beauty and wit, and the two soon began a passionate affair...

First modern Olympic Games

On April 6, 1896, the Olympic Games, a long-lost tradition of ancient Greece, are reborn in Athens 1,500 years after being banned by Roman Emperor Theodosius I. At the opening of the Athens Games, King Georgios I of Greece and a crowd of 60,000 spectators welcomed athletes from 13 nations to the international competition...

What is the Rosetta Stone?

In the 19th century, the Rosetta Stone helped scholars at long last crack the code of hieroglyphics, the ancient Egyptian writing system. French army engineers who were part of Napoleon Bonaparte’s Egypt campaign discovered the stone slab in 1799 while making repairs to a fort near the town of Rashid (Rosetta). The artifact, which is made of granodiorite, came into the possession of the British after they defeated the French in Egypt in 1801...