Cromwell was one of the strongest and most powerful advocates of the English Reformation. He helped to engineer an annulment of the king's marriage to Queen Catherine of Aragon so that Henry could lawfully marry Anne Boleyn.

The Pig War, so called because it was triggered by the shooting of a pig, is also called the Pig Episode, the Pig and Potato War, the San Juan Boundary Dispute or the Northwestern Boundary Dispute. The pig was the only "casualty" of the war, making the conflict essentially bloodless.

Kim Jong-il was the supreme leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), commonly referred to as North Korea, from 1994 to 2011. During Kim's regime the country suffered from famine, partially due to economic mismanagement, and had a poor human rights record -- perhaps because he spent his time composing operas.

In 1912, a Paris orphanage held a raffle to raise money--the prizes were live babies. The proceeds of the raffle were divided among several charitable institutions. An investigation of the winners was made, of course, to determine their desirability as foster parents.

The Punic Wars were a series of three wars fought between Rome and Carthage from 264 BC to 146 BC. At the time, they were probably the largest wars that had ever taken place.

Schoolmaster and amateur mathematician William Shanks (1812-82) spent the greater part of his life calculating the value of pi to 707 decimal places. 60 years after his death, mathematician D.F. Ferguson used a mechanical calculator to show that he had got the last 180 of these decimal places wrong.

First drafted by the Archbishop of Canterbury to make peace between King John and a group of rebel barons, the Magna Carta promised the protection of church rights, protection for the barons from illegal imprisonment, access to swift justice, and limitations on feudal payments to the Crown.

Wever and Bray removed the skull and most of the brain of a live cat and connected its auditory nerve to an electrode. When one researcher spoke in the cat's ear, the sound was seemingly converted, among the cat's neurons, into an electrical signal that was transmitted through the electrode and a connecting wire to a telephone in a separate room.

Herodotus of Halicarnassus (484 BC - c. 425 BC) was the first writer to make a conscious attempt to discover and explain past events. He is generally considered the "father of history". However, his contemporary Thucydides (c. 460 BC - c. 400 BC) is credited with having first approached history with a well-developed historical method in his work the History of the Peloponnesian War.

The first European explorer to discover New Zealand was Abel Janszoon Tasman on 13 December 1642. Captain James Cook, who reached New Zealand in October 1769 on the first of his three voyages, was the first European to circumnavigate and map New Zealand.