The Night Witches were the all-women pilots of Russia's 588th Night Bomber Aviation Regiment. In World War II, the Night Witches were the first women military pilots in the 20th century to directly engage an enemy in combat. One the most horrifying sounds a German soldier on the Russian front could hear in the dead of night was the "whooshing" of the wind off the struts of a Night Witch jerry-rigged biplane bomber. It was described as the eerie sound of a witch's broom as it quietly glided in to drop its payload of bombs.

In the 1840s, Las Californias — the collective name for Alta California and the Baja California Peninsula — was the ancestral homeland of the indigenous Nisenan Maidu people. Their population had already been reduced to less than 100,000 people, due to the spread of European diseases — primarily a malaria epidemic — brought by Spanish and U.S. expeditions. Californios (people of Spanish or Mexican descent) made up approximately 14,000 of the other permanent residents, which included 2,500 “foreigners” (whites of non-Hispanic descent).

Despite his diminutive 5 ft frame, Norwegian composer Edvard Hagerup Grieg was a towering rock star long before the expression existed. Born into a successful Bergen merchant family in 1843, his life dramatically changed when violin virtuoso Ole Bull recognized his talent and also introduced him to the treasures of Norwegian folk music. Grieg studied the masters abroad, but dreamed of reprieves to his beloved Norwegian countryside - a pattern which continued after he became a world-renowned composer.

Professor Sir Ludwig 'Poppa' Guttmann CBE FRS is known as the father of the Paralympic movement; he was the medical pioneer who proved that disabled sport could be as competitive and exciting as a non-disabled sport. In September 1943, he took charge of the National Spinal Injuries Unit at Stoke Mandeville in England. He implemented his own theories on how best to treat patients who had paraplegia by introducing rehabilitation through sport. This led to national competitions, then to the International Stoke Mandeville Games and finally the Paralympic Games, which has become the third largest sporting event in the world.