Peter the Great of Russia

Fig.1: The greatest thing about Peter the Great is that 
Johnny Depp could easily play him in a bio-pic.

Every country has a polarizing figure who transforms a nation's fortunes by saying, "And now for something completely different!" In Russia, that figure would be Peter the Great (fig.1). In some ways, he continued Russia's normal routine of expanding their landmass at the expense of ethnic groups who had at least forty different words for "snow." He even waged war against the powers of Sweden and Ottoman Turkey for seaports that weren't clogged with ice all the time, something all Russian sailors and synchronized swimmers could get behind. But Peter becomes controversial because he often looked to that dastardly West for inspiration on how to rule and, even more alarmingly, how his people should act. His obsession for the ways and customs of places like England, France, and Germany frightened his stoically conservative citizens who had been wearing their babushkas the same way forever! While Peter is still considered "Great," many Russians can't help but say that word in the same manner as, "Great, my frostbitten picky toe needs to be amputated!"

Viking Discovery of America

Fig.1: "Dibbs!"

Everyone and their uncle's monkey knows that in fourteen hundred ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. But what those sly kindergarten teachers failed to tell you was that around the year ten-hundred, Leif Erikson reached the New World and plundered! That's right, conclusive evidence exists that history's greatest bullies, the Vikings, actually became the first Europeans to discover America (fig.1)! While the old Norse legends had long claimed that great explorers voyaged west and made landfall in a place called "Vinland," it wasn't until the 1960s that crazy people digging in the dirt (a breed commonly known as archaeologists) confirmed these stories through the finding of an old Viking settlement on the Canadian island of Newfoundland. Although no long-term colonization occurred at this time (as other Europeans would conceitedly graciously do 500 years later), this initial journey remains a remarkable feat of Norse ingenuity, curiosity, and insatiability of the desire to find more heads of lob off with their axes.