Commissioned as an Easter gift for Empress Maria Feodorovna, the first Fabergé egg appeared plain on the outside but opened to reveal a golden yolk, a golden hen, and a tiny replica of the imperial crown. Delighted, Alexander III made Fabergé a court supplier, beginning an annual tradition that produced 50 imperial eggs before the Russian Revolution ended it.

At the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris, Alfred Nobel signed a one-page document that stunned his relatives: nearly his entire estate, built on dynamite and armaments patents, would fund annual prizes for those who conferred the greatest benefit on humankind. The will was contested for years but ultimately created the world's most prestigious intellectual honor.

Trotsky, once the Red Army's architect and a leading Bolshevik theorist, was formally expelled from the Communist Party at the Fifteenth Party Congress, the culmination of Stalin's methodical dismantling of the Left Opposition. Deportation to Kazakhstan followed within weeks, then exile from the Soviet Union altogether in 1929, setting the stage for his eventual assassination by a Stalinist agent in Mexico City in 1940.

Born James Marshall Hendrix in a working-class Seattle household, he taught himself guitar left-handed on a right-handed instrument, restringing it upside down. Within two decades he would set his guitar ablaze at Monterey, reinvent the national anthem at Woodstock, and die at 27, leaving behind a catalog that permanently altered rock music's vocabulary of distortion, feedback, and improvisation.