There is evidence for students having been taught at Oxford as far back as 1097AD. Although there is no known official date of foundation for the University, it grew rapidly from 1167 when King Henry II banned English students from attending the University of Paris. The first known foreign student, from what is now Germany, was taught there in 1190AD. The Aztec Empire was an alliance of three city-states in the Valley of Mexico. It was created in 1428AD and quickly conquered most of Central Mexico. During this same period Oxford was already well established as one of the pre-eminent seats of learning in the world. The Aztec Empire ruled until it was subdued by Spanish conquistadores and their native allies in 1521.

Queen Elizabeth II was born on April 21, 1926, as the first daughter of Prince Albert, then the second in line to the throne of England. Queen Elizabeth is currently the world's oldest reigning monarch and has been queen since 1952. This was the same year Marilyn Monroe starred in Don't Bother to Knock, her first leading role. Marilyn Monroe was born Norma Jean Mortenson on the first of June, 1926. In 1945 she signed up as a model, and quickly garnered fame as a movie actress. She passed away in 1962 at the age of 36. At that point, Queen Elizabeth had been ruling England for almost 10 years.

Born in 1929, Anne Frank lived only 15 short years, with the last few spent hiding from the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. She and her mother and sister were betrayed, transported to concentration camps, and died. Anne Frank became internationally famous when her diary, which documented her experiences during the war, was published by her father in 1947. In the same year, Martin Luther King, Jr., at 18 years of age, decided to enter the ministry of the Baptist church, in order to answer an "inner urge to serve humanity." King was a prominent leader in the African American Civil Rights movement, perhaps best known for his oratory skills and his belief in non-violent civil disobedience. King was assassinated in 1968 at the age of 39.

The Stegosaurus and the Tyrannosaurus rex are some of the most recognizable dinosaurs for the general public and are often depicted together in popular media. However the Stegosaurus became extinct long before the Tyrannosaurus rex existed. The Stegosaurus was a herbivore that roamed what eventually became part of North America during the Late Jurassic period, around 150 million years ago. It had massive armored plates along its spine and a distinctive spiked tail. The Tyrannosaurus rex lived in roughly the same area of the world, but from 68 to 66 million years ago, during the Cretaceous period. A fearsome predator, a Tyrannosaurus rex could be around 40 feet long, and was probably one of the largest land carnivores of all time.

The Titanic was a passenger liner that collided with an iceberg and sank on her maiden voyage in 1912. She was the largest ship afloat in the world at the time and over 1500 people died in the accident. Infamously, the Titanic carried only slightly more than half the number of lifeboats needed for everyone on board and many of those boats were not filled to capacity during the disaster. Ecstasy is the street name for the drug MDMA. While this chemical was first synthesized in 1912, it was simply documented as a by-product of another process. It was only investigated sporadically over the next few decades. It is thought that MDMA first began to be used as a recreational drug around 1970. Scientists began to study it more closely, hoping that it could find use as a psychotherapy aid. However, MDMA was made illegal in the United States in 1985, the same year that the wreck of the Titanic was re-discovered on the ocean floor.

Adolf Hitler was born in Austria on the 20th of April, 1889. He was the leader of the Nazi Party, and eventually rose to power as the dictator of Nazi Germany. Hitler was directly responsible for World War II and the Holocaust, events which led to the suffering and deaths of tens of millions of people. Charlie Chaplin was born into poverty in 1889 and became an important and beloved actor and film-maker. While best known for his comical persona The Tramp, Chaplin was also passionately political. Galvanized in part by his superficial resemblance to the Nazi leader, in 1940 Chaplin released The Great Dictator, a parody film attacking Hitler and his rise to power.

The US Civil War was fought, in part, over the practice of slavery and its continued existence in the United States. The Confederacy officially surrendered in 1865 and slavery was legally abolished throughout the country. Maudie Hopkins was the last publicly known widow of a US Civil War veteran. She married William M. Cantrell in 1934 when she was 19 years old. Mr. Cantrell was 86 at the time. He had enlisted in the Confederate army at the age of 16 and served briefly until captured as a prisoner of war. 143 years after the end of the war, in August 2008, Maudie Hopkins passed away. Four months later, Barak Obama was elected as the first African American president of the United States.

Born between 1450 and 1451, Christopher Columbus was an Italian explorer, often credited with discovering the Americas. Columbus intended to discover an ocean-based western route between Europe and Asia and instead reached an island in the Bahamas in 1492. His explorations led to the colonization and conquest of the American continent by Europeans. Leonardo da Vinci was born in 1452 and is still widely regarded as one of the most talented painters that ever lived. He was also a polymath with interests and skills in multiple artistic and scientific fields. During 1492, da Vinci finished a massive clay model of a horse, with the intention of casting it as a 70 ton bronze sculpture. Like many of his ambitious projects, this sculpture was never completed.

President Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on the same day and were both late bloomers in their chosen careers, each achieving distinction after they turned 50. Abraham Lincoln became the 16th President of the United States and held office during the US Civil War, until his assassination in 1865. President Lincoln was elected in 1860 when he was 51 years old. The year before this, in 1859, Charles Darwin published his seminal work, titled On the Origin of Species. This book contained his theory of evolution, which Darwin had been developing for decades, during his travels around the world.

The woolly mammoth evolved from earlier mammoth species around 400,000 years ago. They co-existed with anatomically modern humans for roughly 200,000 years before becoming extinct, probably from a combination of climate change and human predation. Isolated populations of the woolly mammoth survived until around 2000 BC. Many examples of art depicting human interactions with woolly mammoths still survive. The Great Pyramid of Giza was completed around 2560BC, well over 500 years before mammoths are thought to have become completely extinct. The Pyramid was named one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and is the only Wonder still existing today.