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TIL Empress Catherine I of Russia was a peasant girl captured as a war prize then transferred around until becoming a concubine to Peter the Great. She quickly knew how to best please him, so he married her, and later Romanovs are her descendants. After Peter's death she reigned in her own name.

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YpP4d TIL before the Mayflower, Squanto was kidnapped, sold into slavery in Spain, and escaped back to North America, only to find his entire tribe wiped out from disease. The site he later helped the Pilgrams settle at was the summer village of his tribe, Plymoth Rock.
pKMA TIL that Seattle changed Columbus day to indigenous peoples day in 2014 to acknowledge that native Americans were living in the Americas long before Columbus “discovered” it.
4XeG6 TIL that “Idaho” was not a Native American word as originally thought but rather a made-up word. “To his horror, he found that he had been the victim of a practical joke. [He]learned, to his surprise, that the name did not mean, "gem of the mountains"...In fact, it did not mean anything at all.”
R7EV7 TIL The expletive "Jesus H. Christ" was first documented by Mark Twain in his autobiography
Vgep TIL that 1 in 5 adults in the U.S. lack the math competency expected of an 8th grader