The personal embarrassments that made it into the historical record.
102 stories in this theme.
At 09:15 on 21 October 1966, colliery waste tip No. 7 above the Welsh village of Aberfan liquefied and slid downhill, engulfing Pantglas Junior School minutes after morning assembly. 144 people died, 116 of them children. The National Coal Board had been warned about the tip — and later raided the disaster fund to pay for removing the others.
Read the story →The Dutch East India ship Batavia wrecked on the Houtman Abrolhos islands off Western Australia on 4 June 1629. While the commander sailed an open boat to Java for rescue, the apothecary Jeronimus Cornelisz established a reign of terror among the roughly 200 survivors, murdering some 110-125 men, women, and children before soldiers he had marooned fought back.
Read the story →On 28 April 1789 Fletcher Christian seized HMS Bounty and set Captain Bligh adrift with 18 men in an open launch. Bligh sailed it 3,618 nautical miles to Timor and lived to be court-martialled and acquitted. The mutineers vanished with Tahitian companions to unlocated Pitcairn Island, burned the ship — and were found 18 years later: one ageing mutineer, nine widows, and a village of children.
Read the story →In January 897 Pope Stephen VI had the nine-month-old corpse of his predecessor Pope Formosus exhumed, dressed in papal vestments, propped on a throne in the Lateran, and formally tried for perjury and coveting the papacy. The corpse was convicted, mutilated, and thrown into the Tiber.
Read the story →Pittsburgh industrialist and amateur golf champion Eben Byers began drinking Radithor — certified radium dissolved in water — in 1927, at up to three bottles a day. By 1931 his bones were disintegrating and his jaw had been surgically removed. His death in March 1932 killed the radioactive patent-medicine industry, under the Wall Street Journal's immortal headline.
Read the story →In September 1859 the ruined San Francisco merchant Joshua Norton proclaimed himself Norton I, Emperor of the United States. For twenty years the city played along: his own currency was honoured, police saluted him, and his decree to bridge the Bay was eventually built. Ten thousand people attended his funeral.
Read the story →At 11:58 on 1 September 1923, two minutes before noon, a magnitude 7.9 earthquake struck the Tokyo-Yokohama region as the city's lunch fires were lit. Firestorms did most of the killing — including some 38,000 people incinerated by a fire whirl at a single open square. Around 105,000 died; in the chaos, mobs massacred thousands of Koreans.
Read the story →Between the 11th and 15th centuries a Shona state built Great Zimbabwe: granite walls up to 11 metres high, laid without mortar, at the hub of a gold trade reaching the Indian Ocean. Colonial Rhodesia officially attributed it to Phoenicians, Arabs — anyone but Africans — and censored archaeologists who reported the truth. The country took its name from the ruins at independence.
Read the story →Astronomers announced that on 18-19 May 1910 the Earth would pass through the tail of Halley's Comet — and that the tail contained cyanogen, a poison. Amplified by newspapers and a famous astronomer's speculation, the news spawned sealed rooms, comet pills, and gas masks. Mark Twain, born under the comet in 1835, died as it returned — as he had predicted.
Read the story →On a July night in 356 BC a man named Herostratus set fire to the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus — one of the Seven Wonders — and confessed under torture that he had done it purely to make his name immortal. The Ephesians executed him and made speaking his name a capital offence. It didn't work: one historian wrote it down, and the arsonist got exactly what he wanted.
Read the story →Five weeks after opening, Chicago's Iroquois Theatre — advertised as "absolutely fireproof" — burned during a matinee packed with women and children. Locked gates, inward-opening doors, and unfinished fire equipment killed 602 people in about twenty minutes, the deadliest single-building fire in US history.
Read the story →In 1854 the Hudson's Bay Company surveyor John Rae brought back the first hard evidence of the lost Franklin expedition: Inuit testimony and relics — and reports that the starving crews had resorted to cannibalism. Lady Franklin and Charles Dickens led the assault on his character and his Inuit sources. Every later discovery proved Rae right.
Read the story →In the autumn of 1726, Mary Toft of Godalming appeared to give birth to a series of dead rabbits. The king's own surgeon-anatomist endorsed the miracle; London's medical elite descended on the case. In December she confessed to the hoax, and the careers of her believers collapsed with her.
Read the story →In July 1816 the French frigate Medusa — commanded by an incompetent émigré appointee — ran aground off West Africa. The privileged took the boats; 147 people were cast off on a makeshift raft. Thirteen days later 15 were alive, having survived mutiny, murder, and cannibalism. Géricault's enormous painting of the raft turned the scandal into immortal art.
Read the story →From 1932 the Chisso Corporation discharged methylmercury into Minamata Bay, Japan. The neurological disease it caused was officially identified on 1 May 1956; Chisso's own physician proved the cause by 1959 and was silenced. The dumping continued until 1968. Thousands were certified as victims; the true number is far higher.
Read the story →Fresh from Suez, Ferdinand de Lesseps promised a sea-level canal through Panama. Yellow fever and malaria killed on the order of 22,000 workers; the company collapsed in 1889 with the savings of 800,000 French investors; and the bribery scandal that followed shook the Third Republic. The United States finished the canal only after conquering the mosquito.
Read the story →From 1917, young women painting luminous watch dials were taught to point their brushes with their lips, swallowing radium with every stroke. As their jaws crumbled and their bones fractured, the companies denied everything. Grace Fryer's 1927-28 lawsuit against US Radium became a landmark of workers' rights.
Read the story →In November 1871 the journalist Henry Morton Stanley, bankrolled by a New York newspaper, found the lost missionary-explorer David Livingstone at Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika. 'Dr Livingstone, I presume?' became the century's most famous greeting — though Stanley tore the page from his diary and may have coined it afterwards. The two men's afterlives diverged as sharply as their legends.
Read the story →Alan Turing was found dead at his Wilmslow home on 8 June 1954, aged 41. The coroner ruled suicide by cyanide poisoning; a half-eaten apple lay beside the bed. The Crown Prosecution Service had convicted him of gross indecency two years earlier and ordered chemical castration as an alternative to prison. The pardon arrived in 2013.
Read the story →Anna Anderson was pulled from a Berlin canal in February 1920 and claimed to be Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia, surviving daughter of Tsar Nicholas II. She maintained the claim through forty-five years of litigation and three biographies. DNA analysis in 1994 — three years after her 1984 cremation — identified her as the Polish factory worker Franziska Schanzkowska.
Read the story →Anne Boleyn was beheaded at the Tower of London on 19 May 1536 with a French sword rather than the standard English execution axe. Henry VIII had paid for a substantial professional executioner to travel from Calais. The decision was made before the verdict was delivered.
Read the story →Anne Bonny and Mary Read were captured along with the pirate captain "Calico Jack" Rackham off Jamaica on 22 October 1720. Tried for piracy at Saint Jago de la Vega the following month, both pleaded pregnancy. Their executions were postponed; the men of the crew were hanged on 18 November. Mary Read died in prison of fever in April 1721. Anne Bonny's fate is unknown.
Read the story →A Senate investigation in January 1893 found that the Banca Romana had been issuing duplicate-serial-numbered banknotes for six years to cover speculative real-estate losses. The director Bernardo Tanlongo and Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti had concealed the audit. The scandal brought down Giolitti's government, eliminated five of six Italian banks of issue, and produced the Bank of Italy in 1893.
Read the story →Robert Clive's force of 3,000 men defeated the Bengali Nawab Siraj ud-Daulah's army of 50,000 at Plassey on 23 June 1757. Clive had previously bribed the Bengali commander Mir Jafar to defect at the battle. The British East India Company became the effective sovereign of Bengal within weeks. The transfer of Indian tax revenue to the Company funded the early Industrial Revolution in Britain.
Read the story →East German Politburo member Günter Schabowski announced relaxed travel regulations at a 9 November 1989 press conference. Asked by a journalist when the changes took effect, he consulted his notes and said "immediately, without delay." East Berliners gathered at the wall checkpoints within an hour. The checkpoints could not get authorisation to refuse passage. The wall opened on the evening of 9 November 1989.
Read the story →Caligula ruled Rome from March 37 CE to January 41 CE. He kept his favourite racehorse Incitatus in an ivory stall with marble fittings and is reported by Suetonius to have considered appointing him consul. He was assassinated on 24 January 41 CE by officers of his Praetorian Guard.
Read the story →George Hull, a New York cigar-maker and atheist, had a ten-foot gypsum statue carved in Chicago in 1868 to mock the biblical line "there were giants in the earth in those days." He buried it on his cousin's farm at Cardiff, New York, and had it "discovered" in October 1869. A syndicate bought a three-quarter share for $37,500 within a month. P. T. Barnum tried to buy it. Hull confessed in December 1869.
Read the story →The Donation of Constantine purported to be a fourth-century imperial decree granting Pope Sylvester I sovereignty over Rome, Italy, and the Western provinces of the Roman Empire. It was forged in the papal chancery around 750-800 CE. The Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla proved it a forgery in 1440 by analysing its Latin vocabulary, which contained terms that did not exist in the fourth century.
Read the story →Dr James Barry served as a British Army surgeon for fifty years (1813–1864), rose to Inspector General of Hospitals, performed one of the first recorded successful Caesarean sections in which both mother and child survived, and was discovered at the substantial 1865 post-mortem laying-out to have been anatomically female.
Read the story →Émile Zola's letter J'Accuse...! appeared on the front page of the Paris newspaper L'Aurore on 13 January 1898, naming seven French Army officers and accusing them of the deliberate frame-up of Captain Alfred Dreyfus. The print run was 300,000 copies — ten times the paper's normal sale. Zola was convicted of libel within a month and fled to England. The letter is conventionally the founding document of the modern public intellectual.
Read the story →President Woodrow Wilson suffered a major stroke on 2 October 1919. His wife Edith concealed the severity for the remaining seventeen months of his term, controlling all access to him and deciding which papers reached his desk. Vice President Marshall was never informed. Historians have called it the longest period of executive concealment in American history.
Read the story →Cixi entered the Forbidden City as a junior fifth-rank concubine in 1851 at age 16. By 1861 she was co-regent for her infant son the Tongzhi Emperor. She ruled the Qing dynasty in fact if not in title from 1861 to her death on 15 November 1908. The Guangxu Emperor — her adopted nephew, whom she had kept under house arrest for ten years — died of arsenic poisoning the day before. The dynasty fell three years later.
Read the story →Theodora was the daughter of a Constantinople circus bear-keeper. By approximately 522 she had been a stage performer and possibly a sex worker. In 525 she married the future emperor Justinian over imperial-court opposition. In January 532, when the Nika riots threatened to overthrow the imperial government, she persuaded Justinian to stay and fight with a speech preserved by Procopius: "The purple is the noblest shroud."
Read the story →The Fourth Crusade was contracted in 1201 to invade Egypt. By 1202 the crusaders could not pay for the Venetian fleet they had ordered. They diverted to attack the Christian Byzantine capital at Constantinople, where they installed an Angelid pretender. When he could not pay either, they sacked the city on 12-15 April 1204. The Eastern Orthodox-Catholic schism became permanent.
Read the story →A Parisian crowd stormed the Bastille fortress prison on 14 July 1789. Bernard-René de Launay surrendered after the outer gates fell. The crowd released seven inmates and killed the governor. The date became the French national holiday in 1880.
Read the story →The PS General Slocum caught fire in the East River off East 90th Street at approximately 10:00 a.m. on 15 June 1904. About 1,300 mostly German-American passengers from the St Mark's Lutheran Church annual Sunday-school picnic were aboard. The fire hoses were rotted, the life jackets were filled with cork dust packed with iron weights to meet the legal weight requirement, and 1,021 people died — most of them women and children.
Read the story →Guy Fawkes was caught at midnight on 4-5 November 1605 in the cellar of the House of Lords with 36 barrels of gunpowder. The State Opening of Parliament — at which King James I, his queen, his sons, the Lords spiritual and temporal, and the Commons would all have been present — was scheduled for 11 a.m. on 5 November. Fawkes was the demolition specialist of a Catholic plot to overthrow the Protestant English government and replace it with a Catholic regent.
Read the story →Hatshepsut ruled Egypt as pharaoh from approximately 1479 to 1458 BCE, the longest reign of any female ruler of ancient Egypt. About twenty years after her death her stepson Thutmose III ordered her cartouches systematically chiselled out of the public monuments she had built. Most of the erasures missed inaccessible interior surfaces, which is how Egyptologists reconstructed her reign in the 19th century.
Read the story →Julius Caesar was stabbed 23 times by approximately 60 Roman senators in the curia attached to the Theatre of Pompey on the morning of 15 March 44 BCE. The post-mortem examination concluded that only one of the 23 wounds — the second, to the chest — was independently fatal. The assassination triggered the 14-year political-military struggle that produced Augustus's monarchy and ended the Roman Republic.
Read the story →Iranian student militants stormed the US Embassy in Tehran on 4 November 1979 and took 52 American diplomats hostage. The hostages were held for 444 days, surviving a failed US military rescue at Desert One on 24 April 1980 that killed eight US servicemen. The hostages were released on 20 January 1981 — minutes after Ronald Reagan's inauguration.
Read the story →President John F Kennedy was shot from behind while riding in a presidential motorcade through Dealey Plaza in Dallas at 12:30 Central Standard Time on 22 November 1963. He was pronounced dead at Parkland Memorial Hospital at 13:00 CST. The Warren Commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald, firing from the Texas School Book Depository, was the sole gunman.
Read the story →Lambert Simnel was crowned Edward VI of England in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, on 24 May 1487, aged about 10. He was a baker's son being impersonated by Yorkist conspirators as the imprisoned Earl of Warwick. After his army lost the Battle of Stoke Field, Henry VII pardoned him and put him to work in the royal kitchens as a spit-turner.
Read the story →John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln in the back of the head at Ford's Theatre, Washington, at about 10:15 p.m. on Good Friday 14 April 1865. Lincoln died at 7:22 a.m. the next morning. Booth was a Confederate sympathiser. The conspiracy he led also targeted Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward the same night. Booth was killed 12 days later in a Virginia barn.
Read the story →Margaretha Geertruida Zelle — performing as Mata Hari — was a 41-year-old Dutch exotic dancer convicted of espionage for Germany by a French court martial in July 1917 and executed by firing squad at Vincennes on 15 October 1917. The post-war access to the French and German intelligence archives substantially weakens the original espionage case against her.
Read the story →Five burglars were arrested inside the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Office Building in Washington DC at 02:30 on 17 June 1972. The two-year investigation that followed linked the burglary to the Nixon re-election campaign. President Richard Nixon resigned at noon on 9 August 1974 — the only US president to resign the office.
Read the story →The First Opium War (1839-1842) was a British naval campaign to force the Qing Empire to legalise the import of Indian opium into China. The Chinese imperial commissioner Lin Zexu had destroyed 1,200 tonnes of British opium at Canton in June 1839. Britain responded with a 5,000-troop expeditionary force. The 1842 Treaty of Nanking ended the war with the cession of Hong Kong, the opening of five treaty ports, and a £21 million indemnity.
Read the story →Perkin Warbeck claimed from 1490 to be Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York, the younger of the two Princes in the Tower. He was recognised by Margaret of Burgundy, James IV of Scotland, and Maximilian I of Austria. He landed in Cornwall in 1497 with 8,000 supporters, was captured, and was hanged at Tyburn on 23 November 1499.
Read the story →The Manchester Yeomanry charged a peaceful crowd of approximately 60,000 demonstrators demanding parliamentary reform at St Peter's Field on 16 August 1819. 18 people were killed, including a 2-year-old child. About 600 were wounded. The atrocity was nicknamed "Peterloo" — a sarcastic combination of St Peter's Field and the recent Waterloo victory.
Read the story →The Piltdown skull was unveiled by Charles Dawson at the Geological Society of London on 18 December 1912 as *Eoanthropus dawsoni* — the missing link between ape and human. It dominated British palaeoanthropology for forty years. The 1953 fluorine and chemical testing proved it was a modern human cranium combined with an orangutan jaw, stained with iron and chromium, with the teeth filed flat.
Read the story →Edgar Allan Poe was found semi-conscious outside Ryan's Tavern, a Baltimore polling place, on 3 October 1849. He was wearing cheap secondhand clothes that were not his. He died at Washington College Hospital on 7 October, aged 40, without ever giving a coherent account of the preceding week. The cause of death has been variously diagnosed as alcoholism, rabies, cooping, syphilis, and brain tumour.
Read the story →According to a 13th-century Dominican chronicle, an English-born woman called Joan reigned as Pope John VIII from about 855 to 858 CE, gave birth during a Lateran procession, and was killed by the crowd. No 9th- or 10th-century source mentions her. The story is almost certainly a 13th-century fabrication. It was treated as historical fact for 400 years.
Read the story →A black Mercedes-Benz S280 carrying Princess Diana, Dodi Fayed, and driver Henri Paul crashed in the Pont de l'Alma tunnel in Paris at 00:23 on 31 August 1997. Fayed and Paul died at the scene; Diana died at La Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital at 04:00. The 2008 British inquest jury verdict was unlawful killing through the gross negligence of Paul and of the pursuing paparazzi.
Read the story →Grigori Rasputin was murdered in the cellar of the Yusupov Palace in Saint Petersburg in the early hours of 30 December 1916. The standard account given by his killer Prince Felix Yusupov has him poisoned with cyanide, shot once, attacked with a club, shot three more times, and drowned in the Neva. The autopsy supports the gunshots; it does not support either the cyanide or the drowning.
Read the story →The German parliament building in Berlin burned on the night of 27-28 February 1933. A Dutch communist named Marinus van der Lubbe was arrested at the scene and beheaded the following January. The Nazi government used the fire as pretext for the Reichstag Fire Decree of 28 February, which suspended civil liberties. The Enabling Act of 23 March made Hitler legal dictator.
Read the story →The Reign of Terror ran from 5 September 1793 to 27 July 1794. The Committee of Public Safety under Maximilien Robespierre executed about 17,000 people for political offences. About 10,000 more died in prison without sentence. Robespierre himself was guillotined on 28 July 1794.
Read the story →Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, their five children, the family doctor, and three servants were shot and bayoneted in the cellar of the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg at approximately 1:30 a.m. on 17 July 1918. The execution was ordered by the local Ural Soviet against the approaching Czechoslovak Legion. The bodies were not recovered for 73 years. The five identified Romanov bodies were reburied at the Peter and Paul Cathedral, Saint Petersburg, in July 1998.
Read the story →Rosalind Franklin produced X-ray diffraction Photo 51 of DNA in May 1952. Maurice Wilkins showed it to James Watson in January 1953 without her knowledge. The Watson-Crick double-helix paper appeared in *Nature* on 25 April 1953. Franklin died of ovarian cancer on 16 April 1958, aged 37. The 1962 Nobel Prize went to Watson, Crick, and Wilkins.
Read the story →Between February 1692 and May 1693 the Salem Massachusetts witchcraft proceedings investigated 200 accused witches and executed 20 — 14 women and six men. Five more died in prison awaiting trial. The court accepted "spectral evidence" — the testimony of accusers who claimed to see the accused's spirit form harming them — over the explicit objection of senior Massachusetts clergy. The legal foundation collapsed in autumn 1692 and the colony issued a formal apology in 1697.
Read the story →The South Sea Company's January 1720 deal with the British Treasury exchanged government debt for company shares. The share price rose from £128 in January to £1,050 in late June. It collapsed to £190 by the end of September. Many of the Whig political class were ruined; several Treasury and Mint officials were imprisoned; Isaac Newton lost about £20,000 of his own money in the crash.
Read the story →Arthur Orton, a butcher from Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, claimed in 1866 to be Sir Roger Tichborne, heir to a Hampshire baronetcy who had been lost at sea in 1854. Two civil and criminal trials between 1871 and 1874 produced the longest jury trials in English history at the time. Orton was sentenced to 14 years for perjury; he served 10. The case generated a working-class political movement.
Read the story →The Dutch tulip futures market peaked in February 1637 with the rarest bulb varieties trading at prices equivalent to fully furnished Amsterdam canal houses. The collapse on 3-7 February 1637 produced the first documented modern speculative bubble. The actual economic damage was substantially smaller than the conventional legend describes; most contracts were never enforced.
Read the story →The Peasants' Revolt began in Essex on 30 May 1381 in response to the third Poll Tax in four years. About 60,000 rebels marched on London by mid-June. They beheaded the Archbishop of Canterbury Simon Sudbury on Tower Hill. The Lord Mayor William Walworth stabbed the rebel leader Wat Tyler in the throat at Smithfield on 15 June while Tyler was negotiating face-to-face with the 14-year-old King Richard II.
Read the story →The German mark lost value at progressively faster rates from August 1922 to November 1923. The peak exchange rate of 4.2 trillion marks to the US dollar was reached on 20 November 1923. The middle-class savings of the German Empire were destroyed. The Rentenmark currency reform of November 1923 stabilised the situation but did not restore the lost wealth.
Read the story →Ptolemy Philadelphus was born to Cleopatra and Mark Antony in 36 BC, the third of their three children together. He was four years old when his parents died and his siblings were taken to Rome. The Roman record loses him after approximately 30 BC. His fate is unknown.
Read the story →Captain Alfred Dreyfus had been convicted of treason on 22 December 1894. His public military degradation took place at the École Militaire in Paris on the morning of 5 January 1895 in front of approximately 4,000 spectators. His epaulettes were torn off, his sabre broken, his uniform stripes cut. The watching crowd shouted antisemitic slogans. He shouted that he was innocent.
Read the story →Marguerite Steinheil was 39 years old and the principal mistress of French President Félix Faure when Faure suffered a fatal stroke during a sexual encounter at the Élysée Palace on 16 February 1899. Ten years later she was tried for the murder of her husband and mother and was acquitted.
Read the story →Augusta of Saxe-Gotha was 32 when her husband Frederick, Prince of Wales, died unexpectedly in 1751. She lived another twenty-one years as the senior court figure of the Leicester House faction, raised the future George III, and substantially shaped the early Hanoverian succession before her death in 1772.
Read the story →Byron, Mary Godwin, Percy Shelley, Claire Clairmont, and John Polidori spent the summer of 1816 at the Villa Diodati. The five would all be dead, scattered, or estranged within six years. Two of them died of poisoning. One drowned. Two lived on into old age in substantial unhappiness.
Read the story →A Paris roofing contractor named Henri Buronfosse reportedly confessed on his deathbed in 1927 that he and an unnamed accomplice had deliberately blocked the chimney of Émile Zola's apartment on the night of 28 September 1902, causing the carbon-monoxide poisoning that killed the novelist. The confession was relayed through a Catholic priest and was not published until 1953.
Read the story →Leicester House stood on the north side of Leicester Square from 1635 to 1791. It served twice in the 18th century as the alternative royal court for the heir-presumptive who was politically estranged from the reigning Hanoverian monarch — under George II's rebellion against George I, and again under Frederick Prince of Wales's rebellion against George II.
Read the story →Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen was the German military attaché at the Paris embassy from 1891 to 1897. The bordereau — the handwritten memorandum that produced the original 1894 Dreyfus treason conviction — had been retrieved from his embassy wastepaper basket by the French intelligence service through its routine cleaning-staff espionage operation. He spent the rest of his life refusing to comment.
Read the story →Alexandrine Zola was sleeping next to Émile when the chimney filled their Paris bedroom with carbon monoxide on the night of 28 September 1902. She woke up. He did not. She lived another twenty-three years, becoming the principal custodian of his literary estate and an unexpectedly forceful figure in the post-Affair Dreyfusard movement.
Read the story →A letter discovered in the Montpellier archives in 1878 — addressed to Edward III from the papal notary Manuel Fieschi around 1336 — claimed that Edward II had escaped his Berkeley Castle imprisonment, walked across Europe in disguise, and was living as a hermit at the Lombard hermitage of Sant'Alberto di Butrio. Modern historians remain divided.
Read the story →Hugh Despenser the Younger was Edward II's principal favourite from about 1318 until the king's deposition in 1326. His public execution at Hereford was one of the most elaborately brutal of the English medieval period — and the man who had ruled England with him died in a Berkeley castle basement nine months later.
Read the story →John, 2nd Baron Hervey was vice-chamberlain to George II from 1730 to 1740. His private *Memoirs* — kept up nightly for ten years, suppressed by his family for ninety, finally published 1848 — are the single best source on the personalities and politics of the early-Hanoverian court. Lord Hervey was also the witty pen behind much of the period's anonymous verse satire.
Read the story →When Émile Zola's remains were transferred to the Panthéon on 4 June 1908, the journalist Louis Grégori shot Alfred Dreyfus twice in the arm at point-blank range. Both bullets struck. Dreyfus survived. Grégori was acquitted by a Parisian jury three months later.
Read the story →While [Alfred Dreyfus was held in solitary confinement on Devil's Island](/articles/dreyfus-devils-island), his wife Lucie wrote to him every week and waited months for replies. Most of her letters were heavily censored by the colonial administration before they reached him. Most of his were censored before they reached her. They corresponded for almost five years across a 7,000-kilometre gap without knowing whether the other was still alive.
Read the story →[Stamford Raffles](/articles/stamford-raffles-singapore) signed the founding treaty for Singapore on 6 February 1819 and then sailed away. William Farquhar — a 49-year-old Scottish officer who had spent 24 years in the East India Company — was left in charge as the first Resident. He ran the colony for five years and was written out of its founding myth.
Read the story →When the French king Charles IV died in February 1328 without a male heir, the French throne passed to his cousin Philip of Valois under a specific reading of the medieval Frankish *Salic Law*. The reading excluded the rival English claim of Edward III through his French-princess mother Isabella. Edward eventually decided he disagreed.
Read the story →Caroline of Ansbach, Queen of Great Britain, had been carrying a strangulated umbilical hernia for fourteen years when it ruptured in November 1737. She had concealed it from everyone including her doctors. She died after twelve days of pain. She was 54.
Read the story →The standard 17th-century explanation for the Salem witch trials was demonic possession. The standard modern alternative is ergot poisoning from contaminated rye. Both theories have problems. The 1976 paper that revived the ergot theory has been argued about ever since.
Read the story →Erik the Red was exiled from Iceland in 982 for killing two men. He spent three years exploring the next island to the west. He returned, organised a settler expedition of 25 ships, and gave the new territory the most successful real-estate name in medieval European history.
Read the story →Eugene V. Debs ran the American Railway Union into the Pullman strike of 1894, lost, went to prison for six months, read Karl Marx in his cell, and came out a socialist. He ran for president five times. The last campaign was conducted from a federal penitentiary, where he was serving ten years for opposing the First World War.
Read the story →Georges Picquart was the head of French Army intelligence in 1896 when he realised that the wrong man had been convicted of treason and sent to Devil's Island. His superiors ordered him to keep quiet. He refused, was framed for forgery, and was imprisoned. Twelve years later he became Minister of War.
Read the story →Konrad Schmid led a flagellant heretical movement in central Germany through the 1360s, predicting that the world would end in 1369. Approximately 168 of his followers were burned at the stake. The exact date and place of Schmid's own death are uncertain. Some of his followers continued to predict the end of the world into the 15th century.
Read the story →The Tyburn gallows at the western edge of medieval London were the main public execution site for the English crown from 1196 to 1783. About sixty thousand people died there. The site is now a traffic junction at Marble Arch, with a plaque almost nobody reads.
Read the story →The literary aristocratic vampire — the seductive, immortal, blood-drinking nobleman of every subsequent vampire story — was invented by John Polidori in 1819 on a rainy Lake Geneva holiday. It took seventy-eight years to reach Bram Stoker. The intermediate steps are mostly forgotten.
Read the story →Cleopatra and Mark Antony had three children. The boys died young. The daughter Cleopatra Selene II was raised by the wife of the man who had killed her parents and married off to a North African client king. She named her son Ptolemy. He was killed by Caligula.
Read the story →Alfred Dreyfus spent four years and seven months in solitary confinement on a small island off French Guiana. He was the only prisoner. His guards were forbidden to speak to him. He kept a diary and survived.
Read the story →According to Plutarch, Mark Antony stripped the library at Pergamon — the second-largest collection in the Hellenistic world — and gave its 200,000 volumes to Cleopatra. The story is probably exaggerated. The library was certainly emptied.
Read the story →In December 1804, Pope Pius VII traveled from Rome to Paris in winter to crown Napoleon Bonaparte Emperor of the French. Napoleon took the crown from his hands and placed it on his own head. Five years later he had the pope kidnapped.
Read the story →Émile Zola was found dead in his Paris bedroom on the morning of 29 September 1902, asphyxiated by carbon monoxide from a smoking fire. The chimney was blocked. A bricklayer's deathbed confession decades later named the man who had blocked it.
Read the story →A torn-up scrap of paper from a German embassy wastebasket convicted the wrong man in 1894. France spent the next twelve years arguing about it.
Read the story →In 1610 four astronomers in four countries pointed early telescopes at the Sun and saw spots. They spent the next decade arguing about who had seen them first.
Read the story →Isabella of France crossed the Channel with fifteen hundred soldiers in 1326, deposed her husband, and ruled England with her lover. Her son removed her at seventeen.
Read the story →Manderup Parsberg outlived the duel by fifty-nine years and outlived his cousin by twenty-four. He never spoke about either.
Read the story →John Polidori was twenty-five. He had written the first English vampire novel, been disowned by Byron, and lost a libel suit. He drank prussic acid on a Wednesday.
Read the story →The Great Chicago Fire killed three hundred people and burned a quarter of the city. Mrs. O'Leary's cow had nothing to do with it. A reporter admitted he made the story up.
Read the story →Roger Mortimer escaped the Tower, invaded England, deposed a king, and ran the country for three years. His own teenage king-by-grace overthrew him in a midnight coup.
Read the story →A decade after President Faure died in her arms, Marguerite Steinheil was charged with the murders of her mother and her husband. Paris had been waiting.
Read the story →In December 1566 the 20-year-old Tycho Brahe and his cousin fought in the dark with rapiers over a mathematical disagreement. Tycho lost the bridge of his nose.
Read the story →Félix Faure had ambitions of being Caesar. On a February afternoon in 1899, he became something else.
Read the story →