On the night of 30 September 1962, a mob of more than 2,500 people laid siege to a university building in Oxford, Mississippi. They threw bricks and bottles of acid, lobbed Molotov cocktails, fired rifles from the dark and drove a bulldozer and a stolen fire engine at the federal marshals guarding the front steps. The person they were trying to get at was a 29-year-old Air Force veteran called James Meredith, who was sitting in a dormitory a few hundred yards away. All he wan

On the evening of 29 September 1913, one of the most famous engineers on the planet ate a pleasant dinner aboard a ferry leaving Antwerp, said goodnight to his friends and headed off to his cabin. Nobody ever saw Rudolf Diesel alive again. His bed hadn't been slept in. His hat and coat turned up neatly folded by the stern rail. And more than a century later, people still can't agree whether he jumped, was pushed or simply walked away from his own life. Quick Answers •

Henry Tandey was the most decorated British private soldier to come home from the First World War. He won the Victoria Cross, the Distinguished Conduct Medal and the Military Medal in the space of about five weeks in 1918. By rights he should be remembered for that alone. Instead he's remembered for something he couldn't recall doing, in a place the other man probably wasn't, on the word of the least trustworthy witness of the 20th century. The story goes that on a French bat

Picture a Black family setting off on a long drive across America in the 1950s. Before they leave, they pack enough food for the whole journey, because they don't know which restaurants will serve them. They bring blankets in case no motel will take them, and some families carried a bucket or a coffee can because roadside toilets could be off limits too. They fill the tank at every chance, in case the next petrol station won't sell to them. And they plan their route so they'r

In 2011, the Nigerian-American writer Nnedi Okorafor won the World Fantasy Award for her novel Who Fears Death. It was one of the biggest honours in her field. The trophy was a bust of H.P. Lovecraft, the father of modern cosmic horror, sculpted by the cartoonist Gahan Wilson. Not long afterwards, she came across some of the things Lovecraft had written about Black people. She wrote about her conflicted feelings on her blog: what did it mean for a Black writer to be handed an

Calling someone an idiot is fine, but it's a bit flat, isn't it? The Georgians had far better options. If your neighbour was fat and lazy, she was a fussock. If your boss was a tight-fisted miser, he was a muckworm. If some bloke in a tight waistcoat was showing off down the pub, he was a twiddlepoop, and if he was just plain thick, he was a jolterhead. Most of these words have been dead for two hundred years. We only know about them because two very different men in the 1700

In a glass case at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia stands one of the strangest skeletons you'll ever see. At first glance it looks like someone's wrapped a normal skeleton in extra bone. Thick bony ribbons run across the back. Sheets of bone lock the shoulders to the ribs. The spine is fused into a single twisted column. There's bone where no bone should ever be. It belonged to Harry Raymond Eastlack, a Philadelphia man with stone man syndrome, who spent almost his entire l

Sometime around 1960, a teenage maths prodigy sat down in a small room at Harvard, with electrodes stuck to his body and a bright light in his face. Behind a one-way mirror, a camera was rolling. Across the table sat a confident young law student who'd been given a detailed plan for one job: tearing apart everything the teenager believed in. The teenager's code name in the study was Lawful. His real name was Theodore Kaczynski, and between 1978 and 1995 he'd kill three people

Some photographers just take pictures. Horace Roye smuggled diamonds in South Africa, castrated sheep with his own teeth, ran with Oswald Mosley's fascists and the Communist Party on alternate nights, and put the first nude photograph ever published in a British national newspaper on the front of the Daily Mirror. He beat two separate obscenity prosecutions, invented a 3D nude photography process, was friends with the man who claimed to have found a supposedly cursed Mayan cr

On 25 June 1894, around 500 people gathered outside the Massachusetts State House in Boston to watch a young mother climb onto a heavy women's bicycle and wobble off down Beacon Street. She was supposedly riding around the world for a bet. She'd only learned to ride a few days earlier. She had three kids under six at home, a pearl-handled revolver in her bag and a brand new surname she'd sold to a spring water company for $100. Her name was Annie Londonderry. Except it wasn't

Most people know the broad strokes of Joseph Merrick's life. A severely deformed man in Victorian London, exhibited in a freak show, rescued by a kindly surgeon, given a home at a hospital until his death at 27. What most retellings skip is that the actual medical question at the centre of his story, what was actually wrong with him, still doesn't have a confirmed answer, more than a century of theories, DNA tests and one very famous misdiagnosis later. The story of trying to

On the night of 1 August 1946, a crowd of armed men gathered outside the McMinn County jail in Athens, Tennessee, and were preparing to blow its front off. They weren't gangsters or rioters. Most had just spent years fighting in Europe and the Pacific, and they'd come home to a town run by a political machine that arrested returning soldiers for cash. Inside the jail, the sheriff's deputies had locked themselves in with the ballot boxes. By about 3am the deputies had surrende

The Tour de France looks pretty glamorous on the telly these days. Helicopters sweep over sunflower fields, riders glide up mountain passes, and everyone sips their wine pretending they understand the time gaps. But dig into the race's back catalogue and you'll find something closer to a demolition derby than a polished sporting event. Riders have been punched off their bikes, doped to the eyeballs, run off the road by cars and, in a handful of grim cases, killed. Fans have s

Emily Capper went to the Gresford colliery offices every single week for years, asking the same question. Had they found her son yet? He was 35 years old, married with children of his own, and his body was one of 254 that would never come out of the mine. Emily kept asking anyway. She was still writing letters and signing petitions in 1938, four years after the explosion, and she never got the answer she wanted. Her story runs right through the middle of the Gresford disaster

Most people who've heard of sex magic think it starts and ends with Aleister Crowley. It doesn't. The idea that orgasm can be used as a tool for magic was being sold by mail order in 1870s America by a mixed-race spiritualist who'd recruited Black troops for the Union army. A woman took her own life in 1902 rather than face prison over her writing on sex and spirituality. A rocket scientist tried to summon a goddess with it in 1946, and the man helping him ended up running of

Jerry Brudos's wife and kids weren't allowed into his garage without ringing an intercom bell first and waiting for him to answer. They thought it was just Dad's workshop, somewhere he tinkered with electronics after his day job. It wasn't. Between January 1968 and April 1969, Brudos used that locked garage in a modest Salem, Oregon, house to strangle women, take their shoes and photograph their bodies, while his family lived their ordinary lives just a few feet away on the o

Camille du Gast jumped out of a hot air balloon over Paris for fun, raced cars in a competition so deadly the French government shut it down mid-race, refused to abandon a sinking boat until her whole crew was safe, and rode alone across Morocco on horseback. Then, in 1910, her own daughter tried to have her murdered. Somehow she's still one of the least talked-about women of the Belle Epoque, a period that produced no shortage of famous eccentrics. Her real story is stranger

Quick answers Who was Robert Clive? A clerk turned East India Company general who won the 1757 Battle of Plassey, became governor of Bengal, and returned to Britain enormously rich, only to spend his final years defending himself against corruption charges in Parliament. Why is his statue controversial? Clive is blamed by many historians for the exploitative rule that helped cause the Bengal famine of 1769 to 1773, which killed millions, and campaigners argue a statue honouri

Quick answers What was Plato's alternative to democracy? Rule by philosopher-kings: a small class of highly educated guardians, selected young and trained for decades, who owned no private property and ruled purely because they understood justice and the good better than anyone else could. Why did Plato think democracy was bad? He argued ordinary people lack the specialised training to govern well, that democratic votes get swayed by emotion and rhetoric rather than reason, a

In October 1912, a young woman from a small village in southwest Serbia cut her hair, put on her brother's conscription papers and walked into the First Balkan War under his name. By the time she finally stopped fighting, more than a decade and two wars later, Milunka Savić had been wounded close to a dozen times, had personally marched dozens of enemy soldiers into captivity with nothing but a rifle and her own nerve, and had been decorated more times than almost any soldier