When Edward S. Curtis died in Los Angeles in October 1952, the New York Times gave him six sentences. The last one read: "Mr. Curtis was also widely known as a photographer." Which is a bit like saying Brunel dabbled in bridges. Curtis had spent three decades hauling a huge glass-plate camera across the American West and up into the Arctic. He took more than 40,000 pictures, recorded over 10,000 wax cylinders of songs and speech and produced a 20-volume work that one New York

Jessica Hahn was promised $265,000 to stay silent about Jim Bakker. She says she saw $20,300 of it, and in 1988 a judge ordered the money paid back. Here's her side of the story, and where she is now.

Where was The Wicker Man filmed? Dumfries and Galloway, not an island. The 1973 locations, the plastic blossom, a secret body double and one nervous goat.

Ian Brady was arrested on 7 October 1965 by a policeman dressed as a bread man. Myra Hindley went home, and stayed free for four more days. Here's what she did with them.

The Battle of Passchendaele ended after Canadian troops took the ruined village on 6 November 1917. Here's what it cost and why the ridge was soon lost.

A Hamburg club owner got three Beatles thrown out of Germany in 1960 over a curfew and a burnt condom. Here's how the feud really played out.

Jim Bakker died 37 years to the day after a jury convicted him of fraud. Everyone remembers the church secretary. Here are the four scandals, including the one that should have stopped him in 1979.

In October 1936, 200 jobless men walked 291 miles from Jarrow to London with a petition for work. Here's what happened and what they actually won.

In October 1892 the Dalton Gang tried to rob two banks at once in Coffeyville, Kansas. Twelve minutes later four of them were dead. Here's how it went wrong.

Harry Oakes spent 15 years hunting gold, struck one of the richest mines on earth and was murdered in his bed in Nassau in 1943. Nobody was ever convicted.

Ali and Frazier's 1975 Thrilla in Manila: a dictator's PR stunt, a mistress scandal, a tin-roofed furnace and 14 rounds that broke them both.

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