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