Battle of Solferino

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Swiss banker Henry Dunant arrived at Solferino the morning after battle and found 40,000 wounded and dead rotting in one field, untended. He spent three days organizing local women to bandage men from both sides. He invented the Red Cross.

In 2014, Isnilon Hapilon pledged bayah — formal oath of allegiance — to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, absorbing his Abu Sayyaf faction into the Islamic State's caliphate project. The pledge turned a kidnap-for-ransom gang into an ISIS province.

Foucault's 'History of Sexuality' — three volumes published before AIDS killed him — argued the Victorian era didn't repress sex; it invented an entirely new way to talk, confess, and be made by it.

Gustav Landauer, Germany's foremost anarchist philosopher, was stomped and shot by soldiers in a Munich prison courtyard on May 2, 1919. His last book on Shakespeare was still unfinished. Philosophy ended with a boot.

CIH triggered on April 26 — Chernobyl's anniversary — flashing BIOS chips into permanent silence. Written by Taiwanese student Chen Ing-hau in 1998, it destroyed hardware, not just files.

At 19, aboard a steamship to England, Chandrasekhar calculated that stars above 1.4 solar masses must collapse catastrophically. Arthur Eddington publicly mocked him; 52 years later, the Nobel committee agreed with the teenager.

Fred Lorz crossed the 1904 Olympic marathon finish line first, accepted a laurel wreath from Alice Roosevelt, and posed for photos before admitting he'd hitched a car ride for 11 miles.

Tarrare, an 18th-century French soldier, ate live cats, eels, and a silver fork whole — and was suspected of swallowing a toddler from a hospital ward. Hunger never left him.

Gliders scraped to a halt on a French bridge in complete darkness at 0016 on June 6, 1944 — Major John Howard's men were inside the German wire before the garrison heard a sound.