Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization

1920 advertisement for the Thor electric washing machine.

Albert von Le Coq

Anti-immigrant protesters in Calais hold a sign in French reading "Diversity is a code word for white genocide", above a banner calling for remigration (8 November 2015).

Coat of arms of the Indies Company, with the reclining figure representing the Mississippi River taken from Law's Compagnie d'Occident , and the motto Florebo quocumque ferar taken from Louis XIV's East India Company

Tupac Shakur (right) and The Notorious B.I.G. (left), the two main figures of the East Coast–West Coast hip-hop rivalry, prior to the conflict in 1993 in Los Angeles. The image was also used in the 2002 feature-length documentary film…

Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization

IMRO's internal purge squads killed so many of their own members — by some counts more than Ottoman officials ever did — that by the 1920s the organization was functionally a self-consuming assassination machine.

Radullan Sahiron

Raddulan Sahiron commands Abu Sayyaf with one arm — the other lost to combat — and has carried a $1 million U.S. State Department bounty since 2002. He has evaded capture for over two decades in Sulu.

Vidkun Quisling

Vidkun Quisling seized the Norwegian government by radio announcement on the night of Germany's 1940 invasion. He was executed by firing squad in 1945 — and his surname had already entered the dictionary as the universal word for traitor.

Thor washing machine

The 1908 Thor washing machine married bare copper wiring to a full tub of water and called it progress. Its inventor, Alva Fisher, left the ground wire out entirely. It sold briskly.

Albert von Le Coq

Albert von Le Coq dismantled Kizil's painted cave walls with bread knives and shipped the slabs to Berlin in wooden crates — where Allied bombs destroyed most of them in 1943.

White genocide conspiracy theory

A claim of white genocide in South Africa — built on disputed murder statistics from Afrikaner advocacy sites — migrated from Boer forums to Brenton Tarrant's manifesto, cited by name before the Christchurch massacre.

John Law's Company

John Law — a Scottish gambler who killed a man in a duel — convinced France to replace gold with paper backed by Louisiana swampland. Within two years, the word 'millionaire' was coined, then the crash.

East Coast–West Coast hip-hop rivalry

By 1997, two of rap's biggest figures were dead and their labels were in ruin. What began as promotional rivalry between Death Row and Bad Boy became geography that determined whose side you were on at gunpoint.

Battle of Chosin Reservoir

At −35 °C, 17,000 UN troops punched through 120,000 encircling Chinese soldiers over 17 days at Chosin Reservoir. Weapons froze mid-fire. Marines carried their dead rather than leave them. They called the retreat a march.