Alice Schwarzer

A carpet beater

01Federici calculates that roughly 50,000 women were executed as witches across Europe between the 15th and 18th centuries.
02She argues witch trials peaked precisely in regions where women held common land rights — the burnings followed the enclosures.
03Federici began the Wages for Housework campaign in 1972, demanding states pay women for domestic labor as a precondition for any feminist politics.

A tulip, known as "the Viceroy" ( viseroij ), displayed in the 1637 Dutch catalogue Verzameling van een Meenigte Tulipaanen ("Collection of a Crowd of Tulips"). Its bulb was offered for sale for between 3,000 and 4,200 guilders (florins)…

In 1971, German editor Alice Schwarzer persuaded 374 women — including Romy Schneider — to sign a magazine cover confessing to illegal abortions. The public self-incrimination was calculated to overwhelm any prosecution.

Carpet beater

Woven rattan, swung hard against hanging rugs in the yard every spring — the carpet beater was killed by one invention, the vacuum cleaner, within thirty years of its own peak production.

Timothy Wilson Spencer

Timothy Spencer was executed in Virginia in 1994 as the first person in U.S. history put to death on DNA evidence alone — evidence that also exonerated David Vasquez, who had already confessed and pled guilty to one of Spencer's murders.

Silvia Federici

Silvia Federici's 'Caliban and the Witch' reread the mass burning of 50,000 European women not as superstition but as a coordinated war to destroy communal female economic autonomy before capitalism could take root.

Tulip mania

In 1637 Amsterdam, a single Semper Augustus tulip bulb sold for 10,000 guilders — enough to buy a canal house. Within three months the market collapsed; bulbs sold for the price of onions.

Henry Plummer

Henry Plummer was elected sheriff of Bannack, Montana, in 1863 while secretly running the Innocents, a road-agent gang credited with over 100 murders. Vigilantes hanged him on his own gallows five months into his term.

No Gun Ri massacre

In July 1950, U.S. soldiers opened fire on hundreds of South Korean refugees sheltering beneath the double arch of the No Gun Ri railroad bridge. Survivors described three days of killing. Survivors existed.

Jiayuguan City

Jiayuguan fort — the Great Wall's westernmost gate, built in 1372 — was called the 'mouth of China.' Exiles who passed through received no return road; one legend says a single leftover brick still sits unused inside the gate.

Michael Milken

Michael Milken financed the 1980s on junk bonds, paid a then-record $600 million fine, served 22 months in prison, and emerged rebranded as a cancer-research philanthropist. The decade he dismantled made him a saint.