The Dinner Party

01Chicago's 'The Dinner Party' features 39 ceramic vulva-plates for women including Sojourner Truth, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Virginia Woolf.
02The installation required over 400 volunteer workers and five years of labor before its 1979 debut at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
03The Heritage Floor beneath the table lists 999 additional women's names in gold on porcelain tiles — women who didn't even get a plate.

The epitome of the Rohan Master's art is the " Lamentation of the Virgin " (f. 135, Pl. 57) from the Hours of the Cross. The grieving Virgin cannot be consoled by the Apostle John , who looks up in consternation at a saddened God.

Gasoline in a glass jar

The Dinner Party

Judy Chicago spent five years building a triangular table setting for 39 women erased from history — each place set with a hand-painted ceramic plate whose center is an explicit vulva. Virginia Woolf's plate took three years alone.

Battle of the Crater

Union engineers dug 511 feet of tunnel, packed it with 8,000 pounds of powder, and blew a perfect 170-foot crater in Confederate lines — then sent infantry into the hole, where they were slaughtered like livestock in a pit.

Rohan Hours

In the Rohan Hours, painted around 1420, a skeletal dying man lies naked on bare ground while God leans down from the sky to address him directly — a private conversation between a mortal and the divine, held across a page smaller than a hardback book.

Battle of Manzikert

Sultan Alp Arslan used the captured Byzantine Emperor Romanos IV as a literal footstool, then released him for ransom. The humiliation triggered a civil war that handed Anatolia to the Turks within a decade.

Joe Hayashi

Joe Hayashi was shot twice and kept fighting, killing 11 Germans and destroying two gun positions in a single action near Tendola, Italy, 1945. He died days later. His Distinguished Service Cross sat in a drawer for 55 years.

Kathy Acker

Acker lifted pages of Dickens verbatim, inserted orgies and gang rapes, and called it literary theory. Arrested for obscenity in the UK in 1984; the charges were dropped.

Entebbe raid

At Entebbe, hijackers sorted 248 passengers by passport — Jews to one side, non-Jews released. The remaining hostages were held in a terminal as ransom for 53 prisoners held across four countries. Israeli commandos flew 2,500 miles to answer.

Gasoline

Thomas Midgley Jr. invented both leaded gasoline in 1921 and Freon in 1928 — one poisoned global blood lead levels for fifty years, one carved a hole in the ozone layer. One man, two planetary-scale mistakes.

Night Trap

In December 1993, Night Trap was held up in a US Senate hearing alongside Mortal Kombat; Senator Joe Lieberman called it filth, and within a year the ESRB existed, rating every game sold in America.