Estelle Ishigo

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)…

North American F-100 Super Sabre dropping napalm in a training exercise

Close-up of a barbed wire

Estelle Ishigo was white, American-born, and under no legal obligation to be interned. She followed her Japanese American husband Arthur into Poston, Arizona, anyway — and drew what she saw. Her sketches are among the only civilian visual records of camp life.

The Age of Reason

Thomas Paine dismantled the Bible verse by verse from a Paris prison cell in 1793, fully expecting the guillotine. The chalk mark on his cell door was drawn on the wrong side by accident.

Tulip mania

In 1637 Amsterdam, a single Semper Augustus tulip bulb sold for 10,000 guilders — enough to buy a canal house. The market collapsed in one week in February, leaving traders holding contracts for flowers that didn't exist.

Roy Bean

Judge Roy Bean, self-appointed 'Law West of the Pecos,' fined a dead man's corpse $40 and a revolver for carrying a concealed weapon. His courtroom doubled as a saloon, and he held court between drinks.

Vermin Supreme

Vermin Supreme has campaigned in every U.S. presidential race since 1992 wearing a rubber boot as a hat, promising mandatory tooth-brushing laws and one free government pony for every American citizen.

Napalm

Korea was the proving ground where napalm became a mass-casualty weapon. The U.S. dropped 32,357 tons on the peninsula. Villages burned at 1,000 °C. The formula perfected there was still in use in Vietnam.

Presidency of Rodrigo Duterte

A sitting president joked, live on stage, that he should have 'gone first' before soldiers raped and killed Australian missionary Jacqueline Hamill in 1989. The crowd laughed. He won the election anyway.

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.

Barbed wire

Joseph Glidden's 1874 barbed-wire patent — filed after sketching the design on a coffee grinder — closed the American open range within a decade and then reappeared at the Somme, herding men into machine-gun fire.