Japanese American Citizens League

The Liver of Piacenza , a bronze diagram of the sheep's liver found near Piacenza with Etruscan inscriptions

01Downer's arrest came after she showed women their own cervices using a plastic speculum and a flashlight at a Los Angeles feminist health clinic.
02The prosecution's key exhibit was a jar of yogurt Downer had inserted into a woman's vagina as a yeast infection remedy — the 'yogurt case.'
03Her 1972 acquittal was cited in the founding documents of the women's self-help health movement, which spread to 50 cities within three years.

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)…

Japanese American Citizens League

The Japanese American Citizens League publicly urged Nisei to cooperate with internment orders in 1942 — calling resistance un-American. Decades later the JACL issued formal apologies to the resisters it had condemned.

Haruspex

Before every major campaign, a Roman general knelt beside a haruspex who split open a sheep and read the liver's lobes like a map. If the liver was diseased, the army stayed home.

Carol Downer

In 1972, Carol Downer was arrested for practicing medicine without a license. Her crime: inserting a speculum into another woman's vagina so she could see her own cervix for the first time. She was acquitted after an eight-day trial.

Nikephoros II Phokas

The Byzantine emperor who reconquered Cilicia, Cyprus, and parts of Syria slept on a hair shirt on the floor and petitioned to have soldiers killed in battle canonized as martyrs by the Church.

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.

Operation Eagle Claw

Eight Americans burned to death in the Iranian desert before a single shot was fired — a rescue mission that killed only its own rescuers, 53 hostages still chained inside Tehran.

1995 Tour de France

Fabio Casartelli died on Stage 15; the peloton rolled neutralized through Stage 16 the next morning, completing the course where he was killed — the race did not stop.

Liu Ziye

Liu Ziye forced his own aunts into his imperial harem, declared them imperial concubines, then was stabbed to death by a palace servant at sixteen — his ministers had arranged the blade.

Battle of Carrhae

Rome's captured eagle standards were paraded through Parthian streets while 10,000 survivors were marched east to garrison Merv — never to return. Rome lost seven legions; the eagles haunted Augustus for decades.