Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging

"Queens" of Mysore : left, Krishnaraja Wadiyar III 's first wife, Devajammani has a discoloration around the mouth, thought to be due to the blowing of variolation dust in the nose ("nasal insufflation"). Right, his second wife shows the…

Sir Geoffrey Luttrell , mounted, being assisted by his wife and daughter-in-law. Folio 202v.

The DU penetrator of a 30 mm round from the GAU-8 Avenger

Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging

The AWB's tri-legged swastika flag flew at rallies where Eugene Terre'Blanche rode a white horse before crowds of 50,000 — a movement that threatened civil war, then imploded when apartheid ended anyway.

Dwight York

Dwight York built a full-scale Egyptian pyramid on a Georgia compound, declared himself an extraterrestrial, and was convicted in 2004 of molesting over 100 children — some as young as four years old.

Variolation

Ottoman physicians rubbed smallpox scabs into children's skin scratches centuries before Jenner's vaccine. The practice cut mortality from roughly 30% to under 2%, yet Europe called it barbarism until the death tolls reversed.

Battle of Isandlwana

At Isandlwana, January 1879, 1,300 British regulars were annihilated by a Zulu force of 20,000 — partly because a quartermaster refused to issue reserve ammunition without the proper paperwork.

Luttrell Psalter

Commissioned around 1320 for Sir Geoffrey Luttrell of Lincolnshire, the Luttrell Psalter fills its psalm margins with plowing serfs, acrobats, hybrid monsters, and a armored snail attacking a knight — 309 pages where medieval England's daily life sits beside its absurdist imagination.

Sabena Flight 571

Benjamin Netanyahu — then a 26-year-old Sayeret Matkal captain — was shot in the arm during the storming of hijacked Sabena Flight 571. He helped drag out a gunman while bleeding on the tarmac.

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.

Depleted uranium

The US Army fired roughly 300 tons of depleted uranium rounds into Iraq and Kuwait, then left the radioactive debris in the sand. Birth defect rates in Basra spiked in the years that followed.

Coral Castle

Edward Leedskalnin, a 5-foot, 100-pound Latvian immigrant, quarried and erected 1,100 tons of coral blocks alone at night in Florida — then refused to explain how. He left no drawings.