Sejanus

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)…

01Griffin's 'Pornography and Silence' (1981) used close readings of Hugh Hefner's published manifestos to argue pornography was hatred wearing the costume of desire.
02Her 1978 'Woman and Nature' was composed in two alternating voices — one the authoritative voice of Western science, one the body it was describing.
03Griffin was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1980 partly on the strength of work her own academic department had refused to recognize as scholarship.

Sejanus ran the Roman Empire as Tiberius's viceroy for a decade — then a single letter from the emperor, read aloud in the Senate, ended it. The Roman crowd tore his body apart in the street before nightfall.

Wilkie Collins

Wilkie Collins drank laudanum by the tumbler — eventually enough to kill several men — and dictated two complete novels in states he later had no memory of. His housekeeper measured the doses. The manuscripts survived him.

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.

Michel Lotito

Michel Lotito — 'Monsieur Mangetout' — ate an entire Cessna 150 aircraft over two years, grinding it into metal filings, plus 18 bicycles, 15 shopping carts, and a coffin.

Jimmy Hoffa

Jimmy Hoffa walked into the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Township, Michigan on July 30, 1975, and was never seen again. Over 50 years later, no body, no confirmed killer.

Claudius

Claudius was found hiding behind a curtain by a Praetorian soldier after Caligula's assassination in 41 CE — trembling and assuming he was next — and was carried to the barracks and declared emperor before dawn.

Susan Griffin

Susan Griffin's 1978 book 'Woman and Nature' interleaved passages about scientific objectivity, factory farming, and the Nazi medical experiments on Jewish women to argue they were the same cognitive operation. She wrote it as prose poetry, not argument.

Turnspit dog

The Turnspit dog — short-legged, long-bodied, now extinct — ran hamster-wheel treadmills bolted to kitchen walls for hours, rotating roasting joints. They worked in pairs, swapping shifts. By 1900, the breed had been deleted from existence.

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.