Mountain Meadows Massacre

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In 1857, Mormon militiamen and Paiute allies killed 120 Arkansas emigrants at Mountain Meadows, Utah — then blamed the Paiutes for twenty years. Only one man, John D. Lee, was ever executed, in 1877, shot at the site.

At 23, Spinoza received the harshest cherem—formal excommunication—in Amsterdam's Jewish community. The writ called his 'abominable heresies' and 'monstrous deeds' unspecified, and they remain unspecified to this day.

Buried in a Suffolk mound around 625 CE with a 27-metre ship and a king's full treasure, the Sutton Hoo helmet was found in 1939 in over 500 fragments — reconstructed, it still carries the pressed impression of a human face in its iron cheekplates.

Worth $100 million in 1900, Hetty Green wore the same black dress until it rotted and allegedly refused a surgeon's fee for her son Ned's infected leg — he lost the limb. She ate cold oatmeal to avoid heating it.

Serrano sank a plastic crucifix in a tank of his own urine, photographed it glowing amber, and received a $15,000 National Endowment for the Arts grant. Congress spent months trying to defund the NEA.

Apulian peasants built conical limestone roofs with no mortar so they could be legally dismantled within hours when tax inspectors approached. The roofs reassembled the same day. The Bourbon inspectors kept coming.

Iraq invaded Kuwait at 2 a.m. on August 2, 1990, partly because Kuwait was drilling at a slant into the Rumaila oil field beneath their shared border — stealing, Baghdad claimed, $2.4 billion in Iraqi oil.

Deported to Italy in 1946 as a 'dangerous alien,' Lucky Luciano ran narcotics networks and American mob strategy from a Naples apartment via transatlantic phone — for fifteen more years.

Erected after 193 AD, the Column of Marcus Aurelius depicts Romans burning German villages and beheading captives in a 190-metre spiral. It was so ignored that a hermit lived inside it for years.