Terrible People from History

Nature versus nurture is one of the oldest debates there is. Are we predetermined to become who we become, or is it the world we encounter that shapes us into who we are? The story of David (”Tiger”) Roche and Boyle Roche seems almost…

The cliched idea of the “thin line between genius and insanity” is one that has been discussed by both psychiatrists, cultural commentators and pop psychologists for decades. In one sense it’s an iteration of the “tortured artist”…

It speaks a lot to the integrity of a justice system when it finds somebody innocent based on the evidence, even when all involved are convinced of his guilt. The jury in Chester Burge’s trial for murder had every reason to find him guilty.…

Laskarina Bouboulina was born in chains, both figuratively and (in a way) literally. She was conceived during one of her mother’s conjugal visits to her father in a prison in Istanbul and was born nine months later in May of 1771. Her…

The story of the abolition of slavery in America is a long and tortuous one. Like many such stories it has its heroes and its villains. One group that almost always fell on the right side of history was the Society of Friends, better known…

The American frontier was a place of legends, tall tales and wild stories. But among these stories were true tales of extreme human endurance and courage in the face of extreme conditions. One such story became a legend in its own right,…

We don’t know as much about history as we like to think we do sometimes. For example, almost our entire knowledge of the druids of ancient Britain comes from the writings of the Romans who quite thoroughly suppressed them. How much of what…

Piracy has been used throughout history as a tool of state policy. Giving free reign to brigands to attack civilian merchants from an enemy kingdom is definitely one way to weaken your enemy and enrich yourself, though one that does seem…

Marriage is a tricky business, even in a legal sense. Victorian law treated the wife as the servant of the husband, which among other things meant that a wife killing her husband was (up until 1828) actually guilty of “petty treason” and…

To quote the great Terry Pratchett, people always seem to have a “little blank spot in their heads where someone had written: Kings. What a good idea.” Even in modern times, when we fool ourselves into thinking we’ve moved on from this, you…