Holocaust victim

  This photo, taken at the turn of the century, shows Jack Daniel (in the white hat) seated next to George Green, the son of Nathan "Nearest" Green, who was the first Black master distiller in America. It was long believed that Daniel was taught how to make whiskey by a wealthy landowner and Lutheran preacher named Dan Call. However, his true teacher was Nathan Green, who had been rented out by his owners to Call. Green essentially took Daniel under his wing and went on to work for his whiskey business after the end of the Civil War. Green's contribution was more of an open secret, whose story has been passed down for generations. After more than 150 years, Brown-Forman, the company that owns Jack Daniel's, officially recognized Green as the first master distiller (Jack as the second). Much of the history behind American whiskey has often been centered around Scots-Irish and other European distilling traditions; however, enslaved men were heavily involved in the disti...

  The most underrated and genuinely unsettling criminal, in my opinion. Danny LaPlante fits the bill perfectly. He was only 15 to 17 during this whole ordeal, came from a rough upbringing, but was disturbingly creepy regardless. At 15, he went on a single date with a girl who quickly decided she wasn't interested in anything further. She moved on with her life, likely forgetting about him entirely. Some time later, that same girl and her family, she lived with her sister and dad, started experiencing what seemed like paranormal activity in their home: objects moving, strange knocking, unsettling messages appearing on the walls. Her father didn't buy any of it, assuming his daughters were just seeking attention since he worked constantly and their mother had passed away. After months of this escalating, the father got a call at work one day and came home to find his daughters sobbing hysterically at a neighbor's house, refusing to go back inside. That's when he realized...

  The poster made Jan Kostański feel a deep sense of fear. In 1942, German authorities in Warsaw issued a warning that any Polish person caught helping Jews who had escaped from the ghettos could be sentenced to death. Jan was a Polish Catholic teenager at the time. Despite the danger, he had been secretly entering the Warsaw ghetto to help his close Jewish friends, the Wierzbicki family. With the help of his mother, Władysława, Jan soon became involved in a larger effort to smuggle food and other supplies into the ghetto. In the summer of 1942, Jan and his mother managed to find a hiding place for Ajzyk Wierzbicki and his children, Nathan and Nacha. Helping them was extremely dangerous. Still, Jan and Władysława continued to hide and support the Wierzbicki family for the next two years, even though they knew they could be killed if they were discovered. While Nacha was in hiding, she and Jan became very close and eventually fell in love. The couple was photographed together in the...

  The Apple Man of Himachal: Samuel Stokes When Samuel Stokes left his home in Philadelphia at the age of 22 and set off for India, his parents hoped he would return home after a year or two. But that didn't happen. Instead, Stokes made India his home. Stokes worked closely with Mahatma Gandhi and participated in the Non-Cooperation Movement. He was imprisoned for six months in Lahore for sedition and was not released on bail—the only American to be imprisoned during the Indian independence struggle. He wore Khadi, married an Indian woman, learned Sanskrit, became a Hindu, founded a school, and introduced apples to Himachal Pradesh. The mountain state's most famous product owes its origin to the apple cuttings that Stokes brought from America to encourage farmers to grow apples. Samuel Stokes changed his name to Satyanand and, after a trip he took with his young wife in 1914, never returned to the USA. His family still has roots in Kotgarh, Himachal Pradesh, where Stokes began ...

Before World War II, Japanese soldiers were model soldiers. When they helped put down the Boxer Rebellion, they behaved better than Western soldiers. In the Sino-Russian War of 1904-1905, they were very compassionate towards prisoners of war as well as Russian citizens. In the Battle of Manila, they knew they were going to die and, following the Bushido creed, they wanted to take as many as possible from the other side with them. While not a justification, it is an explanation. But Nanking doesn't fall into that category. They were winning. In one generation, the Japanese army had transformed from honorable to horrific. Many of the changes were similar to what happened in Germany. The Japanese thought they were the superior race. They believed they were destined to rule the East. They believed the Chinese were subhuman. But within the army itself, they beat and tortured their own, especially new recruits. If you were a soldier and had been beaten and tortured by your own army, they...

She was scorned, ridiculed, broken; her beauty became a curse. Then, in 1878, amidst the dust and dim light of Abilene's backstreets, Clara Duvall did the unthinkable: She left the brothel that had linked her name to shame. Born in Missouri in 1856, Clara had come west in search of work but found only men who saw her as an object to be used and forgotten. Years passed. The town knew her face, but not her story. No one ever asked how hunger transforms grace into mere survival. It wasn't love that saved her, it was mercy. One evening, Nathan Cole, a rancher and widower, walked into that saloon not seeking pleasure, but justice for his weary soul. He saw Clara's eyes, tired yet brave, and something within him refused to leave her there. He offered her his hand, not out of pity, but for peace. They were married under the bare roof of a chapel, where even the priest hesitated to pronounce her name. But Nathan said it as a vow, not a stain. Together, they left the city that had s...

  And that’s the sort of thing you get shanked for — doesn’t matter if you’re in the rather brutal American prison regime or what some falsely assume to be the more “enlightened” European one. You know this guy in the photo below? He was a famous singer once, called Ian Watkins. Ian Watkins, who is no longer in the land of the living Mr. Watkins, much like Mr. Tate, could not keep his hands to himself. Prisoners tore the man to shreds in the end. He survived several attempts, but in October 2025, he was killed by two other inmates. Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan are to be extradicted to the United Kingdom. And one thing all prisoners, everywhere, seem to universally loathe, is a diddler. Because even a murderer, a pimp or a burgler tends to have a family, a few nephews and nieces, some kids, and on a very primal and visceral level, this causes them to hate and attack men accused of crimes against them

  Very, very sad. In July 1945, a group of 13-year-old girls went camping in America. They swam in a river in Ruidoso, New Mexico. The girl in front of the photo is named Barbara Kent. What none of the girls knew was that nearby, the U.S. military was testing a nuclear bomb as part of the Manhattan Project. Barbara later spoke about what happened that day: “We were all just shocked… then suddenly, there was a big cloud above us and strange lights in the sky,” she remembered. “It even hurt our eyes to look up. The whole sky looked strange, like the sun came out all at once, but really bright.” A few hours later, white flakes started to fall from the sky. The girls were excited. They thought it was snow. They put on their swimsuits and went back to the river to play. “We grabbed the white stuff and put it on our faces,” Barbara said. “But instead of being cold like snow, it was hot. We just thought it was hot because it was summer. We were only 13.” But those flakes were radioactive ...

  While filming Matilda in 1995, eight-year-old Mara Wilson was going through a difficult time at home. Her mother, Suzie, had been diagnosed with bre@st cancer and needed to spend time in the hospital. During filming, Mara’s co-stars Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman played her parents in the movie. They also became a source of comfort for Mara in real life. Whenever Mara’s parents needed to be at the hospital, DeVito and Perlman looked after her. They invited Mara into their home and helped keep her mind away from the difficult situation. Years later, Wilson wrote in her memoir that she was only eight and that the experience was very hard, but DeVito and Perlman were very kind to her. She said she felt that they were like family. Thilini Perera Suzie sadly passed away on April 26, 1996, just months before Matilda was released. For many years, Mara believed that her mother had never been able to see the finished movie. Later, however, Mara learned something very special. Shortly befo...

  George Washington was one of few African-American pioneers who migrated from the south to the Pacific Northwest. Born on Aug. 15, 1817, to a black slave and an English woman, his parents gave him to a white family, James and Anna Cochran, to escape a life of slavery in Virginia. In 1850, Washington traveled west along the Oregon Trail. When he arrived, the territory’s black exclusion laws pushed him north of the Columbia River. He became the fourth American to settle in what would eventually become Lewis County, Washington. He chose a 640-acre plot of land between the Chehalis river and the Skookumchuck River. In 1875, he and his wife Mary Jane eventually founded the town of Centerville, which was later renamed Centralia, about halfway between Seattle and Portland in Washington State. Centralia is the largest city in the United States that was ever founded by a couple of color,” A portrait of George Washington and his dog, Rockwood, outside his Centralia home.

  Most Titanic victims froze within 15 minutes. The ship's head baker survived for two hours—after refusing his lifeboat seat, downing liquor, and riding the sinking stern down like an elevator. When the ship struck the iceberg on April 15, 1912, 33-year-old Charles Joughin was off duty. He immediately mustered his staff of 13 bakers and ordered them to bring more than 50 loaves of bread up to the boat deck to provision the lifeboats. He then assisted on the port side, loading women and children into Lifeboat 10. Because the lifeboats swinging over the dark ocean looked precarious, many passengers were terrified to board. Joughin resorted to forcibly grabbing women and dropping them into the boats. Joughin was assigned as the captain of Lifeboat 10, granting him an authorized seat to safety. He refused to board, later testifying that taking a seat would set a bad example for the other men. Instead, Joughin returned to his quarters and poured himself a glass of liqueur. He then went...

  Johanna July was a Black Seminole, born around 1857 in a place called Nacimiento de Los Negros in northern Mexico. Her family was made up of Seminole Indians and former enslaved African Americans who had left Florida and settled in Mexico after the Seminole War ended in 1842. They had moved there when many Seminole Indians and Black Seminoles left the U.S. and moved to northern Mexico in 1849. In 1870, the U.S. Army needed help from people who knew the border area, so they hired Black Seminoles as translators and scouts. This led to many of them, including Johanna’s family, returning to the United States. They settled in or near Eagle Pass, Texas, in 1871. Johanna learned how to train wild horses and help herd the family’s goats and cattle. After her father died, Johanna continued working with the stock and trained horses for the U.S. Army and local ranchers. Johanna had her own special way of training horses. She would take a horse into the Rio Grande River, swim with it, grab i...

She drank whiskey, swore often, and smoked handmade cigars. She wore pants under her skirt and a gun under her apron. At six feet tall and two hundred pounds, Mary Fields was an intimidating woman. Mary lived in Montana, in a town called Cascade. She was a special member of the community there. All schools would close on her birthday, and though women were not allowed entry into saloons, she was given special permission by the mayor to come in anytime and to any saloon she liked. But Mary wasn’t from Montana. She was born into enslavement in Tennessee sometime in the early 1830s, and lived enslaved for more than thirty years until slavery was abolished. As a free woman, life led her first to Florida to work for a family and then Ohio when part of the family moved. When Mary was 52, her close friend who lived in Montana became ill with pneumonia. Upon hearing the news, Mary dropped everything and came to nurse her friend back to health. Her friend soon recovered and Mary decided to stay...

  The Rape of Nanking This horrific event became known as the Nanking Rape or Nanking Massacre. In late 1937, over 20,000 women, including children and the elderly, were brutally raped during the Japanese occupation of the city of Nanking. They massacred approximately 150,000 male prisoners of war and over 50,000 male civilians. The bodies of thousands of victims of the massacre were thrown into the Yangtze River until the river water turned red with the corpses of the massacre victims. After sacking the city of Nanking, the Japanese burned and annihilated a third of the city's area. Nanking, once themost prosperous city and industrial centerChina took decades to recover from the devastation it experienced. It was abandoned as the national capital in 1949 in favor of Beijing. According to the Japanese army's interpretation of the imperial rescript "theJapan had to educate the Chinese and transform China by killing its own people in order to pursue a Greater East Asia Co-Pr...

  In April 2009, Las Vegas gambler John Kane discovered a software bug in a video poker machine that would eventually let him and a friend win more than $1 million.The flaw had been hiding inside IGT’s Game King machines for seven years.Kane discovered that, under a precise sequence of button presses, he could win a valuable hand at a low denomination and then make the machine replay that same hand at a much higher value.He called his friend Andre Nestor.Together, they worked out how to trigger the glitch reliably and began moving between casinos.Kane alone was later estimated by the FBI to have collected more than $500,000 from eight Las Vegas casinos. Nestor eventually won roughly another $480,000 using the exploit in Pennsylvania.Then casino surveillance noticed something impossible.Kane was repeatedly winning jackpots using the exact same hands.He was arrested, and federal prosecutors later charged both men with computer fraud and conspiracy, arguing that deliberately exploitin...

  When Heath Ledger died, his two-year-old daughter wasn't named in his will. Not because he'd chosen to leave her out — but because the document had been written before she existed. Ledger signed his will in April 2003, when he was just 24. At the time, he hadn't yet met Michelle Williams, and their daughter, Matilda, wouldn't be born until October 2005. So the will did the only thing it could: it left his estate to the people who were his family then — his parents and his three sisters. Then, on January 22, 2008, Heath died suddenly at just 28. His estate was later valued at more than $16 million. And almost immediately, questions began to swirl about what would happen to Matilda, who by law hadn't been included at all. His family's answer was immediate and unwavering. His father, Kim Ledger, said Matilda was their "absolute priority," and that Michelle was an integral part of the family — both would be looked after, exactly as Heath would have wante...

  A prisoner sentenced to death and awaiting execution asked as his last wish for a pencil and paper. After writing for several minutes, the condemned man called the prison guard and asked that the letter be delivered to his biological mother. The letter said... Mother, if there were more justice in this world, we would both be executed, not just me. You are as guilty as I am for the life I have led. Remember when I stole and took home a bicycle from a boy like me? You helped me hide it so my father wouldn't find out. Remember when I stole money from my neighbor's wallet? You came with me to spend it at the shopping mall. Remember when you argued with my father and he left? He just wanted to correct me for stealing the final results of the course, which led to my expulsion. Mom, I was just a child, then I became a troubled teenager, and now I'm a rather poorly formed man. Mom, I was just a child who needed correction, not approval. But even so, I forgive you! I only ask tha...