Category
No — the curse was substantially a press invention of the 1920s, and the mortality figures for those actually present do not support it. Where it came from. Howard Carter opened the tomb in November
The nursing image is the least important thing about her. Nightingale's enduring contribution was statistical and administrative — she was a pioneering data analyst who used evidence to force reform
The evidence that she did any meaningful espionage is remarkably weak, and modern historians largely regard her as a woman executed for reasons that had more to do with French morale in 1917 than
Probably not in the way the story tells it — he died of peritonitis following a ruptured appendix, and whether the blows caused it or merely coincided with an illness already underway has never been
The overwhelming scholarly consensus is yes — and the authorship question persists not because the evidence is thin but because the evidence is of a kind that disappoints people who expect a genius
Yes — though the popular image of a man who heard nothing at all for his entire career compresses a gradual decline over some twenty-five years into a single dramatic fact. What the evidence shows.
A formerly enslaved man who bought his own freedom and became a leading figure in the British abolitionist movement, principally through an autobiography that was a genuine publishing phenomenon and
A British archaeologist, traveller, Arabic speaker and intelligence officer who was central to drawing the borders of modern Iraq — a role generally attributed in popular memory to men, and one whose
A British chemist who used X-ray crystallography to determine the three-dimensional structures of biologically critical molecules — including penicillin, vitamin B12 and insulin — and who remains the
A marine biologist and writer whose 1962 book Silent Spring documented the ecological damage caused by synthetic pesticides — and which is widely regarded as having started the modern environmental
An American social reformer who co-founded Hull House in Chicago, effectively created the profession of social work in the United States, and became the first American woman to receive the Nobel
As a ruler, substantially — she was among the most consequential monarchs of the eighteenth century. As the subject of the story most people know about her, no: the horse legend is a fabrication, and
No — printing existed for centuries before him in East Asia. What he invented was a system that made printing with movable type economically transformative in Europe, which is a narrower and more
Yes in effect, and not in the way the popular image suggests — she held no formal command, is not recorded as having killed anyone, and her contribution was substantially moral and strategic rather
Not definitively — but the most probable explanation has been consistent for decades, and it is far less exotic than the theories that circulate: she ran out of fuel and came down in the Pacific.
By the definition most historians and aviation bodies use, yes — and the qualifier matters, because several other people flew something into the air earlier, and the dispute turns on what counts as
The Chinese scientist who discovered artemisinin, the compound that became the basis of the most effective malaria treatment available — work done during the Cultural Revolution, in poor conditions,
A chemist who developed the first effective treatment for leprosy — at 23, in about a year — and who died before publishing it, after which her work was taken and published by the man who had been
The principal organiser of the 1963 March on Washington — the event at which Martin Luther King delivered the speech everyone knows — and a figure who was deliberately kept in the background because
A Chinese admiral who commanded seven enormous maritime expeditions across the Indian Ocean in the early fifteenth century — voyages substantially larger than anything Europe launched for another
A German student who, with her brother Hans and a small group of others, distributed anti-Nazi leaflets in Munich during the Second World War — and who was executed at 21, four days after being
A mathematician at NASA whose calculations of orbital trajectories were central to the early American crewed spaceflight programme — and who worked for years in a segregated unit, doing work that was
No — and this is one of the few historical mysteries that has been definitively closed, by DNA evidence, after decades in which it was genuinely open. The original uncertainty. The Romanov family
No. He drafted it carefully in advance, and the envelope story is a later invention that survives because it flatters a particular idea about genius — that great work arrives effortlessly rather than