After Guy Fawkes plan to kill King James I was foiled, he was sentenced to the worst kind of execution. One he managed to escape. Well, sort of. Wikimedia CommonsGuy Fawkes caught during gunpowder plot.
Breaking your neck is obviously never ideal. Except in the case of Guy Fawkes.
Guy Fawkes, along with 12 other English Catholics, was part of the famed Gunpowder Plot of 1605, a plan to kill King James I by blowing up the House of Lords.
An expert spymaster, Reinhard Gehlen surrendered to the Allies at the end of World War II in order to work with the CIA before founding Germany’s modern intelligence service with hundreds of former Nazis like him.Ullstein bild/Ullstein bild via Getty ImagesReinhard Gehlen, seated front row with an “O” over his chest, was well-respected among Nazi leaders. He later used this experience to start one of the most notorious spy rings in the Cold War.
In 1993, TV writers took a risk in avoiding sex and skimpy clothing They created Dana Scully and mainstreamed women in STEM careers.Gillian Anderson was a twenty-four year old ingenue from Chicago when she auditioned for the part of Dana Scully. Even though Anderson told the producers of the show — titled The X-Files — that she was twenty-seven in order to fit the aesthetic of the FBI agent’s character, she was still the farthest thing from what they were looking for.
Known informally as the Japanese mafia, the Yakuza are a 400-year-old criminal syndicate that carries out everything from human trafficking to real estate sales.When news broke that the Yakuza were among the first on the scene after Japan’s devastating 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, it caused a minor sensation in Western media outlets, which tended to view the Yakuza as the Japanese mafia, more akin to John Gotti than to Jimmy Carter.
Taken by Philip Haas in 1843, John Quincy Adams was captured in his family home is the oldest surviving photograph of a United States President.Taken in 1843, this rather stern depiction of John Quincy Adams is the earliest confirmed, surviving photograph of an American President. We sure have come a long way.
For more after you see the picture of the first President to be photographed, check out our posts on famous influential photographs that changed history.