In 1910, Halley’s Comet was due to pass close by Earth — and everyone from religious fanatics to news reporters stoked the fires of a global panic, believing it was the end of the world.

James Hemings was the first French-trained chef in America — but he was also enslaved by Thomas Jefferson alongside his sister Sally.

In 1960, Jerrie Cobb and 12 other women passed the 75 grueling tests for NASA's astronaut prospects — but was still denied a place in the program.

In 1865, Constance Kent confessed to murdering her three-year-old brother, Francis, when she was just 16 — but that was just the beginning of this disturbing tale.

In the 1960s, Wally Funk passed NASA’s astronaut tests — beating most of the men in the Project Mercury program. But it took decades before she was ever allowed on a spaceship.

Timothy Dexter made absurd investments that somehow panned out, wrote an entire memoir without a single piece of punctuation, and faked his own death just to see how he would be mourned.

Two years after Jack the Ripper murdered and mutilated five women in London, Mary Pearcey was found guilty of an eerily similar slaying.

A child of former slaves, Mary McLeod Bethune achieved the near-impossible when she became an advisor to five different U.S. Presidents in the Jim Crow era.

Loathed by British imperialists but beloved by the Iraqis, Gertrude Bell negotiated a sovereign Iraq — while opposing women’s suffrage in her own home country.

For nearly a decade in the mid-Victorian era, Mary Ann Cotton poisoned a string of her husbands for their insurance money as well as anyone else who got in her way — including 11 of her own children.

In 1851, an American editor named Amelia Bloomer wrote an article in support of female pantaloons — inspiring women to wear a controversial garment called "bloomers."