Before committing his historic murder, John Billington was punished for a number of other offenses in Plymouth and became a social outcast — but scholars now think there might be more to his story.

An Irish-American serial killer, Lizzie Halliday murdered at least four people in upstate New York in the 1890s. And some people even accused her of being Jack the Ripper.

Dr. Thomas Neill Cream left a trail of victims across London and Chicago before he was executed in 1892. And some believe he may have been the infamous Jack the Ripper.

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.

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.