Aubrey Beardsley delighted in scandalizing his Victorian audiences with erotic and morbid artworks, and he would become entangled in a scandal with none other than Oscar Wilde.

Because he bungled his landing after jumping from a Nazi plane into England and broke his ankle, when he was captured, Josef Jakobs' execution was done as he sat.

The West Africa Squadron faced the seemingly insurmountable task of trying to eliminate the slave trade for good.

Hitler had German commandos trained to infiltrate allied territory in a Trojan Horse mission that caused confusion and chaos among real American soldiers.

Beautiful, elegant, and kind, Grand Duchess Tatiana Romanov was born in one of the world's most exquisite palaces and met her bloody end in the basement of a desolate house in Siberia.

The real Gaëtan Dugas was not the monstrous "AIDS Patient Zero" the media portrayed him to be — and even helped the CDC fight the disease.

Agnès Sorel rose to unprecedented heights of power for a woman in medieval France, yet her opponents succeeded in leaving her remembered as a power-hungry harlot.

In the jungles of Vietnam where order and discipline hung by a thread, some officers faced a danger greater than the Viet Cong: their own men.

He was an arctic explorer, a scientist, and a humanitarian who saved upwards of 7 million people. The biography of Fridtjof Nansen almost defies belief.

Descended from German nobility, von Stauffenberg thought it his duty to defend his nation against threats both inside and out. Hitler became one such threat.

Though his reports almost immediately made the New York Times' Bestsellers list, his research was very much not without its critics.