Bobby Sands was a member of the Irish Republican Army and spent the last 66 days of his life on hunger strike in HM Prison Maze fighting for political prisoner status.

At one of the darkest points of the Cultural Revolution, political strife devolved into extreme brutality in China’s southern region of Guangxi, where hundreds were cannibalized.

On October 7, 2006, Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaya was shot dead in her Moscow apartment building after having spent years criticizing Vladimir Putin and the Second Chechen War.

In 1963, a British dancer named Christine Keeler found herself at the heart of a national debacle known as the Profumo Scandal that nearly destroyed her life.

After Isaac W. Sprague developed a mysterious condition that caused his weight to drop to skeletal levels, he endured a life of exploitation in P.T. Barnum’s museum of human curiosities.

Born with a rare form of albinism in the Jim Crow South, George and Willie Muse were spotted by a cruel showman and forced into a life of exploitation.

The 1957 Apalachin meeting held in upstate New York was meant to solidify and streamline underground operations. Instead, it was raided by police and brought the Mafia down.

The younger sister of Eva Braun, Gretl Braun was one of Adolf Hitler's closest friends from his rise to power until the bloody end of the Third Reich.

From 1943 to 1944, Elyesa Bazna worked as a valet for the British ambassador to Turkey. But behind the scenes, he photographed secret documents and gave them to the Nazis.

In June 1960, Patrice Émery Lumumba was elected the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Just months later, he was murdered.

For nearly a century until 1694, thousands of enslaved Africans escaped from Portuguese plantations to the rebel kingdom of Palmares, where fugitives ruled.