Outnumbered and surrounded by Nazi forces, Lieutenant John R Fox made a last stand in the hills of northern Italy. In a desperate final act of bravery, Fox ordered an artillery strike on his own location just as the Nazis overran his position, killing hundreds of the enemy and sacrificing himself.

In the 1870s locust swarms of biblical proportions descended onto the Great Plains, devouring everything in their path. Billions of locust blocked out the sun and devastated America’s agriculture, creating a national emergency unlike any other.


Sources include:

The book Locust: The Devastating Rise and Mysterious Disappearance of the Insect that Shaped the American Frontier by Jeffrey Lockwood

The Biogeosciences article “A probe into the different fates of locust

swarms in the plains of North America and East Asia” by G. Yu, D. Johnson, X Ki and Y. Li

The Kansas Historical Society article “Grasshopper Plague of 1874”

The BBC web article “Why Do Locusts Swarm?”

The poor Irish farmers of Northern Ireland rose in armed rebellion in 1770 after their British landlords evicted thousands of them from their homes.


Sources:

A History of Ireland by Jonathan Barden

Lord Donegall and the Hearts of Steel by W.A. Maguire from Cambridge's Irish Historical Studies

The Battle of Gilford by D E McElroy from the Craigavon Historical Society

In 1862, during the American Civil War, Confederate rebels Gabriel Rains and his brother George Washington Rains changed warfare forever. They ordered their men to place specially made explosive torpedoes into the ground as they retreated from the Battle of Yorktown, creating the world’s first land mines. Their invention would go on to become one of the most destructive and pervasive weapons ever created.

In rural Minnesota a farmer named Olaf Ohman found a mysterious runestone. Engraved into the stone was an epic tale of adventure and bloodshed, apparently written by Norse explorers. The discovery of the Kensington Runestone sparked a worldwide discussion about what we know about pre-Columbus European exploration.


Sources:

The Kensington Stone: Anatomy of a Hoax by Harold Edwards from the Minnesota Archaeological Society

The Non-Enigmatic Origins of the Kensington Stone by Helmer Gustavson from the Scandinavian Archaeological Society

Whats the truth behind Minnesota’s Kensington Runestone? by Henry Erlandson from the Star Tribune

The White Hand Gang was a coalition of Irish street gangs in Brooklyn known for terrorizing Italian immigrants. Even among New York criminals they were notorious for liberal use of violence, lynching dozens of Italians along the waterfront. The White Hand Gang’s reign of terror ended in 1924 after a violent confrontation with a young Al Capone at a waterfront bar.


Sources:


Capone: The Man and the Era by Laurence Bergreen
Five Families: The Rise, Decline and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires by Selwyn Raab
American Mafia: The History of its Rise to Power by Thomas Repetto

In 1969 it was not uncommon for American rivers to burst into flames. Filled with sewage, oil, and agricultural waste, several major rivers were so polluted that they caught fire multiple times.

Here's the story of how the US almost destroyed its rivers, and how it eventually brought them back from the brink.


Sources:
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/cuyahoga-river-caught-fire-least-dozen-times-no-one-cared-until-1969-180972444/]

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/this-river-was-once-so-dirty-that-it-caught-fire-now-its-fish-are-safe-to-eat-again

https://www.nps.gov/articles/story-of-the-fire.htm

During the Vietnam War the United States military attempted a strange form of psychological warfare. Hoping to demoralize and terrify the Viet Cong, American forces used helicopter-mounted speakers to project ghostly screams, distorted Buddhist chants and fabricated sounds of dead Vietnamese soldiers begging for a proper burial.