In 1893 a sensational trial in the District of Columbia pitted a young woman against a powerful US Congressman. The salacious allegations captivated the nation, and went to the very heart of the power structure of the Gilded age. The Breckinridge-Pollard affair is nearly forgotten today, but at the time it was, as a contemporary account of the trial explained, “The Most Noted Breach of Promise suit in the history of court records.”
During the civil war, the manufacture of powder and explosives was often handled by the most vulnerable, young women and children, whose labor was needed when so many men had been sent off to war. On March 13, 1863, the confederacy experienced a munitions disaster, in the confederate capitol of Richmond.
The 1927 Coverdale Mine Brinks Armored Car robbery was a particularly violent episode in the particularly violent era.
In 1933 a farmer named Ed Carlson walked into a laboratory at the University of Wisconsin and asked a simple question- what was killing his cattle? The answer to that question would earn the university millions of dollars, and revolutionize the fields of both medicine and vermin extermination. The strange story of warfarin deserves to be remembered.