As the great philosopher Rodney Dangerfield pointed out, some people “get no respect.” One would think after inventing a permanent part of pop culture for generations, one might finally be entitled to some respect. Even that’s not true. In fact, as these following 10 people show, sometimes one only gets properly celebrated after having their entire life destroyed.

SEE ALSO: Top 10 Things Americans Get Wrong About Their Own History

10 Tony Kaye Went Down in American History X

Tony Kaye has good ideas. Most of them have nothing to do with American History X though. Previously known for directing music videos, American History X was Kaye’s chance to become a household star. The resulting film was a lauded triumph. The movie’s dark and mature tale of the glorification of violence led to cartoonish antics off screen.

The Oscar nominated finished product was unrecognizable from Kaye’s original vision. The first edit barely clocked in at 95 minutes. New Line Cinema insisted he recut. Kaye refused. To stretch out the run time and emotional weight, Edward Norton secretly inserted more clips of his performance. Kaye felt so betrayed he ordered his name be taken off the credits and replaced with the pseudonym “Humpty Dumpty”. Obviously not wanting their deft look on neo-Nazism to be associated with a clumsy egg, New Line kicked Kaye out. Accompanied by a priest, a rabbi, and a Tibetan monk, Kaye barged into the office demanding to be brought back on board. Sounding like a literal joke, the studio denied his request.

To besmirch the movie’s reputation, Kaye published full-page ads insulting Norton and the studio. Financially ruining himself, the 35 ads cost Kaye nearly 1 million dollars. Persona non grata in Hollywood, Kaye’s filmography afterwards is a scattershot collection of half-finished projects and moments of genius. 20 years later, Tony Kaye has never made a movie as celebrated as American History X. Because of American History X, he never will again.^[1]

9 Napoleon Dynamite Blew Up in Efren Ramirez’s Face

Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. The power of a fictional school president in a bizarre indie flick from 2004 corrupts bizarrely. Efren Ramirez has found moderate success over the years with the quirky movie Napoleon Dynamite and its short lived animated spinoff. He will always be most recognized as Pedro Sanchez, even if a lot of people cannot recognize Efren Ramirez.

Everything about Napoleon Dynamite’s success was unlikely. However, the most statistically improbable thing about the movie is that both of the main protagonists are sets of identical twins. Jon Heder and his brother Dan remained close during Napoeleon’s height. Efren and Carlos did not.

Wanting to cash in on the fame, Carlos crashed public appearances by posing as his brother. Likely overestimating the frequency of necessary Pedro sightings, Carlos says Efren sanctioned these hijinks when Efren was too busy to attend himself. Carlos has confessed that on at least one occasion he attended without Efren’s knowledge, “to get back at him for a personal matter which involved the girl I was dating at the time.” Neither Carlos or Efren have specified what Carlos meant by that. Luckily thanks to Napoleon Dynamite, Efren has a history of dealing with love triangles.

Efren’s subsequent behavior discounts Carlos theory that this was all in jest. Threatening to sue, Efren issued a cease-and-desist order. Carlos had to pay a 10 million dollar fine if he ever impersonated Pedro again. A rift enveloped the twins. Citing “the magnitude of Napoleon Dynamite and everything that has come along with it,” Carlos says the movie has ruined his life. The two have yet to reconcile.^[2]

8 Winifred Sackville Stoner Got No Poetic Justice

It is probably the first thing taught in United States History class, even if the author never is. Kindergartners can easily remember the dawn of European expansion in the Americas with the handy mnemonic “In fourteen hundred ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue”. Winifred Sackville Stoner Jr would hate that people are still quoting her works. Her mother would love it.

Winifried Sackville Stoner Sr was more than your typical stage mom. Fluent in Esperanto, Winifred Stoner Sr. was convinced that the universal language was the best way to educate children. Paraded around the country, Stoner Sr trumpeted Stoner Jr as a child genius. It was hard to disagree. Remarkably, Stoner Jr was talking at one years old, writing at two, and typing at three. Like a lot of details about her prodigy years, Stoner Sr likely exaggerated some facts. Either way, her mother felt vindicated when Stoner Jr’s 1913 poem “History of the United States” earned the 12-year-old child acclaim.

Grown out of childhood, Stoner renounced her years as a prodigy, including her poetry. Looking back on her time in the spotlight, Stoner says her mother’s experiment damaged her for life. Isolated as a prodigy, Stoner rebelled by going through a series of terrible relationships. Her first disastrous marriage was to the 35-year-old French count, Charles de Bruche. Before Stoner Jr could divorce de Bruche, he supposedly died in a car accident in Mexico City. Her four other marriages were equally doomed, including an engagement to Woodrow Wilson’s former Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby, a man more than twice her age. After faking his death, Charles de Bruche returned to try and blackmail Stoner as a bigamist. He had tried similar cons across Europe. For 50 years, she secluded herself from the public and marriage. In nineteen hundred eighty three, Stoner Jr. died lonely.^[3]

7 Philo Farnsworth Had Plenty of Reason to Hate Television

It took a lot of work to invent the greatest tool of laziness. Primitive cumbersome television models existed for years before Philo Farnsworth perfected the technology. Drudging up dirt on the gridlike pattern of his ranch, Farnsworth had a major breakthrough. By scanning an image line by line, one could broadcast a clear picture onto any screen. This idea was the literal groundwork for the 1927 “Television System” patent.

Four years earlier, Vladimir Zworykin patented a similar system. The key difference was that Zworykin’s machine did not work. That hitch did not bother David Sarnoff, head of radio behemoth RCA. Fearful of television’s competition to radio, Sarnoff tried to buy out Farnsworth’s superior technology. The Mormon farmer turned down the proposal. Sarnoff went to war. While suing Farnsworth for patent violation, Zworykin and Sarnoff sent spies to monitor him. Subterfuge was not far enough, so they simply released a line of TVs anyway without Farnsworth’s permission. RCA lost the suit and had to acknowledge Farnsworth owned the rights to the patent. It was a short lived victory. His patent expired in the mid40’s, missing television’s explosion by mere months.

After struggling for decades, he could finally relax and enjoy his invention. With a television in every home, he dreamed that people would “learn about each other.” His utopian vision turned to static. Viewing westerns and gameshows convinced him he “created kind of a monster, a way for people to waste a lot of their lives.” Farnsworth did not have much more life to waste. Stress from his squandered fortune caused a fatal bout of pneumonia. He was 64.^[4]

6 Robert Indiana Does Not Love “LOVE”

The simplest ideas are often the most popular. Perhaps no idea is simpler than LOVE. Robert Indiana’s iconic sculpture depicts a L supporting a leaning O stacked on top of a V and E. Like plenty of people, Robert Indiana feelings toward LOVE is complicated.

During the 1960s, Robert Indiana was primed to take over the Pop Art scene. Avoiding the sex and drugs associated with the movement, Indiana embraced the art-form’s ethos by stripping down ideas to their essence. The Museum of Modern Art thought this genre could translate to the limited space of a Christmas card. On a green and blue background, Indiana’s blocky red letters LOVE made their first appearance in 1965. It would not be the last. The image has been slapped on everything from t shirts, magnets, and a particularly popular series of postage stamps in the 1970’s.

Over the next few years, imitators popped up in cities around the world. Not wanting to disturb the simplicity of the design, Indiana did not put his signature anywhere on the piece. He was totally anonymous. With no recourse to sue for his art, Indiana barely turned a profit. Wrongly assuming he made a fortune, his fellow artists branded him a sell-out. Museums rejected his other work as too commercial. Excluded from the art world, he left New York. For the rest of his life, he isolated himself in the small coastal city of Vinalhaven, Maine. He hated his most famous creation. Robert Indiana wished he could have been known for more. Nevertheless, when it comes to an enormous artistic legacy, all you need is LOVE.^[5]

5 A Trip to the Moon Cratered George Melies’ Career

George Melies’ talent was literally out of this world. More than any of his peers, Melies understood the possibilities of film. Trained as a magician, Melies turned his sense of showmanship into surrealistic sketches that pioneered the basics of cinematic special effects. No film better showcased his revolutionary editing and framing techniques than 1902’s A Trip to the Moon. While the shot of a space capsule jutting out of the man in the moon’s eye is endlessly referenced, the other 14 minutes are equally dreamlike. Melies’ life was less whimsical.

A blockbuster in Europe, Melies planned on recouping his special effects laden production budget by distributing the movie in the United States. Like many other inventors before him, Thomas Edison stole Melies’ success. Bootlegs and pirated copies of the movie flooded the market. Using the same business model as those Transmorpher cash grabs, Edison directed his own knockoff film called A Trip to Mars to trick the audience into seeing his version. All of the royalties were funneled to Edison. Flushed with money from ripping off Melies’, Edison used his own production company to muscle Melies’ struggling Star Films into bankruptcy.

When World War One broke out, the neglected reels of Star Films were melted down to become soles for shoes. A large portion of Melies’ movies are now lost forever. Stripped of his rightful earnings and his greatest achievements, Melies spent the last few years selling toys in a train station. Even the father of modern cinema could not get a Hollywood ending.^[6]

4 Herman Melville was a Whale of a Failure

For Herman Melville, fame was as elusive as his titular white whale. The saddest part of Moby Dick’s rejection was that Melville had already known success. Both of his first two books, Typee, and Omoo, were instant hits. Churning out one adventure story per year, Melville was heralded as a great new voice in nautical yarns. In the vein of his other stories, Moby Dick was initially another rollicking tale of bold men braving the high seas. Then in 1849, he met Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Scarlet Letter author was the first person to suggest the epic quest could work as an existentialist tome. Over the next two years, Melville studied philosophy and literature. In 1851, those years of introspection resulted in the Great American Novel.

Echoing the thoughts of many future high school students, readers at the time hated the book. Noted editor, Henry F. Chorley, of the London Athenaeum, called it “as much trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature.” Critically and commercially a flop, the book only sold 3,000 copies. Complaining to Hawthorne, Melville said that “dollars damn me” Hawthorne ignored Melville’s pleas, and their friendship crumbled. Melville’s income and popularity sank faster than the Pequod. His follow-up, Pierre, was similarly dismissed. Dejected, the 33-year-old Melville basically retired from writing, only releasing the occasional poem over the next decades.

In 1867, Melville plunged further into alcoholism and depression when his oldest son killed himself. In 1891, the local newspaper summed up the tragic life of the notoriously longwinded author in just six lines. His obituary could not even get his name right. Though wrongfully called “Henry”, Melville’s name lives on.^[7]

3 Grant Wood Did Not Live the Simple Life

The parodies are almost as ubiquitous as the original. Through the hundreds of homages to American Gothic, the pitchfork wielding farmer and his wife have stood in for countless types of careers and relationships. Grant Wood never got to experience much of either.

Influenced by European tradition, Wood’s portfolio contains many exaggerated scenes of Iowa farmlife. Modeled after the local dentist Byron McKeeby and his sister, Nan, the couple in his most iconic work were filled with the same admiration of his town. Within weeks of its debut at the Art Institute of Chicago, the art world did not take it that way. Critics embraced the painting as a joke, a satirical take down of middle America. Wood regretted that interpretation, but went along with it as the painting’s popularity soared. Nan expressed similar discontent for the haggard stretched out face of the woman and the age gap in the relationship.

The troubled legacy extended to the world outside the painting. Internationally known as the personification of Midwestern values, Wood faced growing scrutiny about his bachelorhood. A closeted gay man, Wood claimed that he forwent marriage to take care of his sister and widowed mother. Unable to hide his sexuality, he got into a sham marriage in 1935. The marriage drained him emotionally, financially, and artistically. Wood refused to paint for years.

Outed in Time magazine, Wood was fired from teaching at the University of Iowa in 1941. His few remaining months were not much better. In 1942, Wood died from pancreatic cancer, a day before his 51st birthday.^[8]

2 A.A. Milne’s Story is Sadder than Eeyore’s

Winnie the Pooh is the essence of innocence. His origin is as lovable as he is. A.A. Milne told his son, Christopher Robin, fantastical adventures of the boy and his teddy bear. The only people who could possibly dislike Winnie the Pooh just happen to be everyone involved with making it.

Winnie the Pooh was far from A.A. Milne’s first story. All totaled, Milne wrote seven novels, five nonfiction books and 34 plays. Readers abandoned him when he did not write about Hundred Acres woods. Pigeonholed as a children’s writer, Milne hated the character, because he felt he could never fully write what he wanted to again. These limitations do not come close to his son’s existential crisis.

Despite entertaining millions of children, A.A. Milne was not as similarly affectionate with his only child. Locked in his office, A.A. Milne abandoned the real Christopher Robin most days in his office to write with the one in the book. As the namesake of the character, Christopher Robin could not escape the association. While attending boarding school in 1930, the other students constantly taunted him, physically and verbally.

After school, Christopher Robin struggled to find a job, in part because of depression from “the empty fame of being his son.” Much to his parent’s protest, the inspiration for one of children’s literature most wholesome characters fixed his sadness by having sex with his first cousin, Lesley de Selincourt. The schism in the family finally ruptured when Christopher Robin publicly announced he never felt close to his parents. Not really disproving his claim, his mom and dad cut off all ties. In the last fifteen years of her life, he only spoke to his mother once. Laying on her deathbed, his mother refused to see him.^[9]

1 George Ferris’ Wild Ride

What goes up must come down. If anybody would understand this, it would be George Ferris. With his eponymous invention, the Ferris Wheel, George Ferris has brought joy to thousands. The Ferris Wheel only brought him despair.

The Ferris Wheel was built out of spite. In 1891, Chicago needed an innovative display for their upcoming world’s fair. The director wanted something that could surpass the recently erected Eiffel Tower. Engineers around the country submitted proposals. Most of them amounted to constructing larger towers. The most creative was George Ferris’ unwieldy contraption of a series of carriages revolving every five minutes. Chicago dismissed the plan as structurally unsound. Ferris knew it could work. On Nov. 29, 1892, they made a deal. The World’s fair would display the prototype, but Ferris would have to fund it on his own. 29 weeks and $250,000 later, Ferris revealed his exhibition. Crowds adored it. George Ferris had reached his peak.

The downturn followed quickly. Amusement parks across the U.S. packaged their own models without compensating Ferris. For the next three years, Ferris fought against the imitators in court with little success. Falling deeper in debt, Ferris kept investing in bigger versions of his machine. Nobody was buying. With no money left, George’s wife divorced him in 1896, directly increasing his rampant alcoholism. Later that year, George Ferris died alone in Pittsburgh’s Mercy Hospital. Faced with a litany of medical issues, Ferris never sought help. He let himself succumb. He was 37. Nobody claimed his ashes for 15 months. 10 years later, his original Ferris Wheel went out too. Dismantled in bankruptcy court, the remnants were dynamited in 1906. The scraps of one of America’s greatest technical marvels were unceremoniously dumped in a landfill.^[10]

The year is far from over, but you should probably put money on “social distancing” being the most popular phrase of 2020. This is the year of COVID-19, a worldwide pandemic that has infected 242,191 people worldwide and claimed 9,843 lives as of this writing.

The coronavirus has forced governments to cancel mass gatherings, classes in schools, sporting events, and much more to halt the spread of the novel virus. Billions of everyday people are now learning to love being in quarantine.

If this applies to you, then cheer up. Some of the greatest artists and inventors have managed to change the world for the better from their quarantined rooms. Let this list serve as a reminder to read more, sleep more, and create more during your enforced isolation.

10 Quarantine Islands and Lazarettos

10 Eugene Onegin

Alexander Pushkin’s standing in Russia is equivalent to William Shakespeare’s in Great Britain. Pushkin is the “great bard” of Russian letters, and one of his greatest productions is the verse novel Eugene Onegin (1832).

The story focuses on the life of Eugene Onegin, a wealthy and spoiled aristocrat living in Saint Petersburg. When Onegin becomes tired of attending all the city’s balls and dances, he decides to move to his deceased uncle’s country estate.

There, he meets the poet Vladimir Lensky. Onegin also meets the beautiful Tatyana Larina, who becomes his lifelong obsession. In 1879, Eugene Onegin was turned into an opera by the great Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

Pushkin, himself a dandy like Eugene Onegin, often turned to writing whenever he was sick (most often with some form of venereal disease). In fall 1830, a terrible cholera outbreak in Moscow convinced Pushkin to leave for his family’s estate in the country. There, while doing a little social distancing, Pushkin completed Eugene Onegin and other classic works.^[1]

9 Samuel Pepys’s Diary

Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) was a Member of Parliament and a civil administrator for the English Navy. During his life, he was best known for his efforts to modernize the navy and its administration. Nowadays, Pepys is best known for the diary that he kept from 1660 until 1669, which remains one of the best primary documents concerning the English Restoration.

In 1665, the bubonic plague struck London. Unlike most fellow Londoners, Pepys was not surprised by the outbreak because he had seen a similar outbreak of the “black death” in Amsterdam two years earlier. In June 1665, Pepys wrote, “[To] my great trouble, hear that the plague is come into the City.” Then he added, “God preserve us all.”^[2]

Thanks to Pepys’s active pen, historians and scientists have a good understanding of how the bubonic plague moved so quickly and proved so devastating in London. Essentially, a massive rat population in the filthy city spread the plague.

8 Alexander The False Prophet

Lucian was one of the great wits of the Roman Empire. An Assyrian born in the imperial city of Samosata (located today in southern Turkey), Lucian was a popular playwright, satirist, and rhetorician. His works mocked such things as the differences between Greeks and Syrians, stoicism, and cults. One of his more important works, Alexander the False Prophet, lampooned magic and those Romans who sought supernatural explanations for life’s miseries.

The “Alexander” of the title was a real person named Alexander of Abonoteichus. Like Lucian, Alexander came from Asia Minor. Not too much is known about Alexander except that he claimed to be a powerful magician who could cure the sick.

This claim caught on with Roman citizens and imperial subjects because a massive plague started in AD 165. Called the Antonine Plague, it cut a swath through the Roman Empire.^[3]

First discovered by the brilliant Greek physician Galen, the plague most likely came from China and was spread via the Silk Road. Today, the plague is thought to have been either measles or smallpox.

While the Romans isolated themselves or sought magical cures, Lucian decided to write a satire of a fake spiritual healer.

7 The Magic Mountain

Considered one of the finest works in all of German literature, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain was first published in 1924. The novel concerns Hans Castorp, a young Hamburg merchant who decides to visit his cousin Joachim at a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps.

Hans’s simple journey soon becomes complicated as his health fails and he begins to meet other patients. Almost all of them represent the social decay of Europe after World War I.

Mann knew a thing or two about sanatoriums. His wife, Katia, suffered from tuberculosis, and in 1912, she stayed at a sanatorium in Davos-Platz, Switzerland. Mann visited her often. In the following years, the two were regular patients at health spas throughout the world. Mann turned this experience into the setting for The Magic Mountain.^[4]

6 Dashiell Hammett

American writer Dashiell Hammett was born to raise hell. The son of an old Catholic farming family in Maryland, Sam “Dashiell” Hammett dropped out of school at 13 and began hanging out with gamblers, prostitutes, and thieves in Baltimore and Philadelphia.

In an attempt to turn his life around, Hammett signed up with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in 1915. He worked as a private eye until 1922. A few years later, Hammett started writing detective fiction. Without question, he used his real-life experiences to create the fictional private eyes Sam Spade and the Continental Op.^[5]

Hammett might never have become a writer if he hadn’t contracted tuberculosis while serving in the US Army during World War I. The army recorded that Hammett was 25-percent disabled because of the disease and granted him a medical discharge. The army also gave Sergeant Hammett a small pension.

Thanks to this pension and a part-time job as a copywriter, Hammett had time to devote to writing, which was still frequently interrupted by his terrible coughing fits.

10 Horrors Of The Great Plague Of London

5 Anton Chekhov

Like Pushkin before him, Russian writer Anton Chekhov found time to write due to Russia’s frequent cholera epidemics. Between 1892 and 1899, Chekhov wrote some of his best-known short stories, including “Ward No. 6” and “The Black Monk.”

At the same time, Chekhov lived a semi-isolated life at his Melikhovo estate. It was here that Chekhov helped to organize famine and cholera relief for the local peasants. He also continued his day job as a practicing doctor.

Sadly, Chekhov had to stop practicing medicine in 1897 due to his worsening health. Like Hammett, Chekhov suffered from tuberculosis. The disease killed him in 1904.^[6]

Today, Chekhov is hailed as one of the world’s greatest short story writers. Many of these short stories came as a result of what Chekhov saw as a doctor during the cholera epidemics of the late 19th century.

4 Paradise Lost

The Englishman John Milton was many things during his life—a pamphleteer, a philosopher, and a politician who served as the Secretary of Foreign Tongues (Latin Secretary) for England’s Commonwealth Council of State. Milton is best known today as a poet, specifically the one who wrote the epic Paradise Lost about Satan’s fall from grace and his war against God, Heaven, and humanity.

Many know that Milton went blind while composing Paradise Lost. Between 1652 and 1667, Milton had to dictate his epic poem to his family members, friends, and amanuenses. This process was made more difficult when the Milton family had to move to a new home at Chalfont St. Giles to avoid the Great Plague of London in 1665–66. It was here that Milton finished Paradise Lost.^[7]

3 The Decameron

The Decameron is arguably the greatest piece of literature about a pandemic. Most likely written between 1348 and 1353, The Decameron is about 10 young aristocrats who flee to a country estate to avoid the Black Death in Florence. Inside the estate, the aristocrats tell 100 stories over several days.

Most of the stories are somber, although some are funny and full of practical jokes. The Decameron, much like Dante’s Divine Comedy, is written in the Florentine vernacular, which eventually became standard Italian.

Giovanni Boccaccio, the man who wrote The Decameron, lived through the terrible plague years of the 14th century. Like the characters in his most famous work, Boccaccio successfully avoided the plague in Florence by traveling to Naples and other Italian cities. However, he did witness the Florentine plague firsthand in 1348.^[8]

2 William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare’s entire life was full of plague epidemics. In fact, the infant Shakespeare was one of the few residents in Stratford-upon-Avon to survive the plague of 1564. One of Shakespeare’s most prominent biographers, Jonathan Bate, has written that Shakespeare’s experience with the plague was the single most defining aspect of his life and work.

The plague appears in several of Shakespeare’s best works, including Romeo and Juliet. Even more startling, Shakespeare’s greatest burst of energy occurred between 1605 and 1606 when he composed King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra.

Scholars now believe that Shakespeare was so productive during this time because 1605–06 was a plague year in England. Rather than brood while in quarantine, Shakespeare decided to write.^[9]

1 Isaac Newton

The English physicist and mathematician Isaac Newton is regarded as the man who discovered gravity and, in turn, wrote down the laws of physics. Without Newton’s discoveries, the Age of Enlightenment may never have happened.

In 1665, Newton was a subpar student at Cambridge University. That year, the university closed due to the Great Plague of London. With school closed, Newton returned to his family’s home in Cambridge and began conducting a series of experiments.

While working during quarantine, he first began observing the laws of motion and gravity. When Newton returned to Cambridge University in 1667, he bolted up the university ranks from undergraduate to fellow and then professor in 1669.^[10]

Top 10 Things You Need To Do To Prepare For The Coronavirus

About The Author: Benjamin Welton is a freelance writer based in New England.

For the most part there are not a lot of things a human corpse can do on its own. Aside from being fairly stationary, decomposing, or being used as a hilarious prop in an ’80s movie, there’s not much else going on. But that’s in general, and in some very rare circumstances dead people have still been achieving noteworthy feats. Let’s look at some of the most remarkable accomplishments made by the dead.

10. Jochen Rindt Won a Formula One Series After His Death

Back in the 1960s, Jochen Rindt was a racecar driver who competed for Australia. Tragically, Rindt died in an accident in 1970 when he was practicing for the Italian Grand Prix. However, he had been the point leader for the series at the time of his death and, even though there were still four races left, he had been so far ahead of his competition that no one could catch up.

That meant that by the end of the entire series of races, Rindt was still in the lead. He became the first, and to date only, driver to win a race series posthumously. 

9. The Corpse of Pope Formosus Was Put on Trial

These days the Pope is the kind of person who will sometimes make proclamations about how we should be better treating people in war zones or in developing nations. There’s not a lot of power given to the Pope on a world scale anymore, and they rarely do a lot to ruffle anyone’s feathers outside of occasionally saying things that people disagree with.

Go back in time and the papacy was a very different thing.  The Pope was often considered a man of massive power and could command Kings. They could also just be completely bizarre like when Pope Stephen VI held what came to be known as the Cadaver Synod. 

Nine months after Pope Formosus had died back in the year 896, his corpse was exhumed by Pope Stephen. The two had been political rivals and Stephen wanted to put Formosus on trial for breaking many laws. Keep in mind, he’d been dead for nine months.

The man’s actual corpse was put in a chair and a whole trial was conducted with that corpse in the chair. He was found guilty of his crimes, had three fingers cut off and then he was buried only to be dug up again and executed despite still being dead. His body was tossed in the Tiber River.

Ironically, this trial turned the people against Stephen and when Formosus’s body washed up on shore, people said it was performing miracles. Stephen was later jailed and strangled to death.

8. Dante Alighieri Was Exonerated for a Crime 700 Years After Dying

One of the most famous writers in history, Dante Alighieri was responsible for the Divine Comedy. It’s still a well-known work in the present, but the writer had his detractors back in the day who weren’t appreciative of his non-artistic works. Dante had been a politician in Florence in the early 1300s and had made some rivals along the way. 

For being a member of the “wrong” political party, Dante was convicted in a court of corruption and patronage. He was forbidden from holding political office and the court took possession of his assets. His life was threatened should he ever return to Florence again, so he left and never came back.

It was during his exile that he became the writer we know today, and he mostly wandered Italy riding poems that would go on to become classics. But he was never able to return to Florence and historians agree that his trial was a sham. He ended up dying in 1321.

Fast forward 700 years and in 2021, the Alighieri line is still going strong, or at least strong enough to return to court to get their famous ancestor exonerated. Despite being dead for the better part of a millennium, Dante was retried and his name has been cleared.

7. A 6-Year-Old From the French Resistance was Posthumously Awarded the Rank of Sergeant

The French Resistance during the Second World War has gone down in history as an example of, and even a blueprint for, what it means for a small, organized force to stand up to something that should be much more powerful than yourselves in the fight for what you know is right.

Many people today only know the French Resistance from films and from history classes, but the reality of what happened back then is much more harrowing and dramatic than we’ll probably ever realize. A stunning example of this comes in the form of a 6-year-old boy.

Marcel Pinte was a courier for the resistance. The little guy carried messages for the resistance past Nazi guards, helping his father whose farm was a base of operations for sending and receiving coded messages. Accidental gunfire from the Resistance themselves took the boy’s life. To honor him, his name was inscribed on a memorial in Aixe-sur-Vienne. In 1950, he was even given the rank of sergeant. 

6. Douglas Adams Posthumously Voiced a Radio Broadcast of His Books

Douglas Adams became a beloved writer thanks in no small part to his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. Before becoming a multi-million selling book series, it was actually a radio show. The tradition of performing the series on the radio has lived on, even after the death of Adams himself who passed away in the year 2001.

When the BBC adapted the final three books of the series to the radio, they even threw in a remarkable twist. Adams had been known to read the books publicly for years, so they took older recordings made just before his death and included Adams himself as the character Agrajag, including him with the actors who were newly performing it. The series featuring Adams’ voice aired four years after his death. 

5. Ralph Steinman won a Posthumous Nobel Prize in 2011 Despite a Rule Against Posthumous Prizes

The Nobel Prize committee actually has a rule on the books that they will not give out awards posthumously. If someone were to die, they would be out of the running and some of their living peers would be among the potential nominees. However, things don’t always work in real life like they do on paper.

In 2011 Ralph Steinman won a Nobel Prize because he passed away 3 days before it was awarded. The rule had been on the book since 1974 and before that only two people had ever received a posthumous prize. The 1974 change was in the hopes of avoiding this in the future. However, Steinman was given the award before anyone was aware he died because the timeline was so narrow. Because it was so sudden and deemed too late to change, the award stood despite the rule against it. 

4. No One Will Ever Outrank George Washington in the US Military 

There are a lot of good arguments to be made that George Washington already has a heck of a lot of accomplishments under his belt. No one else is going to be the first President of the United States, after all. But another honor that he can lay claim to, one that he was awarded posthumously, is the highest rank in the US military. 

Gerald Ford promoted Washington to the rank of six star general back in 1976. He is the only person to have ever achieved this rank, though the title “General of the Armies of the United States,” is shared by General John J. Pershing. Pershing only had 4 stars and Washington is the only person who will ever achieve this six star rank. There are only a few 5-star generals, nevermind 6-star. 

The official wording is “whereas it is considered fitting and proper that no officer of the United States Army should outrank Lieutenant General George Washington on the Army list.” This means that, after death, Washington has and always will outrank everyone else in the United States military.

3. Joe O’Donnell Was Posthumously Allowed into the Baseball Hall of Fame Despite Not Being a Pro Ball Player

Here’s a bit of a feel-good story for you. This one’s about a father and a son and the bond they shared that revolved around baseball. Back in 1988, Pat O’Donnell visited the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. He brought with him a photo of his father Joe. His dad didn’t play professional ball, but he was a ball player. They’d always wanted to go to the Hall of Fame together but never got a chance to before his father passed on. 

To honor his dad, he took a picture of him in his uniform to Cooperstown and left it under a display there. In his own way he inducted his father into the Hall of fame. He wrote a message on the back of the photo about how his dad had always been there to play a game of catch with him.

Years later, one of the museum curators happened upon the photo. He read the story and was touched by how baseball had been so important in the lives of these two men. This ended up sparking something larger than O’Donnell could have ever imagined. The story made its way to Sports Illustrated, ESPN and beyond. Once O’Donnell was tracked down, he was even invited to throw the opening pitch at a Hall of Fame game. 

As for Joe O’Donnell, his picture remains at the Hall of Fame, and official inductee now despite having never been in the big leagues. He’s there because of the story of how a father and son’s love of the game brought them together, and what that means to baseball itself.

2. Oliver Cromwell’s Corpse Was Executed

Oliver Cromwell is arguably one of the most important figures in British history, and he even ruled England as Lord p\Protector after the death of Charles the 1st, which Cromwell himself had a hand in bringing about. His signature was on Charles’ death warrant, after all. 

Cromwell’s reign came to an end after his death in 1658, which is believed to have been a result of kidney disease and malaria. That seems like it should have been the end of Cromwell’s story, but it was not. You can imagine any man who helped depose the previous King and then became ruler despite not being a king himself would have one or two enemies out there. 

Cromwell’s son took over, but he was not cut out to be a leader and he ended up giving up power. This ended the short-lived protectorate and Charles II took the throne as a result. Clearly not a fan of the elder Cromwell, Charles had his body exhumed so that he could then be executed. 

Along with two others, Oliver Cromwell’s corpse was hanged, drawn and quartered. His head was put on display at Westminster Hall. 

1. Mel Carnahan Was Elected To The Senate Despite Being Dead

The last several decades of American politics have done a good job of showing just how deep the divide is between political parties. Modern politics is rife with examples of disagreements between people on varying ends of the political spectrum. 

You can even go back to the year 2000 and see some pretty dramatic stuff related to just how poorly everyone got along. This is best exemplified by the Missouri election for state senator in which Mel Carnahan beat John Ashcroft to become the senator for Missouri. That doesn’t sound terribly dramatic until you learn that Mel Carnahan had been dead for 3 weeks before the election. Carnahan’s plane crash and death was well known, but he still eked out a victory when his widow said she would serve in his place. Carnahan won with 50% of the vote to Ashcroft’s 49%.

The states that formed the Confederate States of America began seceding months before Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration. At his death in April 1865, Richmond had fallen and Lee had surrendered, but Confederate resistance continued. The 49 months of Lincoln’s Presidency has been measured by the conduct of the Civil War, and his effectiveness as a war leader. But several other issues occupied Lincoln as President. They have long been pushed aside in the public mind by those focused on the long and bloody war which dominated his administration.

But his accomplishments outside of the combat between the Confederacy and the United States were considerable. Union victory remained Lincoln’s highest priority throughout his administration, but the business of the United States also occupied his attention. The US economy grew throughout his administration. Two new states were added, West Virginia and Nevada. Transportation, infrastructure, education, finance, and national expansion all required the President’s attention. Here are some of the less well-known accomplishments of the Lincoln Administration not directly linked to the combat between North and South.

10. The Legal Tender Act of 1862

On February 25, 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed the Legal Tender Act of 1862 after its passage by Congress. For the first time the United States government printed paper money, not backed by reserves of gold and silver in the Treasury’s vaults. The notes were printed in several denominations, and earned the name “greenbacks” for the color of ink on the reverse side of the notes. The notes were deemed “legal tender in payment of all debts, public and private”. The government was initially allowed to print $150 million in notes backed only by the faith and credit of the federal government.

Despite the misgivings of many bankers and financial experts of the time, who believed the issuance of paper money would destroy the American economy, the issue actually did the opposite. The infusion of cash stimulated industry and the financial system. During the Civil War the US economy boomed. Additional acts passed by Congress, and signed by Lincoln, eventually allowed the government to print $500 million in greenbacks during Lincoln’s Presidency.

The federal bank notes became the standard currency in the United States, replacing privately issued bank notes. The cash infusion threatened to create inflation in the economy, and Congress responded with additional measures to keep inflationary pressures under control. The word “greenback” became a slang term for the dollar, and remained so over the ensuing decades.

9. The Revenue Act of 1861

Prior to the Lincoln Administration the chief source of revenue for the federal government came from tariffs and excise taxes on certain products, such as alcoholic beverages. During the first year of Lincoln’s Presidency it was evident the government needed another source of funds in order to pay its bills and finance the war. After consultation with his Cabinet, Lincoln and members from both chambers of Congress hammered out an agreement which eventually passed as the Revenue Act of 1861. Lincoln signed the act into law on August 5, 1861.

The law imposed taxes on imports and on land ownership. It also, for the first time in American history, imposed a tax on personal incomes. All incomes over $800 (about $22,500 today) per year were subjected to a flat tax of 3%. Unfortunately for the government, only about 3% of all Americans had incomes above that level. As a result, the new income tax only affected a small minority of Americans, and of course it had no impact on the seceded states at all.

Besides only affecting a few Americans, the new law did not have an enforcement mechanism. Most Americans who were required to pay the tax simply ignored the law. Those who did try to pay it found the government had not created an agency to receive the funds. The first income tax was thus of little value to the government. Congress had to revisit the issue several times during Lincoln’s Administration.

8. The Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862

The Morrill Land-Grant Act first passed in Congress in 1859. President James Buchanan vetoed the act, and the measure lacked sufficient support in the Southern states to override the veto. In 1862 it passed through Congress again and Lincoln, who supported the act, signed it into law on July 2, 1862. It was later expanded in 1890. The Act as passed in 1862 awarded 30,000 acres of federal territory to a state for every representative that state had in Congress, as well as its two Senators. The lands thus granted to the states were to be used to create colleges and universities dedicated to education in industry and agriculture, but not excluding “other scientific and classical studies…”

The first state to take advantage of the Land-Grant Act was Iowa, in September, 1862. It used the grants to expand an already extant institution, which is today Iowa State University. New York accepted some of its endowment in the form of notes, which it used to purchase timberland in Wisconsin. The sale of the valuable timber was then used to found Cornell University. Many of America’s most famed institutions of higher learning owe their existence to the Land-Grant Acts, among them Purdue, the entire University of California system, Nebraska, Ohio State, and Rutgers.

After Reconstruction the Land-Grant Act was expanded to include the Southern states excluded from its benefits during the Civil War. Louisiana State University, Tuskegee University, Auburn, University of Florida, and many others were born out of the act. Possibly no other measure signed by any American President has had a more far-reaching impact on American culture and history than the Morrill Land-Grant Act.

7. Creation of the Department of Agriculture in 1862

Though the states which remained loyal to the Constitution during the Lincoln Administration held a larger industrial base than the Confederacy, the North was nonetheless largely agricultural. More than half of the population either worked on farms, or in agricultural related trades and industries. Lincoln called for a new agency of the federal government which he called “The People’s Department”.

On December 3, 1861, in his first annual message to Congress (today’s State of the Union Address) Lincoln said, “While I make no suggestions as to details, I venture the opinion that an agricultural and statistical bureau might profitably be organized.” Lincoln urged Congress to pass legislation which allowed him to create a below Cabinet level Department of Agriculture. Congress obliged, and Lincoln signed the legislation on May 15, 1862.

The President appointed Isaac Newton as the first Commissioner of Agriculture. Newton was a dairy farmer from Pennsylvania who advocated for daily weather reports being sent across the nation via telegraph. He also created an experimental farm in Washington, studying new crops and agricultural techniques, sited on what is today the National Mall, visible from Lincoln’s White House. The legislation prompted by Lincoln remains the authority under which the Department of Agriculture operates today. In 1889 it was elevated to full Cabinet status.

6. The Revenue Act of 1862

In 1862, having observed the futility of the Revenue Act of 1861 and its inability to collect taxes, Congress enacted the Revenue Act of 1862. President Lincoln signed the act into law on July 1, 1862. An important provision of the act was the creation of the Commissioner of Internal Revenue. The new commission received the task of tax collection within the United States. Many of those taxes were from excise taxes on consumer goods and services, as well as on profits from business activities, interest on investments and savings, and business licenses.

The Act also did away with the 3% income tax on incomes over $800, replacing it with a progressive tax system. The tax threshold was lowered to $600, and incomes between that level and $10,000 were assessed a 3% tax. Above $10,000 a 5% rate was assessed. $10,000 in 1862 equates to roughly $260,000 today, making the tax rate relatively low compared to those assessed today. The Commissioner hired three detectives in 1863 to pursue tax evaders, especially those imposed on alcohol and tobacco.

The Revenue Act of 1862 introduced the concept of a progressive tax in American history. It was abandoned in 1872, but returned in 1913 with the ratification of the 16th Amendment to the Constitution. The Commissioner of Internal Revenue evolved into the Internal Revenue Service, everyone’s favorite branch of the federal government, which today employs about 75,000 people, and operates under an annual budget exceeding $11 billion.

5. The Yosemite Grant led to the creation of National Parks in the United States

Today, the United States is blessed with 59 National Parks as well as over 6,000 State Parks, set aside for recreation rather than creation of profit. Their roots can be traced to the Yosemite Grant Act. The act, which originated as Senate Bill 203, was passed by Congress in 1864, and Lincoln signed the legislation into law on June 30, 1864. The act transferred federal lands to the State of California, though it mandated their use.

The Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Tree Grove were granted to the state, “upon the express conditions that the premises shall be held for public use, resort, and recreation”. The act also mandated that areas within the grant could be leased by the state to other entities, and that all proceeds from any such leases be used for preservation of the properties, or improvements to roads and trails accessing the properties.

Lincoln’s action on Yosemite and Mariposa was the forerunner of what eventually became America’s National Parks. Eight years after Lincoln’s action on Yosemite, President Ulysses S. Grant signed legislation setting aside Yellowstone as the first National Park in the United States, the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act. Much of the language in that legislation was derived from the earlier Yosemite Grant Act.

4. The National Bank Act of 1863

Following President Andrew Jackson’s termination of the Second Bank of the United States there was no central banking system in America. Instead, a hodgepodge of state-chartered banks existed across the country, issuing their own bank notes. Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase, and Senator John Sherman (brother of General William Tecumseh Sherman) worked together to create a centralized banking system, both to create a market in which to sell government bonds and to stabilize banknotes.

Their efforts led to the National Bank Act of 1863. The act provided for charters and federal supervision of banks, known as National Banks, secured by bonds deposited with the government. The amount and types of loans issued by National Banks was regulated by the government, and the banks issued the national currency through their branches. State chartered banks were allowed to continue to issue their own banknotes, though the 1863 Act imposed a tax of 10% on them, which rendered them too costly to use and led to their decline.

The National Bank Act of 1863, which was amended the following year, thus introduced a stable national currency, eliminated much of the corruption inherent in the state-chartered banks, and created a modern national banking system. By the end of the American Civil War state bank issued notes had all but vanished, replaced by the paper currency produced by the US government. The modern banking system was another creation of the Presidency of Abraham Lincoln.

3. The Pacific Railway Acts of 1862 and 1864

On July 1, 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed the Pacific Railway Act of 1862. The Act provided rights of way to two competing railroad companies, the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific and authorized them to complete a railroad connecting Sacramento, California and Omaha, Nebraska. The Union Pacific began in Omaha, laying track in the westward direction. The Central Pacific began in Sacramento heading east, where it soon encountered the disheartening obstacles of the Sierras.

Both railroads, under the provisions of the 1862 Railway Act, received land grants via public domain on both sides of the tracks they laid. Loan bonds were calculated per miles of tracks laid, and the degree of difficulty encountered during construction. Construction began in January, 1863 in Sacramento, and both companies raced to lay the greater amount of track. In 1864 Congress passed another Pacific Railway Act, effectively doubling the lands awarded to the two companies and giving the railroads the ability to raise their own funds through the sale of railway construction bonds.

It took six years, and Lincoln, long a champion of the Pacific Railway, had been dead for over four years before the Transcontinental Railroad was completed in 1869. Yet it stood as a monument to his belief in national unity. Even while his administration was beset by Civil War, Lincoln strove to unite the East and West through the use of then cutting-edge technology. The Union Pacific Railroad still operates, one of the nation’s largest freight haulers. The Central Pacific was absorbed by the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1959.

2. The Homestead Act of 1862

In 1860, eager to populate western lands owned by the federal government, Congress passed the Homestead Act of 1860. Opposed by Southern Democrats, who wanted western lands available for purchase by slave owners, President Buchanan, a Democrat, vetoed the bill. After the Southern states seceded and Lincoln endorsed the concept, Congress passed the Homestead Act of 1862. Lincoln signed the bill into law on May 20, 1862. It led to arguably the largest land giveaway in history. Roughly 10% of the land in the United States was given away for free to those who qualified under the act.

The qualifications were not particularly stringent. If one was over age 21, or was the head of a household, he qualified, as long as he had not borne arms against the United States. In return for a promise to settle on and improve the land, he received a patent for 160 acres, mostly in the west. Families with several members over 21 could claim several patents, contiguous with their siblings’ holdings. A filing fee was the only cost, other than those for transportation, construction, farm equipment, livestock, and so forth. After meeting the length of the homestead requirement, usually 20 years, the homesteader could obtain title and land ownership.

Over 270 million acres of land was transferred from the federal government to private ownership, through 1.6 million homesteads. The open lands of the west became the farmlands of today. Homesteading continued in the lower states until 1976, and in Alaska for a decade beyond that. The Homestead Act was later emulated in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and it was amended and adjusted many times over its long term in force.

1. Thanksgiving as a federal holiday

Abraham Lincoln is not usually associated with the Thanksgiving Holiday, dominated by Pilgrims, turkeys, Black Friday, and football. But it was President Lincoln who first made Thanksgiving a National Holiday, via Presidential proclamation in October, 1863. That year Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday in November to be a National Holiday, with the ordinary business of the day suspended, “as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise”. Prior to Lincoln’s proclamation there had been no national observance of Thanksgiving.

November occasionally contains five Thursdays. In those events celebrating Thanksgiving on the last Thursday in November impinged on the Christmas season. By the 1930s the Thanksgiving Holiday was seen as the beginning of the holiday season and shopping. In 1939, with the last Thursday in November falling on November 30, President Franklin Roosevelt moved the day of celebration to the fourth Thursday of the month.

He could do so because when Congress officially designated Thanksgiving as a permanent national holiday in 1870, it left to the President the discretion of specifying the date in his annual proclamation. After some Roosevelt-hating states ignored the President and celebrated the holiday on the last Thursday, Congress intervened in 1941. It passed legislation designating Thanksgiving as the fourth Thursday in November, FDR signed it, and Thanksgiving, introduced nationally by Lincoln in 1863 and again in 1864, became a Congressionally mandated celebration.