Comedies are often seen as simply light entertainment, and awards are rarely given to comedy programmes. Which is a shame, because, when you get a good one, they have the power to change the world, one giggle at a time.

While it might be a stretch to say that watching comedy shows is educational, sometimes we can learn some really important life lessons while having a laugh.

Here are 10 things you might have learned from watching comedy shows on TV.

10 Comedy Acts That Went Horribly Wrong

10 It’s OK to Be a Woman

I Love Lucy was a ground-breaking show in more ways than one. For starters, it was her show, and her real-life husband, Desi Arnaz, who played her on screen husband, was always only a supporting act. Which, in the 1950s, was unusual. Arnaz did manage to get second billing by the time the late 1950s, when the show was reinvented as The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show. Which isn’t quite as catchy.

When their marriage ended in 1962, Lucille Ball bought out her ex-husband to own the production company outright, one of the few women to do so at the time. She was also one of the first women to appear on TV while pregnant, although she was not allowed to use that term. She was only allowed to be ‘expecting’, which was considered a much more seemly description.

The show featured a kooky Lucy doing silly things, while her straight-laced husband tries, and fails, to make her act like a married woman should. While those around her were sipping wine, she was having fun stomping the grapes the made it.^[1]

Sounds like much more fun.

9 It’s OK to Be Gay

Before Ellen Degeneres was a talk show host, she had her own sitcom, Ellen, which was incredibly popular. And then, in 1997, she told the world that she was gay. Almost at the same time, her TV character also announced that she was gay.

It’s probably fair to say that the announcement received a mixed reaction. The now famous ‘Puppy Episode’ where the announcement was made, led to her receiving death threats. It also won her awards. The show was picked up for a 5th season, but each episode now began with a warning that the comedy featured ‘Adult Content’.

Despite eventually being scrapped, the show has been widely applauded, and credited with paving the way for shows such as Will and Grace, which increased the representation of gay people on screen. Her contribution was rewarded by a Medal of Freedom, presented to her by President Obama in 2016.^[2]

Her show may have been cancelled, but Ellen Degeneres went on to become one of the most successful talk show hosts in the world.

8 It’s OK Not to Have a Life Plan

Friends changed a lot of things. The show made drinking coffee, in boutique coffee shops kind of cool. It made the term ‘on a break’, the subject of a million arguments between couples around the world. It gave a whole new meaning to the term ‘pivot’. But most of all, it said, it’s OK to be 30 and not have your life all mapped out.

With the exception of boring old Ross, all the friends had a go at a number of different careers before finding something that they loved. It was OK if they were broke, or out of work, or doing menial jobs to get by.

None of them (except Ross) knew what they were going to be doing in 5 years’ time, and they were OK with that. Sometimes its just nice to hang out with friends.^[3]

In a coffee shop.

7 It’s OK to be Bored at Work

Sometimes work is boring. And sometimes it’s REALLY boring. The Office did more than any other programme set in a workplace to show just how dull work can be.

So dull, in fact, that you might be compelled to hold your own Office Olympics.

With 8 hours to fill, and an endless supply of paper balls and coffee cups, what else are you going to do?

Not work, that’s for sure.

The Office showed that it is OK not to be enthusiastic about your job. You are there for the money. You are not really a team player. Don’t worry. No one else likes doing Team Building Exercises either.

Except, of course, Michael Scott.^[4]

And that’s OK too.

6 It’s OK to Be Neurotic

Seinfeld has regularly been voted the best sitcom ever. A fantastic achievement for a ‘show about nothing’. Despite the fact that almost every character on the show is neurotic in one way or another, the characters appear to be universally loved.

A group of psychiatry students ‘studied’ the programme, and concluded that Seinfeld himself suffers from OCD, with his obsessive compulsion for neatness, and Kramer probably has a schizoid personality disorder, while George is ego-centric to a fault. And then there is the original single-white-female “social justice warrior”, Elaine. She certainly has anger issues, but then she is the child of an alcoholic, which is a common trigger.

Apparently.

Despite the fact that the characters display some alarming mental health issues from time to time, they all seem to manage just fine.

Which is reassuring to the rest of us.^[5]

And it’s funny, too.

10 Hilarious Attempts To Rephrase Controversial Things

5 It’s OK to Be Pretentious

A programme about a couple of pretentious psychiatrists whose hobbies include wine-tasting, opera and not getting girls, doesn’t sound like the perfect recipe for a hit show. And yet Frasier, the most successful spin-off show ever, made it through 11 seasons of fierce sibling rivalry, classism, and constant references to Frasier’s Alma Mater (Harvard, just in case you didn’t know) in order to win an impressive 37 Primetime Emmys.

Despite living with his working-class ex-cop father and even more working-class British housekeeper, Frasier never quite manages to enjoy the less fine things in life. At the end of the 11th season, Frasier and Niles were just as pretentious and just as competitive as they had been at the beginning of season one.

There was that time they decided to write a book together. Or run their own restaurant. Or join the wine club. Every social occasion became an opportunity to get one over on each other or, even better, on someone else.^[6]

Despite that, the Crane boys were extremely likable, and painfully honest.

If only Frasier could manage to hang on to a relationship.

Happily, we can look forward to more from the hilarious brothers, as Frasier is set to return to our TV sets in a new series, date TBD.

4 It’s OK to Be a Nerd

The Big Bang Theory is said to have done more than any other TV programme to make scientists cool. Which is strange, considering that the cast consists of one genius with anti-social tendencies, one genius with anxiety issues, a genius who would like to be cool but knows he’s not, and an engineer.

Although they do share an unhealthy interest in dressing up like superheroes, watching science fiction and playing improbable games of chess, The Big Bang Theory really celebrates being smart.

And not only is it OK to be smart. You can also be a nerd. It’s OK to have your own spot on the sofa, or knock 3 times on a door. The characters bring academic rigor to the most banal situations, testing out theories that, really, just don’t need to be tested.

But it’s not just the characters who like to get the science right. The show employs scientific consults to ensure that the science is accurate. Because of this the show has regularly featured guest appearances by real-life scientists, including Stephen Hawking, who appeared on the show in Season 5 and had an entire episode named after him.

The show was so successful in making science look, if not cool, at least interesting, that interest in Physics received a huge boost in classrooms around the world.^[7]

3 It’s OK to Be a Dysfunctional Family

Although animated, The Simpsons is a classic sitcom based on the lives of a working-class American family. Having completed 32 seasons, and almost 700 episodes, the family have suffered almost every disaster it is possible to imagine. The father is lazy, a poor father and a worse husband. His wife doesn’t seem to notice. Possibly because she is so busy keeping the home and the children together, which, considering the children she was blessed with, is no mean feat.

Not only was The Simpsons the story of a family, however, it was also the story of an ever-expanding community of neighbors, work-colleagues, churchgoers, politicians and the media. Luckily for production costs most of the actors plays several characters, and celebrities compete for the honor of guesting on the show and being turned into a yellow caricature.

While The Simpsons are not the sort of neighbors you would want to live next to in real life, (what with the dog barking, saxophone playing and constant yelling), they have come to be one of the most loved families in America.

The show spawned a million memes, most of them beginning with Homer’s favorite word ‘D’Oh!’, but the phrase that made it to the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations was one of Groundskeeper Willie’s. He described the entire French nation as ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’.^[8]

Le ouch!

2 It’s OK for Old Women to Like Sex

In 1985 any sitcom that starred 4 women, was unusual, but a main cast of 4 old women was unheard of. The Golden Girls was a ground- breaking show. The 4 friends were all, one way or another, single, and, shock horror, they all quite liked sex.

They talked about having sex, about not having sex, good sex, bad sex and boring sex. Sex in all its forms, in fact.

The show was just as novel discussing gay issues, same-sex marriage, porn, and sexually transmitted diseases. Though the subjects were often thought to be controversial at the time, The Golden Girls managed to explore them with a mixture of innocence, interest and irony that made the show less threatening to many viewers.

Some audiences found the idea of people watching porn uncomfortable. But group of elderly ladies sitting in their living room watching a porn movie seemed somehow disarming.

Until, that is, one of them suddenly stood up, pointed at the TV and said, ‘I did that once’.^[9]

1 It’s OK to be silly

In 1969, Monty Python’s Flying Circus was like nothing ever seen before. In fact, the show is still considered to be the wildest, funniest, strangest sketch show ever made. Only 45 episodes were ever made, but they spawned a new brand of surreal comedy that inspired a generation.

The show has been a particular inspiration to astronomers, who named 7 asteroids in honor of the Pythons, and to paleontologists, who discovered a dinosaur-python fossil, and named it “Montypythonoides Riversleighensis”. John Cleese even had a woolly lemur named after him.

The term ‘Pythonesque’ was defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “resembling the absurdist or surrealist humor of Monty Python’.
Their lasting legacy, however, is the popularization of a word that does not describe an asteroid, a dinosaur, or a lemur. The word, certainly, is a Pythonesque one, that is used daily by millions of internet users to describe something that is unwanted and unappealing.

Thank you, Monty Python, for giving us Spam.^[10]

Top 10 Mandela Effects (Movie And TV Edition!)

Psychology is odd; it’s old enough to seem as though it’s been around forever but young enough so that there’s still an almost terrifyingly large amount of things that even professional psychologists don’t fully understand yet. When it comes to the general public’s popular image of psychology, a lot of folks hardly ever move past the timeless mantra of “lie down on the couch, and tell me how you feel” or Dr. Phil repeating people’s problems to them in a louder and slower voice on TV. While psychology and psychological disorders today are no longer kept in the corner like forbidden books of black magic, there’s still a long way to go in terms of actually spreading comprehensive knowledge.

Society has moved from tepidly prodding psychology with a long stick to an almost cult-like fascination and macabre fetishization of the concept. Comic books, TV shows, and movies almost always generate a buzz with the strategic use of the word “crazy.” Were that not the case, how much differently would Heath Ledger’s Joker performance have been received? Buzzwords like “psychopath,” “insane,” and “sociopath” are top contenders for words that are most frequently used despite a general misunderstanding of their meanings, right up there with “ironic” and “rhetorical.”

Schizophrenia is another one of those hot buzzwords that gets passed around corners in hushed tones but is rarely (accurately) expounded upon. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV) defines schizophrenia as the presence of “two or more of the following symptoms for a significant portion of time during a 1-month period (or less if successfully treated): (1) delusions (2) hallucinations (3) disorganized speech (e.g., frequent derailment or incoherence (4) grossly disorganized or catatonic behaviour (5) negative symptoms, i.e., affective flattening, alogia (poverty of speech), or avolition (lack of motivation).” (Note: The DSM-V terminology is essentially the same.) The psychological community has examined schizophrenia with an increasingly stronger lens since the beginning of the 21st century, and they have made many surprising findings.

10 Schizophrenia Is The Result Of Over-Intense Mental Processing

A common misconception about schizophrenia is that those who suffer from it have weaker mental processing skills, which many believe is to blame for paranoid delusions and inaccurate memories. On the contrary, neural activity tests have provided evidence supporting the exact opposite explanation.

If you’ve ever been guilty of throwing back a shot or five too many on Cinco de Mayo, then you might be familiar with the phrase, “Follow my finger.” The follow-my-finger sobriety test is an example of more than just why you should usually have more water in your body than tequila; it’s an example of what psychology wizards refer to as saccadic eye movement. To put it simply, your brain processes resources and memories differently when your eyes are in motion, as opposed to a static point of view.

Scientists at the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain conducted a test that focused on saccadic eye movement. The purpose of the study was to distinguish between the eye-movement (EM) brain activity of people with schizophrenia and healthy control subjects without the disease. All of the participants were asked to shift their eyes to a “target” in their peripheral vision, while avoiding a “non-target” closer to the center of vision—the catch was that they all had to keep a certain random color in mind during the exercise.

The hypothesis was that the non-target would be more distracting to the participant if its color matched the one that they were asked to keep in mind during the exercise. The results showed that the effect of matching color between the non-target and the imagined color was much more intense in participants with schizophrenia than those without. It was also observed that participants with schizophrenia were prone to hyper-focus on the space surrounding the main target’s position.

The findings served as more support to the belief that schizophrenic symptoms might actually be the result of a super-narrow, abnormally intense level of resource processing than normal.

9 Schizophrenia Is Linked With Brain Areas That Process Cannabis

Whenever somebody suggests that cannabis “kills the brain,” chances are that they’ve never heard of something called the endocannabinoid system (ECB). The ECB is a part of brain that modern science has found to be specially fine-tuned to reception of cannabinoids for emotional processing, memory maintenance, and learning.

The existence of the ECB is not evidence that lighting up in your parents’ basement actually makes you a genius, but its discovery helped us understand the brain a lot better and also raised many more questions. The existence of cannabinoid receptors provoked questions such as “why do we have cannabinoid receptors in the first place?” and “how do cannabinoid receptors interact with mental diseases?” Scientists at the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology at the University of Western Ontario conducted a study to address the latter question, specifically focusing on schizophrenia.

The heavily cited report states that the medial prefrontal cortex (PFC) and the basolateral nucleus of the amyglyda (BLA) are not only both cannabinoid receptor–heavy areas that are extremely important for emotional regulation but are also prone to serious distortions in cases of schizophrenia. In addition to the relationship between cannabinoids and schizophrenia-affective brain regions, research conducted at the University of Western Ontario’s labs also reported a strong interaction between cannabinoid transmission and dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that’s been found to be essential in explaining addiction and schizophrenic pathology.

8 Schizophrenics’ Memories Are More Resilient To Long-Term Substance Abuse

Up until very recently, there hasn’t been much research done on the effects of long-term substance abuse on the working memories of people with schizophrenia. The relationship between schizophrenia and poorer memory is well documented, as is the relationship between substance abuse and forgetting your entire weekend. Less well-studied is the impairment of base-level memory by substance abuse of schizophrenics.

Drs. Jessica A. Wojtalik and Deanna Barch of the Washington University School of Medicine conducted a study to provide some much-needed data in this area. Thirty-seven schizophrenia patients (17 with a history of substance abuse and 20 non–substance abusers) and 32 non-schizophrenic controls (12 with a history of substance abuse and 20 non–substance abusers) completed a working memory task while being scanned with an fMRI. The results of the study showed that the control group was much more divided in neural activation rates between past substance abusers and non–substance abusers than the schizophrenia group.

Whereas the memory-processing brain regions of the formerly substance abusing participants in the control group were far more active during memory tests than the non–substance abusing controls, there was little to no difference in neural activity between the formerly substance abusing schizophrenic participants and non–substance abusing schizophrenic participants. Schizophrenia patients were much less accurate than the controls on all tasks, but these findings indicate that substance abuse may have a relatively smaller impact on the base-level working memory of schizophrenics compared to those without.

7 Schizophrenics Have Trouble Identifying Facial Expressions But Process Them More

How many times have you awkwardly run into that one person whose name you just can’t ever seem to recall, but you recognize their face every time? It’s moments like those that seriously make you wonder about what your memory will be like a decade from now.

In a report on the interaction between cognition and emotions in schizophrenia, Dr. Quintino R. Mano and Dr. Gregory G. Brown cited a number of peculiar findings about the working memory patterns of schizophrenia patients, one of which had to do with simple facial recognition. It was found that while schizophrenia often causes those with the condition to have difficulty expressing and identifying facial emotions, schizophrenia patients also show a significantly heightened rate of automatic and implicit processing of facial emotions.

6 Siblings Of Schizophrenics Have Different Brain Activity Than Others

Dr. Alan Ceaser and associates conducted working memory tests with the participants split into three groups: schizophrenia patients, their siblings without schizophrenia, and a control group of healthy participants without the condition or any direct relationship to people with the condition. The results of the study showed that the patient and sibling group, but not the control group, exhibited different neural reactions to changes in dopamine availability than healthy controls. This supports the hypothesis of excess dopamine being a key player in the emergence of schizophrenic symptoms.

The most important implication of the study is that there are abnormal neural activity spikes in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), cerebellum, and striatum in both schizophrenia patients and those at risk for schizophrenia—this includes the brothers and sisters of those with the condition.

5 Male Schizophrenic Smokers Are More Susceptible To Nicotine Withdrawal

The subtle neurocognitive deficits of schizophrenia patients can even be observed in the brain’s reaction to nicotine withdrawal. The Clinical Psychiatry Research Center at Tabriz University of Medical Sciences conducted a study to examine the effect of short-term nicotine abstinence on schizophrenic smokers.

The 45 participants, all male schizophrenic smokers, were split into three groups: one group that would abstain from smoking for one night, a second group that would use a nicotine patch after avoiding smoking for a night, and a third control group with no intervention at all. Each participant was given a visuospatial memory test at the beginning of the experiment and the following morning, after the intervention.

The nicotine patch group and the freely smoking group showed no significant difference in scores between either test, but the group that was withheld from both smoking and nicotine patch use exhibited significantly worse test scores after the intervention. The study concluded that nicotine abstinence causes visuospatial deficits in male smokers with schizophrenia.

4 Gender Affects Schizophrenia Symptoms

Few people really take into account the subtle differences that gender can make on the manifestation of a psychological disorder, let alone schizophrenia, but the effects are very real. It’s understood by many in the field of psychology that schizophrenia often, if not always, accompanies visual perceptual organization impairment—particularly in those patients with rough social histories. Until recently, there was not a complete understanding of just how intensely gender differences can affect the visuospatial deficits in question.

Dr. Jamie Joseph and associates at Rutgers University conducted a study to investigate the relationship between disorganized schizophrenic symptoms and gender. The tools used to measure the relationship were specially designed perceptual organization tasks: the Countour Integration Task and the Ebbinghaus Illusion.

The participant sample consisted of 43 females and 66 males. The results showed that while females (with more relatively intact bottom-up grouping skills) performed more impressively on the Contour Integration Task, males (with more top-down-oriented grouping skills) performed better on the Ebbinghaus Illusion task. This supports the notion that sex differences are an important factor to consider when weighing in on the visual-perceptual impairments caused by schizophrenia.

3 Younger Schizophrenics Aren’t Being Treated As Effectively

Psychological treatment has come a long way since the mid-19th century. These days, we tend to lean more toward the clinical communication and behavior-analysis method of approach than the “let’s try poking your crazy out with a literal icepick” approach. Despite the advancements in technology and basic human decency, there is some evidence to show that the relationship between age and quality of psychological care doesn’t necessarily improve in a linear fashion as one gets older.

In 2013, the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry published findings that show the results of medical-administrative data analyses run over adult schizophrenia patients in Quebec for two years. The results showed that 77 percent of patients aged 30 and over were receiving adequate pharmacological treatment, compared to only 47 percent of patients aged 18–29. The fact that schizophrenia has been documented to be better-treated in the earlier phases of the disease makes this a concerning discovery.

2 Schizophrenics Have Lower Sex Drive

Scientists at the Clinic for Young Schizophrenics ran a study in 2014 measuring the psychosexual tendencies of 45 young adults with schizophrenia. The 45 young adults were compared to 61 young adults without the disease as a control group.

The results found that a smaller number of the schizophrenia patients had a sexual partner or had ever had sexual intercourse compared to the control group. More men with schizophrenia who were being treated with risperidone or olanzapine reported issues with arousal than men in the control group. Proportionally, the schizophrenia patient group demonstrated an increased chance of developing negative psychosexual tendencies compared to the control group.

This doesn’t mean that anyone should start substituting the word “schizophrenic” for prude—schizophrenia doesn’t erase sexual urges or instantly overstimulate them. These findings only serve to play down the misconception that mental pathology instantly implies hypersexuality.

1 Schizophrenia Is Related To Low Appetite Control

At the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Montreal, a study was conducted in 2012 in order to examine appetite regulation and metabolic differences between schizophrenia patients and a healthy control group. Even if you don’t have a doctorate hanging on your wall, chances are that you’re somewhat familiar with the horror stories that center on metabolism dysfunctions caused by psychiatric treatment gone wrong; the study took this into account as well, measuring the relationship between food cravings and antipsychotic medication dosages.

The results showed that only schizophrenic patients demonstrated specific cerebral responses in the parahippocamus, thalamus, and middle frontal gyri to appetite stimulation. Schizophrenic patients’ parahippocampal activity and related hunger levels both increased linearly over time. It was found that medication dosage had a strong positive correlation with food cravings, and also that the severity of the disease was negatively correlated with dietary restraint.

The findings show that not only does schizophrenia lend itself to a weakened ability to control the appetite, but also that the antipsychotic drugs used to treat the disease may also drastically exacerbate the dietary symptoms.

I was raised on the nation’s capital’s concrete, spent three years eating swordfish and terrible barbeque in the Massachusetts mountains, took a nap, and woke up in this weird dimension they call Long Island to get a doctorate in psychology. I can give you a rough play-by-play on what’s happening in a Spanish soap opera and teach you a lot of Chinese curse words. Slam poetry, rock climbing, marathon running, Muay Thai, Buddhism, electronic music, and stupid YouTube videos keep me sane—if you like any of those, you go on the pretty cool person list. You can also check out my website, Instagram, or Twitter.

When was World War II? What was the Berlin Wall? Who invented the cotton gin? This is what you’ll learn about in high school history class. The important people, places, and things that shaped the societies we know today. You’ll learn dates, facts, and names, many of which you’ll forget as soon as the test is over.

But what’s in the subtext of history? Ever wonder about the interesting little tidbits that slip through the cracks? Here are 10 things your history teacher forgot to mention.

10 Saddam Hussein’s Key To Detroit

“He was [a] very kind person, very generous, very cooperative with the West,” said Reverend Jacob Yasso of Chaldean Sacred Heart in Detroit. The Chaldean religion is a sect of Catholicism prevalent in Iraq, a population that is dominated by Muslims. It is practiced by tens of thousands of Americans of Middle Eastern descent.

The person in question? Saddam Hussein.

In 1979, Yasso congratulated Hussein on his presidency and Hussein generously donated $250,000 to Yasso’s church. The following year, Yasso visited Iraq as a guest of their government. With permission of the mayor of Detroit, he presented Hussein with the key to the city.^[1]

Hussein’s response? “I heard there was a debt on your church,” he said. “How much is it?” Hussein gave the church another $200,000. Yasso later changed his mind about Hussein. “The job the United States trusted to him is done,” Yasso said. “Now he’s no good.”

9 Al Capone’s One Mistake

Al Capone was the king of crime in Chicago during the Roaring Twenties. He ruled a criminal empire during Prohibition by controlling gambling, bootlegging, prostitution, and most other crime in Chicago.

The FBI knew of his criminal activities. But they couldn’t take any action against Capone because none of his crimes were federal offenses. They had to sit by and watch local law enforcement fail to take him down, a wait that became even more infuriating after the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre.

Finally, in 1929, Capone slipped up. When he was subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury as a witness in February, Capone claimed that he was sick at home and unable to make it. However, FBI agents quickly found him in Miami, out and about and as healthy as ever.

Capone was cited for contempt of court and sent to jail. However, they were unable to hold him and he was released on bond. But that was the beginning of the end.

When Capone was finally tried for the contempt of court citation, a federal judge sentenced him to six months in prison. This gave federal Treasury agents enough time to gather evidence that Capone had failed to pay his income taxes. In the end, the murdering, devious crime boss had forgotten to keep an eye on his real enemy: the IRS.^[2]

8 The Longest War In History

The longest war in history was an accident. In 1651, the Dutch were fighting with the Royalists and had driven them back to the Isles of Scilly. Eager to make up for the cost of the war, the Dutch sent warships to the islands to demand reparations.

It didn’t work. So Admiral Maarten Tromp officially declared war on the Isles of Scilly. Whether Tromp had the authority to do so remains unclear. But after forcing the Royalists to surrender three months later, the Dutch sailed back to the Netherlands. However, they forgot an important bit of last-minute business: declaring peace with the Isles of Scilly.

The matter was all but forgotten until 1985. At that time, Roy Duncan, a local Scilly historian, contacted the Dutch embassy asking if there was any truth to the preposterous rumors he had uncovered of an ongoing war between the two nations. The embassy turned up documents that seemed to indicate that the two nations had been at war for 335 years.

Duncan quickly asked the Dutch ambassador, Rein Huydecoper, to sign a peace treaty.^[3] On April 17, 1986, Huydecoper signed the agreement to end the bloodless, nearly forgotten, longest war in history.

7 The Shortest War In History

A mysterious death. A shady relative. A colonial British presence. The perfect ingredients for war.

In 1896, Hamad bin Thuwaini was ruling over Zanzibar, a protectorate of the British Empire, after being instated as a “puppet” sultan by the British. His reign had lasted just three years when he suddenly died in his palace on August 25. Rumor has it that his cousin Khalid bin Barghash had him poisoned, a belief seemingly confirmed by the fact that Barghash quickly moved into the palace and assumed the status of sultan without British permission.

Basil Cave, the chief British diplomat in the area, caught wind of the affair and didn’t approve of the change in leadership. Cave requested the assistance of British military warships stationed nearby. While he awaited permission from Britain to open fire, Barghash gathered his own surprisingly well-armed forces.

At 9:00 AM on August 27, Cave gave the order to begin bombarding the palace. At 9:02 AM, Khalid’s army was essentially destroyed and the palace began to crumble. By 9:40 AM, the sultan had pulled down his flag and the British ended their attack. In 38 minutes, the shortest war in history was over.^[4]

6 The Pope’s Erotic Novel

Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini was one of the most read authors of the early Renaissance. He was an educated and eloquent man, and his book was filled with historical and literary allusions. It opens with a quote from Virgil’s Aeneid. It is also one of the earliest examples of an epistolary novel, a book that tells a story through letters.

This book, The Tale of Two Lovers, follows the love story of Euryalus, an assistant to the duke of Austria, and Lucretia, a married woman. It is absolutely rife with erotic descriptions and imagery, most likely contributing to its widespread popularity.

Later, Piccolomini became widely known again, though this time as Pope Pius II. He condemned slavery, supported the crusades, and started one of the first city planning projects in Europe. However, he retained his literary bent, with his autobiography, Commentaries, serving as his most important and acclaimed work.

The Tale of Two Lovers was widely read after his election to the papacy^[5] and remains so to this day, both for its own merit and the illicit pleasure taken in an erotic novel written by a pope.

5 The Hatchet-Wielding Prohibitionist

Carrie A. Moore was born in Kentucky in 1846. Her first husband was an alcoholic who could not support her or their child. He died six months after the child was born. Later, after marrying preacher David Nation, Carrie became deeply religious. She also became incredibly involved in the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and working with prisoners.

During her work in jail, she began to believe that alcohol was the root of the prisoners’ problems. So she started her crusade against the illegal bars active in Kansas. She and another member of the WCTU attempted to close down bars by standing outside and loudly singing hymns and praying.

After supposedly receiving a message from God, Carrie turned to violence.^[6] She threw bricks at bars, and someone handed her a hatchet, which she used to continue her destruction of bars and their liquor supplies.

Carrie Nation—a strong woman who was 183 centimeters (6’0″) tall—quickly drew national attention. The WCTU awarded her a medallion with the inscription: “To the Bravest Woman in Kansas.”

In 1903, Carrie A. Nation officially became Carry A. Nation, claiming that she wanted to “Carry A Nation for Prohibition.” Though she did not live to see it, her hatchet-wielding legacy paved the way for the Eighteenth Amendment, which banned the manufacture and sale of alcohol, and the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote.

4 The Oneida Society

Chances are, your silverware comes from the Oneida Community. In 1848, John Humphrey Noyes left Vermont after being accused of adultery. He established his own community based on the religious belief of Perfectionism, which he adopted while studying at Yale Divinity School.

He carefully selected 300 members, all of whom lived in a system of complete communism. The religion’s central tenet was complex marriage,^[7] where every man was married to every woman and vice versa and all children were raised communally. Monogamy was heavily frowned upon, and younger members of the society were introduced to the “holy pleasures of the flesh” by an assigned older member of the community.

Ultimately, those outside the community—called “The World” by the Oneida Community—accused the members of immorality. In 1881, the commune dissolved. What remains of the community is Oneida Ltd., the largest manufacturer of stainless steel cutlery in the nation.

The transition from religious commune to successful corporation remains poorly documented, but there is no question as to the origins of Oneida Ltd. It is the only flatware maker with a factory in the United States, leaving an untarnished legacy in the wake of its utopian experiment.

3 The Cat Telephone

Move over, Schrodinger. In 1929, Ernest Wever and Charles Bray, researchers at Princeton University, turned a live cat into a working telephone. They removed part of the cat’s skull to add an electrode to the right auditory nerve and to another part of the cat’s body. Then the researchers used a cable to attach the electrodes to a vacuum tube amplifier, and the amplified signals were sent to a telephone receiver in a separate, soundproof room.

“Speech was transmitted with great fidelity,” the researchers said. “Simple commands, counting, and the like were easily received. Indeed, under good conditions, the system was employed as a means of communication between operating and soundproof rooms.”^[8]

The success, however, could have been a fluke. To ensure that it wasn’t, Wever and Bray killed the cat. The sound faded and died, proving that the functionality of the telephone came from the life of the cat.

2 The Dancing Plague Of Strasbourg

In July 1518 in Strasbourg, France, Frau Troffea began to dance. People laughed and clapped at the lone woman dancing in the streets to no discernible music. But they slowly stopped laughing when she did not stop dancing. She danced day and night for six days.

Her dancing fever proved contagious. Within a week, 34 people had joined her. By the end of a month, there were 400. At the height of the dancing fever, 15 people died each day from heart attacks, strokes, and exhaustion.

The town’s government decided to lean into the storm, constructing a makeshift dance floor and hiring musicians for the dancers in hopes that they would attain their fill of dancing and stop. However, these measures did nothing but encourage others to hop on the dance floor and join the craze.

After a month, the boogying suddenly stopped^[9] and the dancers went home. Experts still disagree about what caused the craze. Many think that it was a social phenomenon caused by the stress of the times and not a mass medical disorder as some have speculated.

1 The Great Emu War

Would you fight an emu? In 1932, Australia tried.

Finding it difficult to grow and sell their crops, farmers in Western Australia were struggling to stay afloat during the Great Depression. It didn’t help that their attempts to grow wheat had coincided with the emus’ breeding season and the birds were migrating inland.

Finding the cultivated land of the wheat fields appetizing, the emus ate the crops, spoiled the wheat they didn’t eat, and left gaping holes in the fences. Dismayed, the farmers appealed to the government.

Minister of Defense Sir George Pearce heard about the plight of the farmers and readily agreed to aid them in their war on the emus. Major G.P.W. Meredith of the Seventh Heavy Battery of the Royal Australian Artillery led the charge, arming soldiers with machine guns and chasing after any word of emu sightings, ready to face the enemy.

The emus, however, proved to have a military strategy that far outstripped that of the Australian army. The flightless birds employed the guerrilla tactic of scattering in small groups, rendering the Australians’ weaponry ineffective. The Australians conceded defeat,^[10] put down their machine guns, and headed home.

In 1934, 1943, and 1948, when the farmers again requested military assistance to fight off the dastardly birds, the government refused.

The Second World War featured some of the deadliest battles in history, with casualty figures far surpassing anything we’ve seen at any other time of conflict in history. While we still remember many of them – like the infamous urban struggle at Stalingrad, or the daring amphibious Allied landings on the Normandy beach – most of them are left out of history books today. 

10. Battle Of Crete

Fought between May 20 and June 1, 1941, the Battle of Crete was an airborne assault launched by Nazi Germany to capture the strategically-important island of Crete in Greece. After a failed British expedition to defend Greek territory against the German attacks, the remaining British, Commonwealth, and Greek troops were evacuated to Crete, making the island an important position for both sides. The Germans, along with their overwhelming superiority in the air at that time of the war, planned a large-scale assault using elite parachute and glider troops, aiming to capture key airfields for reinforcements. 

While the Allies outnumbered the Germans, they lacked coordination, communications, and heavy weaponry, and German dominance of the air soon made effective defense of the island nearly impossible. The battle resulted in a German victory and high losses for both sides, with 4,000 dead, 2,000 wounded, and 11,300 captured out of 47,500 troops involved for the Allies, and 7,000 dead on the German side.

9. Battle Of Monte Cassino

The Battle of Monte Cassino was a military confrontation between the Allied forces and Nazi Germany in Cassino, Italy. From January 17 to May 18, 1944, it was a grueling attempt by the Allies to fight their way up to the Italian peninsula due to the heavily-fortified Gustav Line,  as Monte Cassino and its historic Benedictine monastery had been turned into an important stronghold for the Germans.

The battle soon turned into a stalemate and led to the deaths of a shockingly-high number of troops. By the end of it, the Allies forces suffered about 105,000 casualties, with a total loss of around 80,000 soldiers on the German side. While Polish troops did finally gain control of the monastery, they found it unoccupied as the Germans had already retreated to a new defensive line. Till today, the indiscriminate and almost-total destruction of the monastery by Allied forces during the assault remains a matter of controversy.

8. Siege Of Budapest

The siege of Budapest was one of the most destructive chapters of the war, lasting from November 1944 to February 1945. Hitler had declared Budapest a fortress city due to its strategic importance to Nazi Germany, and the city was defended by around 90,000 German and Hungarian troops against 170,000 Soviet and Romanian attackers. The offensive saw intense hand-to-hand urban fighting that resulted in massive losses of military and civilian lives, with additional damage to the cultural and historical heritage of the city. 

Many relief attempts were made by the Germans and Romanians occupying the city by the time the battle began, though to little success. Red Army soldiers launched an assault on the city on January 14, 1945, capturing Buda by February. Many fascist soldiers were mercilessly shot throughout the episode, and by February 14, the city was entirely under Soviet control. The casualties were anywhere between 100,000 to 160,000 on the Soviet side, and about 70,000 troops on the Axis side, with an additional 40,000 civilians that died in the crossfire. 

7. Battles Of Imphal and Kohima

The battles of Imphal and Kohima were important turning points of the Second World War, though they’re often overshadowed by other major engagements ongoing in the European theater around that time. The Japanese launched an offensive codenamed U-Go in spring 1944, targeting the Allied base at Imphal in north-east India and simultaneously attacking the small village of Kohima on the Imphal-Dimapur Road. The garrison at Kohima, heavily outnumbered, held out for many days, although they relied on air-dropped supplies throughout the engagement. 

Meanwhile, the Japanese attack on Imphal began in early March but failed to defeat the Indian and British defenders by the beginning of May. The Allies launched a counter-offensive to take advantage of the retreating Japanese soldiers in Kohima, linking up with forces at Imphal around June. The Japanese offensive would ultimately fail, resulting in almost 60,000 dead and wounded, while the Allies suffered around 17,500 casualties. The victory at Imphal and Kohima allowed the Allies to plan a return to Burma and turn the war in their favor across the region. 

6. Battle Of Manila

Japan’s empire began to crumble around the beginning of 1945, as strategic cities across Southeast Asia started to surrender to advancing Allied forces without much resistance. Manila, the capital of the Philippines, however, experienced a grueling, fierce battle from February to March 1945, now remembered as the Battle of Manila. It was the only urban battle between Japanese and American forces within a city, resulting in the deaths of around 6,500 Americans, 20,000 Japanese, and 200,000 Filipinos. 

By the end of it, almost all of the Japanese and half of the local population in the city were killed in the brutal house-to-house struggle. The Imperial Japanese soldiers, tasked with defending the city to the last man, faced overwhelming firepower from the Americans, leading to desperate and retaliatory actions against the local civilian population. 

This phase is also sometimes referred to as the Manila Massacre – a period of severe Japanese brutality against civilians that included rape, massacre, and violent mutilation perpetrated by frustrated troops facing capture or certain death. Japanese General Yamashita was found responsible for these atrocities and subsequently executed for war crimes after the war.

5. Second Battle Of Kharkov

The Second Battle of Kharkov – or Operation Fredericus on the German side – was a bitterly-fought offensive that happened in two distinct phases: the Soviet offensive from May 12 to May 28, 1942, and the subsequent German counteroffensive from May 18 to May 23, 1942. 

It began when Soviet forces pushed to reclaim the strategic city of Kharkov and take control of the region. This offensive, however, faced stiff resistance, resulting in the costly encirclement of Red Army forces, with around 240,000 Soviet soldiers dead and 1,000 tanks lost.

The Germans retained control of Kharkov until January, 1943, when the tide of the war began to turn on the Eastern Front . Soviet forces had reached the outskirts of Kharkov by February, forcing the German forces under Field Marshal Erich von Manstein to withdraw. It proved to be a wise decision, as it allowed the Germans to regroup and launch a counteroffensive using SS-Panzer Corps and other Panzer divisions. They reached the city’s outskirts by March 7, 1943, bringing Kharkov back under German control.

4. Battle Of Tulagi and Gavutu–Tanambogo

The Battle of Tulagi and Gavutu-Tanambogo was the land part of the Guadalcanal campaign, fought from August 7 to 9, 1942 on the Solomon Islands. The objective was to capture Tulagi, Gavutu, and Tanambogo, where the Japanese had established a naval and air base in the early phases of the war. The assault was executed in the face of fierce resistance from Japanese naval troops, primarily carried out by US Marines led by Major General Alexander A. Vandegrift’s 1st Marine Division.

The battle saw some of the most brutal fighting of the war in the Pacific theater until that time, resulting in the Allied capture of these islands with high losses on the Japanese side. The successful capture of Tulagi’s natural harbor later turned it into a vital naval base for Allied operations in the South Pacific. 

3. North Africa Campaign

The North African Campaign was one of the longest-running military offensives of the war, lasting from June 1940 to May 1943. It consisted of many large-scale strategic battles between Allied and Axis powers in the deserts of Libya and Egypt, along with battles in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. Axis forces aimed to secure oil supplies, cut off British access to resources in Asia and Africa, and relieve pressure on the eastern front after Germany invaded the Soviet Union. 

The campaign consisted of three phases – the Western Desert campaign, Operation Torch in Algeria and Morocco, and the Tunisia campaign – and saw fierce fighting and high casualty rates on both sides. The Allies, led primarily by the British Commonwealth and later aided by the United States, eventually achieved victory by neutralizing nearly 620,000 German and Italian troops, at the cost of about 220,000 men on their own side. This success opened a second front against the Axis forces, as it directly led to the invasion of Sicily and the Italian mainland.

2. Operation Kutuzov

Officially known as the ‘Orel Strategic Offensive Operation’, Operation Kutuzov was a major Soviet offensive of the Eastern Front, launched in the immediate aftermath of the German defeat during Operation Zitadelle in 1943. The offensive aimed to exploit the weakening capabilities of the German forces and entirely eliminate the German salient centered on Orel during the larger Battle of Kursk.

It was fought by three Soviet army groups – the West Front, Bryansk Front, and Central Front – and involved a multi-pronged attack on the Orel territory held by the Germans for nearly two years. 

Operation Kutuzov began on July 12, 1943, with a heavy artillery barrage, as Soviet forces attacked with overwhelming strength and drove through the German defenses, pushing the Nazi forces back to the ‘Hagen-Stellung’ line. The losses were staggering in numbers, especially for the Soviet side that lost more than 685,000 soldiers during the battle, compared to about 185,000 total casualties for Germany.

1. Operation Bagration

Operation Bagration was a major Soviet offensive against Nazi Germany on the Eastern Front, fought from June 23 to August 19, 1944. It was launched in support of the Normandy Invasion in the West and aimed to take advantage of Germany’s declining military power during the waning phases of the war.

Named after General Pyotr Bagration, the Red Army planned the offensive carefully, deceiving the Germans into expecting an attack further south in Ukraine while amassing armor and troops opposite Army Group Center in the north. It resulted in a successful attack that took German commanders by surprise, destroying 28 out of 34 German divisions and liberating large parts of the Soviet Union. The losses on both sides were severe, however, with an estimated 350,000 to 670,000 German soldiers and over 750,000 Soviet soldiers killed or wounded during the entire offensive.

Everyone’s heard of Ghengis Khan, Adolf Hitler, Ted Bundy, and Jeffrey Epstein. But, sadly, history is filled with mass murderers, psychopaths, child abusers, tyrants, and dictators that you’ve probably never heard of. As delicious as it is to think of these power and fame-hungry monsters dying in obscurity – undoubtedly a fate worse than death for some of them – it is important to learn from their crimes, to make sure they can never be repeated. Let’s take a look at some historical bad guys you’ve probably never heard of. 

10. Elizabeth Bathory

The name “Elizabeth Báthory” probably means nothing to you. But it should evoke chilling tales of darkness and horror. Known as the “Blood Countess,” this 16th century Hungarian noblewoman killed more than 600 girls and bathed in their blood to maintain her youth. It was one of the most sinister reigns of terror in history. 

Or was it? Beneath the tales that have woven her into a monstrous figure, there lies a complex narrative. New evidence suggests her terrifying reputation was either a result of a conspiracy hatched against Bathory by friends and family, who sought to discredit her and steal her wealth and power, or that she really was a criminal but that tales of her monstrous atrocities have been exaggerated to the point of absurdity over the centuries. Poor record keeping in her day certainly doesn’t help us parse truth from fiction. But whether she was really guilty of those crimes or a victim of someone else’s slander, it appears there is indeed a true villain in this story somewhere. 

9. Sawney Bean

Legend has it that in the 16th century, Sawney Bean and his family carved a gruesome path through the rugged Scottish countryside. Portrayed as a clan of cannibals and murderers, the Bean family is said to have lurked in the hidden caves, preying upon unsuspecting travelers for sustenance and pleasure. Their reign of terror and the sheer brutality of their crimes have immortalized the Bean clan as one of Scotland’s most macabre characters.

According to lore, the Beans, believed to number in the dozens, would ambush and rob unsuspecting passersby before dragging them to their secret coastal cave hideout. There, they would murder their victims, dismember the bodies and feast on their flesh. The scale of their atrocities is said to have been staggering, with estimates claiming hundreds of innocent lives fell victim to the family’s insatiable hunger. Now, as you’ve probably guessed from the wording so far, there’s a lot in this story that’s probably made up. But true or not, the legend did inspire several works of art, including The Hills Have Eyes. So good luck sleeping tonight.

8. Gilles de Rais

If you ran into Gilles de Rais on the streets of 15th century France, you’d probably bow politely to this esteemed nobleman and military captain. But de Rais was hiding in plain sight like Heisenburg. Today, he’s remembered not for his valor on the battlefield, but for his descent into the depths of depravity as an early serial killer.

Once a trusted companion of Joan of Arc, Gilles de Rais’s life took a harrowing turn following her execution. Fueled by a disturbing fascination with the occult and alchemy, he embarked on a series of unspeakable acts. He lured young boys to his castles, then indulged in acts of sadistic torture, sexual abuse which we will not describe here, and ultimately, murder. The magnitude of his crimes is staggering, with estimates ranging from dozens to hundreds of innocent lives lost at his hands. Thankfully, de Rais was eventually caught, forced to confess, and brought to justice. However, some modern historians wonder if he was actually guilty, or just telling his tormentors what he thought they wanted to hear?

7. Leopold II

When we think about vast European empires, you probably think Britain, Spain, France, and a few other power players. Belgium, on the other hand, is depicted as a teeny country that was often bullied by Germany. None of that is necessarily wrong, but Belgium’s status as a cute waffle-maker and blameless victim in the World Wars has blinded the globe to its terrible crimes in Africa. 

Enter Leopold II, Belgian monarch from 1865 to 1909. While celebrated for some of his policies back home, his rule in the Congo Free State deserves no such praise. Under the guise of philanthropy and civilization, and hungry for lucrative rubber, Leopold II unleashed a reign of terror in the Congo, utilizing forced labor, enslavement, and rampant human rights abuses. Millions of Congolese people were subjected to horrific conditions, including mutilations, mass killings, and other forms of terror and state-sanctioned violence. Sadly, the great European powers mentioned above did still manage to exploit Belgium in one sinister way. Although they all copied Belgium’s cruel, exploitative practices in Africa, they allowed Leopold to take the heat from the international community all by himself, since Belgium was too small to narratively defend itself.

6. Leonarda Cianciulli

Don’t let the nickname “Soap-Maker of Correggio” trick you into thinking Leonarda Cianciulli, a seemingly bland 20th century Italian woman on the surface, was just a sweet neighborhood lady who valued cleanliness. Behind her seemingly ordinary facade lurked a deeply disturbed mind, driven by a belief in the occult and a deranged quest for personal protection. 

In an effort to protect her children from harm, Cianciulli often lured unsuspecting women into her home, drugged them, and subsequently killed them with an axe. That’s heinous enough – but what followed was even more gruesome. Cianciulli dismembered the bodies and boiled them piece by piece, transforming legs and heads into soap and tea cakes. Hence the no-longer-very-charming nickname. Her grotesque acts were rooted in a belief that human sacrifices would shield her loved ones from misfortune.

The revelation of Cianciulli’s crimes sent shockwaves through the Italian populace. Fortunately, she was brought to justice – but not before destroying numerous lives and traumatizing the whole country.

5. Carl Panzram

You’ve heard of Ted Bundy, Ed Kemper, and Jeffery Dahmer. But Carl Panzram can hold his own in hell with any of them. Born in 1891, Panzram led a life of crime from an early age. But it wasn’t until the man was behind bars that his true nature unraveled. After escaping, Panzram, now fully committed to a career of criminality, went on a heinous spree that involved burglary, arson, sexual crimes, and murder. 

He spent several stints in jail but managed to escape on numerous occasions, including once by sawing through the window bars. At no point did Panzram ever attempt to lay low or become a productive member of society. When he was arrested once and for all, Panzram admitted to 21 murders and more than 1,000 acts of sexual abuse that we will not be going into detail on here. He was ultimately hanged in 1930. 

It was actually the criminal plots he never got around to pulling off that raise the most eyebrows, including ones to poison a whole city’s water supply and even to provoke war between Britain and the US by sinking a British ship in New York harbor and blaming it on the American government.

4. Belle Gunness

We’re all far more familiar with male serial killers. But – and this isn’t what anyone thinks of when they push for gender equality – it’s worth noting that several women have lived lives of incredible violence and cruelty as well. Enter Belle Gunness, a cunning murderer in the 19th and 20th centuries who left a trail of death and mystery leading to her farm in La Porte, Indiana. Gunness enjoyed luring wealthy bachelors to her farm, where they would mysteriously vanish, never to be seen again. It is believed that she would first dispatch her victims through poison or blunt force trauma. Then, to cover her tracks, she dismembered the bodies and disposed of the remains on her property, leaving behind few traces of her heinous acts.

Rumors swirled around Gunness and her farm, as the disappearances of multiple suitors raised suspicions among the community. But it was not until a fire engulfed her property that the true extent of her crimes came to light. Amidst the charred ruins, authorities discovered not only the remains of several unidentified individuals, condemning Gunness and establishing her as one of the most notorious female serial killers of all time.

3. Oskar Dirlewanger

He might not be responsible for as many innocent deaths as Hitler or other members of the Nazi high command he served. But Oskar Dirlewanger, leader and namesake of the notorious SS Dirlewanger Brigade, committed some of World War II’s most monstrous crimes. Operating with impunity, Dirlewanger and his unit of literal criminal psychopaths unleashed a reign of torture and terror that shocked even their comrades in the SS. That is, as we’re sure you can imagine, saying quite a bit.

Under Dirlewanger’s command, the brigade perpetrated unspeakable acts of physical and sexual violence against civilians, prisoners of war, and partisans. Their actions were fueled by a toxic combination of ideological fervor, a desire for personal gain, and, especially, a sadistic pleasure derived from inflicting pain.

Dirlewanger’s atrocities peaked during 1944’s Warsaw Uprising, where his brigade was unleashed against resistance fighters. But it was innocent civilians – specifically children – who found themselves at the nonexistent mercy of Dirlewanger’s men. We won’t go into detail here about what happened, but the information is out there if you have a strong stomach. After the war, Dirlewanger was tortured to death by vengeful Polish officers in 1945.

2. Ilse Koch

Hitler. Himmler. Goebbels. Goering. Dirlewanger. All Nazis. All men. But the Third Reich wasn’t entirely a man’s man’s world. Some women are unsung villains of Nazi Germany too. Ilse Koch, for example, infamously known as the “B***h of Buchenwald,” was one of the most sadistic concentration camp leaders in the Reich. As the wife of Karl-Otto Koch, the commandant of the Buchenwald concentration camp, Koch was given oversight of the women’s camp. 

Koch was known for her obsession with human skin, collecting tattoos and body parts from murdered inmates. Rumors swirled of her macabre decorations, including lampshades and book covers allegedly made from the stuff. Beyond her gruesome collection, Koch would personally select victims for beatings, lashings, and even murder, based on the tiniest provocations, or none at all. 

After the liberation of Buchenwald, Koch was tried by an American military tribunal and ultimately found guilty of charges including incitement to murder, cruelty, and the use of human remains for personal gain. She was sentenced to life imprisonment, but was infuriatingly released in 1949. However, she was given a life sentence in a separate trial regarding unrelated crimes, and died in prison in 1967. 

1. Idi Amin

We could fill a dozen of these lists with two-bit Third World dictators. But Idi Amin deserves a special mention, Amin ruled Uganda with an iron fist from 1971 to 1979. And if you’ve ever learned about anyone on this list, chances are it was Amin. As is often the cases with dictators, human rights abuses, mass killings, and chilling terror were hallmarks of his regime. 

During his rule, Amin targeted various ethnic and political groups with arbitrary arrests, torture, and extrajudicial killings, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Ugandans. The dichotomy featured by the flamboyant image he presented to the world and the vast suffering he was responsible for back home is both bizarre and completely in line with what we’ve come to expect from the cruel leaders of Banana Republics and former democracies in the developing world. On the one hand, it’s a tragedy his crimes aren’t more well known. On the other, we imagine he’d be furious if he knew how few people recognized his name. In the end, it’s yet another cautionary tale about the importance of standing up to tyrants and protecting the right of all people to choose their own governments. We really shouldn’t need this many, but here we are.