Ciaran Conliffe 274 posts 6 comments

Aphra Behn’s origins are mysterious, almost certainly because she wanted it that way. She was born around 1640, probably to parents of the professional class. Her father could have been a man named Cooper. Or he could have been a barber…

Ferdinand Waldo Demara, commonly known as “Fred”, was born in Lawrence Massachusetts in the December of 1921. The family were fairly well off when he was born, but his father lost a lot of money in the Great Depression and the family had to…

Diogenes was born over twenty-four hundred years ago, which is more of a problem than historians like to admit. People didn’t keep great records back then, of course, and not much was written down. Of what was, little has survived to this…

Catalina de Erauso was a real person, that much we can verify. The details of her life, however, are much harder to pin down. Partially this is because our main source is her “autobiography”, which reads like an adventure novel and probably…

Note: This edition of Terrible People from History covers sexual exploitation, and gets more than a little gory as well. Consider yourself forewarned. Abe Sada was born in Tokyo in May 1905 to a relatively respectable middle class…

"'And do you know what I'm going to do now?"' 'No,' she said. 'What?' 'Buy a copy of Hamlet,' I said, 'and solve that!'" The Macbeth Murder Mystery, by James Thurber At first, I was sure that Hamlet must have killed his father.…

Titus Oates was a liar. But he was a special type of liar, the kind who told a lie that people desperately wanted to believe. If his lie was a spark, then it started an inferno - and that inferno would consume dozens of lives before it ran…

Nobunaga was born the heir to the Oda clan in 1534. He was his father Nobuhide’s second son, but his elder brother Nobuhiro was illegitimate. The clan had historically been the vassals of a more powerful clan, the Shiba, but eighty years…

Man, don’t you just hate hipsters? I mean there they are, with their stupid fancy moustaches and silly fixed gear bicycles and weird beer and dodgy clothes and dreadful music and soy milk lattes. And the fads! Don’t get me started on the…

Benedetta Carlini had the misfortune of being born into the wrong time. If she’d been born a few hundred years earlier (or even a hundred years later), she’d be Saint Benedetta of Pescia. As it was she was born in 1591 in Italy, a period…