20 Times People Majorly Screwed Up And Changed The Course Of History

Back in 1348 Scots chieftains were delighted to hear that the “auld enemy” — England — was in the grip of a devastating plague outbreak. For the more bellicose Scottish people this presented an opportunity too good to be missed. Surely, now was the perfect time to invade their antagonists to the south, while they were so sorely stricken?

A Scots army duly marched across the border into England in 1349. But the invaders had failed to spot one serious weakness in their plans. If you trample into another nation where plague is raging, there’s every chance you’ll be infected. And surprise, surprise, it seems that’s precisely what happened. Even worse, they apparently took the plague back to Scotland when they retreated, sparking a major epidemic there.

Mao Zedong, it seems, was often angry at the world. And in 1958 the Chinese leader crystallized this rage into a program known as the four pests. The less-than-fab four were identified as rats, flies, mosquitoes — and the humble house sparrow. All of those creatures were to be killed on sight. The diminutive brown birds were in the frame because they ate crops rightfully bound for human mouths. 

Whatever they thought privately about Mao’s instructions, the Chinese people acted with enthusiastic zeal. One expert estimated that during the period of the campaign as many as 1 billion sparrows were exterminated, pushing them close to local extinction. But Mao had overlooked one key impact of the sparrow massacre: sparrows ate locusts. And lo and behold, China was soon engulfed in a catastrophic plague of the voracious insects, gobbling down food crops at a terrifying rate.

There was a time, some two decades ago, when Yahoo! was one of the internet’s top players. When it was, it had a chance to acquire a company that would rise astronomically in value. Google. Yes, Yahoo! had the opportunity to buy out the company that eventually far outpaced it. And that chance came along not just once, but twice. In 1998 unknowns Sergei Brin and Larry Page offered to sell their AltaVista search engine to Yahoo! for a measly $1 million.

AltaVista, of course, evolved into Google. Yahoo! executives took a look at AltaVista and said, “No.” Then in 2002 Yahoo! approached Page and Brin with a view to buying their search engine. But the duo demanded $5 billion, and Yahoo! pulled out. Yet in May 2021 Yahoo! and another ancient internet pioneer AOL, were sold together for roughly the same valuation. Google’s parent company Alpha, on the other hand, has a current value of more than $1.8 trillion. That’s according to Yahoo! Finance.

The first digital camera was invented as long ago as 1975. The company that came up with the new gizmo was the leading photographic outfit of the day, Eastman Kodak. But the company’s bosses decided that digital photography was a dead end. It was a young technician called Steven Sasson who came up with the innovation. Admittedly, Sasson’s camera was primitive by today’s standards.

In a pre-home computer, tablet and smartphone age, the only way to view the photos was to plug the camera into a TV. Talking to The New York Times newspaper in 2015 Sasson remembered the reaction of Kodak seniors, explaining, “Print had been with us for over 100 years, no one was complaining about prints, they were very inexpensive, and so why would anyone want to look at their picture on a television set?” Dear oh dear.

By 1962 highly successful British record company Decca had been in business for nearly 35 years. So you would have thought its talent-spotters would have known what they were doing. But when The Beatles came to the Decca studios to audition for a possible contract, something went badly wrong. It was an error that the company’s head of A&R, Dick Rowe, would come to rue.

After listening to The Beatles’ demo tape, Rowe, who wasn’t actually at the audition, decided that they were already passé. According to the band’s manager, Brian Epstein, Rowe said that, “Guitar groups are on their way out, Mr. Epstein.” To make matters worse, Decca chose to sign a combo called Brian Poole and the Tremeloes instead. They did have U.K. Top 40 success in their era. But if you’re younger than about 60, you probably haven’t heard of them.

In 1912 RMS Titanic sank beneath the icy waters of the Atlantic and more than 1,500 souls perished. Of course, the cause of the accident was an iceberg that wasn’t spotted until it was too late to take evasive action. But if the lookout on duty, Fred Fleet, had been equipped with binoculars, perhaps catastrophe might have been averted. But he had none. Asked at the official enquiry if binoculars would have made a difference, Fleet replied, “Enough to get out of the way.” 

Yet there was a pair of binoculars on board the ship which should have been available to lookouts. But they had been locked in a cabinet and no one had the key. Where was this vital key? Second Officer David Blair had it. He’d been due to sail aboard the luxury liner but was pulled just before she left. And he forgot to return the crucial locker key before disembarking.

All too often the human race has, with good intentions, messed with the natural world only to cause calamity. And there can be few better examples of that than what happened in the African nation of Zimbabwe back in the 1960s. At that time the country was still ruled by a white elite and was called Rhodesia. 

An ecologist called Allan Savory was appalled by the increasing desertification of parts of southern Africa, including Zimbabwe. He concluded that the blame for this lay with elephants, which he believed were devastating the landscape. So Savory decided the only answer was to cull the huge beasts. Based on his theory, some 40,000 were slaughtered — with absolutely no discernible effect on desertification.

Look at your personal computer today and you’ll see a screen with icons on a desktop. You operate the machine with a mouse or touchpad. Pretty straightforward, and something that we take for granted in our everyday life. But these things didn’t always exist. At one time the only way to operate any computer was to type in raw code. Somebody, or several people, had to invent modern computing. And the team that did this actually worked at Xerox.

But the bosses at Xerox didn’t fully appreciate the potential of what their developers had created. According to legend, Steve Jobs visited the Xerox headquarters in the late 1970s and saw what the company had created. Jobs did see the possibilities of these innovations. And he went on to steer Apple to a leading position in the industry. Xerox, which had not patented its inventions, missed out big-time.

In the 13th century a man called Inalchuq was the governor of a city called Otrar. It fell within the Khwarezmian Empire, which encompassed territory in modern-day Iran and Central Asia. This was the era when Genghis Khan was building his own empire, and he sent a trading delegation to Otrar in 1218. Inalchuq apparently didn’t like the look of these visitors and executed the lot of them, including Genghis’ personal representative.

By his own standards, Genghis’ response was moderate. He sent a small party to Inalchuq’s boss and uncle, Sultan Muhammad II, to seek justice. But the Sultan seems to have been no smarter than his nephew. Muhammad killed one of the messengers and shaved the beards of the other two, a gross insult. The Great Khan’s patience now evaporated. He besieged Otrar and slaughtered its citizens, including Inalchuq. He also toppled Muhammad, bringing an end to the Khwarezmian Empire.

Gerald Ratner was lucky enough to inherit a chain of jewelry shops from his father. He’d joined the family company in 1966 and clearly had an aptitude for the business. By the 1980s he’d built it into a thriving enterprise with more than 2,500 stores selling jewelry at rock-bottom prices across the U.K. But things came to a crashing halt one day in 1991 when Ratner addressed a prestigious gathering of Britain’s Institute of Directors.

Some 6,000 were ready to hear Ratner’s words of wisdom as he mounted the stage at the Royal Albert Hall in London. But what they heard astonished them. At one point Ratner said, “People say: ‘How can you sell this for such a low price?’ I say: ‘Because it’s total crap.’” The reaction was immediate. Angry customers deserted the shops and even demanded refunds. The share price bombed. Ratner had effectively torpedoed his own business.

It was 1959 and rock ‘n’ roll legend Buddy Holly was on the road with his band The Crickets. They were touring venues around the Upper Midwest in a bus, not especially comfortable in the sub-zero temperatures of January and February. The party arrived in Clear Lake, Iowa, to play the Surf Ballroom. Holly decided he had taken as much as he could stomach aboard the ramshackle buses in which they’d been traveling.

On top of that, Holly really needed to do some laundry, as did his band. He came up with a solution. He would charter a plane and fly to the next gig 400 miles away in Fargo, North Dakota. Arriving ahead of time, he’d be able to arrange for the band’s clothes to be laundered. It seemed like a plan. But, of course, the result of taking this flight was a disaster for 22-year-old Holly and those who accompanied him: the plane crashed near Clear Lake with no survivors.

After a successful coup, Napoleon Bonaparte became ruler of France in 1799. He then embarked on a series of military campaigns that made him overlord of much of continental Europe. But he had his eyes on another prize to the East; the Russian Empire. Napoleon assembled his Grande Armée, which may have included as many as 650,000 soldiers. The first troops marched onto Russian soil in late June, 1812.

The Russians had only 200,000 men in their army. But they had clever tactics. Instead of confronting Napoleon, they retreated. They even allowed the French to take their capital, Moscow, in September after the savage but indecisive Battle of Borodino 75 miles from the city.  The Russians abandoned the city and soon Napoleon realized his soldiers could not survive the winter there. The retreat began in mid-October and the French troops were exposed to the severe Russian winter. Some 300,000 of Napoleon’s troops died during the campaign and the disorderly retreat.

As the Civil War raged in the fall of 1862 Confederate forces were in Maryland and plotting to move north. Confederate General Robert E. Lee was in charge of the operation and formed a plan of action which he hoped would mean defeat for the Union. The blueprint dealt with how the South would deploy its troops at the Battle of Antietam. Unfortunately, a Confederate officer was sent a copy of the battle plans in error.

He was Major General Daniel Harvey Hill. But for Hill’s carelessness, that wouldn’t have mattered too much. But the hapless major general managed to lose his copy of the attack strategy. Worse, the plans, apparently wrapped around three cigars, were discovered in a field by two Union soldiers who passed them on to the authorities. The Unionists now possessed a full copy of precisely how the Confederates intended to deploy their forces. Helped by this intelligence, the Union forces stopped the Confederates in their tracks at the bloody Battle of Antietam.

Science and math obviously go together. So you’d think that the clever boffins at NASA would be right on top of all things mathematical — and no doubt that’s the case most of the time. But not always. Our story takes us back to the late 1990s when a $125 million spacecraft called Mars Climate Orbiter was developed. By December 1998 it was ready for launch. Climate Orbiter duly zoomed off into space, headed for the Red Planet.

Everything went well for the first ten months of the journey to Mars. But disaster struck in September 1999 when the spacecraft basically blew up. When experts analyzed the calamity they came up with a startling finding. The spacecraft builders, Lockheed Martin Astronautics, had worked in pounds, feet and inches. But those at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory had used the metric system. The result? Catastrophe.

The name Chernobyl will be forever associated with nuclear disaster. It was in 1986 that something went badly wrong at the Soviet Union’s nuclear power station in Ukraine. A devastating steam explosion wrecked the facility and set it on fire. Subsequently, a substantial amount of radioactive material escaped from the reactor core and drifted across Europe. In fact the amount of radiation given off was, at a minimum, 100 times more than occurred when two atom bombs were dropped on Japan in 1945. 

But this horrible accident can actually be traced to operator error. On the April night when it happened, technicians had been running a turbine-testing procedure. On its own, that was fine. But the engineers also decided to switch off the emergency system that would cool the reactor core in the event of a mishap. Well, there was a mishap and there was no emergency cooling system to counter it. The result was disaster. 

Many historians take the view that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in the summer of 1914 was the spark that set off the human disaster that was World War I. Of course, the blame for the outrage must truly fall on the assassins, militant nationalist Serbians. But it turns out that the Archduke’s driver made a mistake which had fatal consequences.

Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie were on an official visit to the Bosnian city of Sarajevo in Bosnia. Assassins lay in wait for the couple as they drove through the streets in an open car. One would-be killer hurled a bomb at the auto, but missed the target. After this failed attempt, the tour descended into confusion. Franz Ferdinand’s driver turned up the wrong street. While he tried to turn around one of the Serbians, Gavrilo Princip, took his chance and shot the royal couple dead.

By 44 B.C. Julius Caesar was more or less lord of all he surveyed. Dictator of Rome, his string of military successes across Europe had made him highly popular with the citizenry. Or with most, but not all of them. There were those in the Roman Senate, the governing body, who resented their leader’s fame and position. These dissenters hatched a plot to assassinate Caesar.

The plotters planned to do so while he was actually in attendance at the Senate building. In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, his wife Calpurnia had a nightmare in which her husband’s statue appeared covered in blood. She warned him not to go to the Senate the next day. That may or may not be derived from fiction, but what happened when Caesar did go to the Senate is cold, hard historical fact. Some 40 senators attacked him, stabbing him to death.  

The year 1989 was a momentous one for Europe and indeed the world, since that was when the Berlin Wall came down. This landmark event led in no small part to the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. But it seems that the actual moment that the wall was breached by citizens from East Germany came about because of an error by a Communist official. 

He was Guenther Schabowski and his bumbling gaffe came during a press conference. Seemingly by mistake, Schabowski announced that his fellow East German citizens had the right to travel to the West with immediate effect. It later emerged that Schabowski was supposed to say that East Germans could apply for travel visas. But his words started an unstoppable flow across the Berlin Wall and resulted in its ultimate destruction.

You could call it the bargain of the century. You might even say it was the best buy in all of recorded history. We’re talking about America’s purchase of Alaska from Russia. It happened in 1867 and at the time the Russians were perfectly happy with the $7.2 million they were paid. After all, Alaska was just miles and miles of desolate tundra and impenetrable forests.

If the dumb U.S. government wanted to buy it, that was their business. Even many Americans thought slightly less than two cents an acre was too much to pay. But 30 years after the deal was signed, gold was discovered in the Klondike. And now Alaska produces a quarter of America’s oil. So, all told, it wasn’t such a bad deal for America after all. For the Russians, not so much...

A devastating plague, known as the Black Death, hit London in 1665. By the middle of the summer roughly 1,000 of the British capital’s unfortunate citizens were dying every day. We now know that bubonic plague is spread by the fleas that live on rats. When infected insects bite humans, they are in turn infected with the disease.

But the folks back in medieval London didn’t have that information. In fact, some, including the Lord Mayor, believed that the disease was actually spread by cats and dogs. The obvious answer? Kill all the felines and canines in town. So the animals that could potentially have controlled the rat population were slaughtered in their thousands. That, to say the least, was not a smart move...

There have also been many last-second decisions that changed the course of history — including ones that seemed like screw-ups at first. One of the leading faces of the American civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. is fondly remembered for his "I Have A Dream" speech, delivered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. Unbelievably, MLK improvised the speech on the spot, completely abandoning his notes after one gospel singer asked him to tell the audience about his "dream."

Astonishingly, the tragedy of the Titanic could have been avoided if not for one change in staff. When Second Officer David Blair was removed from the crew, he forgot to hand in his key to the locker that housed the lookout binoculars. As a result, the crew relied on their own eyesight to spot danger ahead, a contingency plan that proved catastrophic.

Infamous for her ignorance, Queen Marie Antoinette was one of the main causes of the French Revolution, as her lavish lifestyle infuriated the struggling working class. Ultimately, this vanity led to the death of her family. Instead of fleeing in a regular carriage Marie demanded a fancier one for her escape, which proved to be slower and allowed the mob to catch up to them.

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States vaporized the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs. Initially, America wanted to bomb Kokura, though a young crewman named Kermit Beahan insisted it was too cloudy to see the entire city. What turned out to be a lucky break for Kokura became a tragedy for Nagasaki, the next target on the list.

Famous for his elaborate public appearances, Theodore Roosevelt decided to make a grand speech during his reelection campaign in 1912. As he stood at his podium, someone in the crowd shot Roosevelt in the chest. Miraculously, his 50-page speech, which he'd tucked into his pocket just moments before, blocked the bullet. You better believe this gutsy president then decided to continue delivering his speech as planned!

In 1994, tensions between the United States and North Korea reached a boiling point. After discovering that North Korea had been developing nuclear weapons, Defense Secretary William Perry briefed President Bill Clinton on how to respond. While he had a plan for bombing North Korea's nuclear facility, Perry decided to keep quiet, fearing that Clinton would greenlight the attack. A few days later, a peace settlement was reached.

Before going on vacation in the fall of 1928, Alexander Fleming forgot to clean up his lab. Once he returned, he noticed that some of his Petri dishes were contaminated with a green mold called Penicillium notatum. Following further experimentation, penicillin was born.

In April 1961, the CIA trained Cuban exiles as part of a plan to attack Cuba's Bay of Pigs and overthrow Fidel Castro. Following a failed airstrike, President John F. Kennedy sent in six American fighter planes, only for the pilots to forget to adjust their watches to the Cuban time zone. As a result, the planes arrived an hour too early, and the operation failed miserably.

East German politician Guenter Schabowski enabled the tearing down of the Berlin Wall — and it was all due to lazy reading. When asked during a press conference about travel from East to West Berlin, Schabowski said it would be allowed immediately. Amusingly, he gave this answer because he didn't read an update that included the official answer. Germans on both sides then demanded to have freedom of movement across the border.

On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was traveling in a motorcade when Bosnian militant Gavrilo Princip threw a bomb under his car. Due to a delayed explosion, the Archduke escaped unharmed, though he remained nearby to visit the victims of the attack at the hospital. Unfortunately, the Archduke's driver made a wrong turn, leading him back to the armed Princip. Ferdinand's assassination kickstarted World War I.

On April 14, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was scheduled to visit the theatre with his wife Mary, Ulysses S. Grant, and Grant's wife Julia. The outing was cancelled because the women didn't get along, though Lincoln insisted on attending the show as people were expecting him. Needless to say, John Wilkes Booth also visited the theatre and ended Lincoln's life not long after.

In 1955, Rosa Parks was riding on a bus when she was asked to give up her seat in the "colored" section to a white passenger. Her refusal led to her arrest. Parks' decision was truly spontaneous, though she also knew that her local NAACP chapter was looking to protest discriminatory bussing laws. Her act of defiance sparked nationwide protests against racial inequality and made her a symbol of the American civil rights movement.

Every '50s rock fan sorrowfully remembers the 1959 plane crash that took the lives of Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and J.P. Richardson, Jr., aka the Big Bopper. What's particularly tragic is that if Buddy Holly had not convinced the others to take a charter plane so he could get to their next city early and do laundry, the group would've hopped a bus to their next show and survived.

With Cold War tensions at their peak in 1983, Stanislav Petrov was practically on the front lines as he monitored the Soviets' early warning systems. When a sensor indicated that the US had launched missiles toward the USSR, Petrov sensed that something was wrong and decided not to alert his superiors. Petrov's inaction likely prevented a nuclear war — especially since the warning was a false alarm!

As the American Civil War raged on, Confederate general Robert E. Lee sent his troops north in search of supplies. Once the entire Army of Northern Virginia arrived in the Pennsylvanian town of Gettysburg, they were greeted by Union forces — an encounter that changed the tide of the entire war.

While calculus is an integral part of any mathematics syllabus today, advancements in the field would have been made much sooner had it not been for one 13th-century monk. Desperate for paper on which to write his prayers, the monk erased part of an ancient text written by Archimedes, the Greek mathematician. In short, he unknowingly rubbed out the foundations of calculus!

In 1888, John Dunlop's son was struggling to ride his tricycle on a bumpy cobbled street when, suddenly, Dunlop got an idea. He cut a rubber hose and wrapped it around the wheel, thereby making it easier to ride the tricycle on such an uneven surface. Thus, the tire was born!

Carthaginian military leader Hannibal Barca nearly conquered Rome during the Second Punic War, though one poor choice he made while traversing the Alps cost him victory. To prove to his officers that the ground was still solid, Hannibal struck a snowbank — the resulting avalanche wiped out most of his troops.

The storming of Normandy on D-Day was a crucial moment in World War II that led to the Allies' victory. It was also the day that German Field Marshall and tactical mastermind Erwin Rommel (nicknamed Desert Fox) abandoned his post. Why, you ask? Because he decided to take some time off to surprise his wife with a vacation for her birthday — a very costly mistake.

After a Russian contingent captured the Pristina Airport in 1999, NATO peacekeeping forces were called in to block the runways. At the last minute, Commander Mike Jackson refused the order from his superior, telling him, "I'm not going to start the Third World War for you."

The Confederates made plenty of mistakes en route to their Civil War defeat. During the invasion of Maryland in September 1862, Robert E. Lee sent a note outlining battle plans to Maj. Gen. D.H. Hill, who carelessly left it in a cigar box on the ground. Soon after, Union troops found the note and learned of all the plans the Confederates had up their sleeves.

In an attempt to eliminate Fidel Castro, the CIA once hired Marita Lorenz, one of Castro's jaded lovers, to poison him. Lorenz traveled to Cuba and got close enough to kill Castro, though she instead revealed the entire plot to him. While Lorenz decided to abandon her plan of ultimate revenge, these important figures changed the course of history for the purpose of vengeance.

To help secure some trade routes along the Silk Road, Genghis Khan sent a caravan to the city of Otra, right around where you'd find Iraq on a map today. The governor there didn't trust Khan's men (which is fair) and had them all executed. Word of the slaughter reached the conqueror quickly.

Khan sent a few ambassadors to patch things up, but the governor in Otra had them killed, too. So Genghis Khan took his military to town, slaughtered innocents, burned buildings of significance, and poured molten silver into the eyes and ears of the governor, executing him for all to see.

In 1340, King Alfonso XI announced his son, Peter I, would be marrying Constanza Manuel of Villena. This was a political alliance, so Peter and Constanza weren't so in love, a fact showcased by the long affair Peter carried out with his wife's cousin, Ines (kneeling below). To end the great shame upon his family, King Alfonso had Ines killed.

What the men who executed Ines had not considered was that Peter I was set to be king when Alfonso died. So, when he finally ascended the throne, Peter's first act was to have the executioner's hearts ripped out in front of the whole town! He then declared Ines a posthumous queen.

Before he was the owner of Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett made a verbal agreement with its chairman, Seabury Stanton. See, Buffett bought a ton of BH stock, and Stanton wanted to buy it all back at $11.50 per share. Buffett agreed, but then the chairman unexpectedly changed the arrangement down the road.

Seabury Stanton drew up a contract for the agreement, but instead of $11.50 per share, the paperwork said he would buy back the stock for $11.38 per share. Insulted by the last-minute change, Warren Buffet bought more and more Berkshire Hathaway stock until he became the majority owner — and fired Seabury Stanton. Is this the modern day equivalent of ripping hearts out?

A young Julius Caesar was kidnapped by pirates. They didn't seem to know he was nobility, so they only asked for a meager ransom, and while they waited for payment, Caesar hung out on the ship, drinking, writing, playing games, and warning all the pirates that when he was free, he would have them all crucified.

A man of his word, Caesar had the entire pirate crew crucified shortly after Rome paid the not-so-steep ransom. At first, Caesar handed the captured lot over to the governor of Asia, who had the jurisdiction to punish them. When the governor didn't act, Caesar took the pirates back and nailed them all to crosses.

Asano Naganori was new to the shogun's court in the city now known as Tokyo (shoguns were military leaders in Japan). When he was asked to perform some ceremonial procedures, he failed, so Kira Yoshinaka made fun of him. This upset Asano, who pulled a blade on Kira in anger. Outraged, the courts ordered Asano to commit seppuku (or honorably take his own life). The aftermath was deadlier.

When Asano Naganori took his own life, his 47 bodyguards now had no master, making them ronin (masterless samurai), and they determined the only proper action was revenge. After two years, the 47 ronin killed Kira Yoshinaka, put his head on Asano's grave, and then all committed seppuku. In the end, 49 people were dead because Asano Naganori was unfamiliar with court procedures.

Russia's Peter The Great was having an affair with a woman named Anna Mons. She had a brother, Willem Mons, and Peter made him a secretary for Catherine, his wife. Soon, Catherine and Willem were having an affair of their own, and the unimaginably sticky situation ended about as you'd imagine.

On November 28, 1724, Willem was arrested for allegedly embezzling money from the throne, but anyone with even a modest understanding of personal relationships figured the charges were purely Peter's revenge for the affair. He had Willem decapitated and left his pickled head on Catherine's nightstand.

When King Phillip VI of France executed the city of Brittany's Olivier de Clisson for suspected allegiances to Britain, he had his head cut off and stuck onto a large pole so everyone in town could see where a maybe betrayal could land you. When Olivier's wife Jeanne found out, she rallied some troops.

With her small army, Jeanne defeated all the pro-France soldiers in Brittany (a French region), sold her land, bought some warships, and sailed the English Channel with a really cool nickname (The Lioness Of Brittany), slaughtering the men and women on every ship owned by King Phillip VI.

Back in his engineer corps days, Montgomery Meigs worked with Robert E. Lee, the eventual Commander of the Confederate Army. He knew him well, but when the Civil War broke out, Montgomery threw his hat in with the Union, working to transport the blue troops across the map. Montgomery couldn't help but feel his old comrade was responsible for so much death and destruction.

During the fighting, Union soldiers managed to gain control of Robert E. Lee's long-held family home in Arlington. Absent while fighting, Lee and his wife could then not pay the exorbitant taxes the Union placed on the land, causing the North to seize the property entirely. To make sure Lee could never visit his beloved home again, Montgomery Meigs turned the plot of land into Arlington National Cemetery.

In 945, Prince of Kiev Igor I demanded a group of people known as Drevlyans pay his kingdom tribute. The Drevlyans did not want to pay Igor, so they killed him, widowing Saint Olga. Because their son was a baby, Olga became the ruler of Kiev, and in an attempt to patch things up, the Drevlyans sent her some marriage candidates to form a union between the opposing groups. Saint Olga was not happy.

In one of history's great acts of revenge, Saint Olga Of Kiev had all the suitors buried alive in a moat outside of town. She sent the Drevlyans a letter asking for more suitors, and when those showed up, she locked them in a tiny room and burned them alive. Then she went to the town with her army as a show of peace, got the Drevlyan troops drunk, and killed them all.