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A cook scolds a clumsy farmhand who cannot work a roasting jack, and he explains that his family was too poor to eat meat. The farmhand is Charles II, the most wanted man in England. On September 3rd, 1651, Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army destroyed his forces at the Battle of Worcester, and the king fled out the back of his lodgings with about 60 mounted officers. Persuaded that a private army co...

In February 1861 a woman on a night train to Washington, D.C. fussed loudly over her sick brother, a tall man slumped under a shawl and a soft felt cap. The brother was president-elect Abraham Lincoln, and the woman was Kate Warne of the Pinkerton agency, moving him through Baltimore past a planned assassination. Five years earlier, in 1856, she had walked into Allan Pinkerton's Chicago office as...

Between roughly 1688 and the 1820s, a worker in England, Wales, or Ireland who stole goods worth 12 pence, about one twentieth of a skilled worker's weekly wage, could be hanged for it. Historians call the system the Bloody Code. In 1689 there were about 50 capital offenses. By around 1820 there were more than 200, and most of the additions protected property. As common land was enclosed, the land...

A skeleton on display in a London medical museum belongs to the man who ran the city's underworld while the public thanked him for fighting crime. Jonathan Wild was born poor in Wolverhampton in the early 1680s and came to a London of around 600,000 people with no police force, only unpaid parish constables. Thrown into the Wood Street Compter for debt in 1710, he learned how corruption worked by...

In July 1882 a man hauling wood in West Turkey Creek Canyon, Arizona found a body seated on a flat rock among five oak trees growing from a single root. The corpse was blackened by the sun, a bullet had entered the right temple, a revolver was still in the right hand, and the feet were wrapped in strips torn from an undershirt. This was John Peters Ringo, the outlaw the movies present as a Latin-q...

On a July night in 1934, bystanders in a Chicago alley dipped handkerchiefs and scraps of newspaper in the blood of a man federal agents had just shot. The man was John Dillinger, born in 1903 in Indianapolis and raised by a strict grocer father. His path to that alley began with a clumsy 1924 grocery store robbery that netted about $50. On his father's advice he pleaded guilty without a lawyer, e...

Jim Corbett killed big cats that had taken hundreds of human lives, and he is also remembered as a founding figure of wildlife conservation with a tiger subspecies named for him. Born in 1875 in Nainital, India, the eighth of nine children of a postmaster who died young, he grew up roaming the jungles near the family's winter home at Kaladhungi. He moved from a catapult to a pellet bow to a muzzle...

On a January night in 1875, armed men surrounded a Missouri farmhouse and threw an incendiary device through the window. It rolled into the fireplace and exploded, nearly severing a mother's arm and killing her nine-year-old son. The attackers were Pinkerton detectives. The victims were the family of Frank and Jesse James, who were not even home. This episode starts there to ask how a gang of bank...

In the fall of 1724, the most secure prison in England was beaten by a five foot four carpenter with a slight stutter. Jack Sheppard was born in Spitalfields in 1702, sent to a workhouse at six, and bound to a seven year carpentry apprenticeship in which his labor belonged to his master. For five years he was a model apprentice. Then he fell in with the crowd at the Black Lion, including the thief...

J. Edgar Hoover grew up in Washington, D.C. with a severe stutter and beat it by teaching himself to talk at ferocious speed. At 18 he took a messenger job at the Library of Congress, where he absorbed a cross-referenced cataloging system and a lesson he never forgot: power belongs to whoever can retrieve and connect information fastest. He carried that method into the Department of Justice in 191...

A rotund, unarmed man walks into a 1920s New York speakeasy, points at a wanted poster of a federal Prohibition agent, and bets the patrons that he is the man in the picture. They take the bet. He collects his winnings and arrests the room. That was Izzy Einstein, a multilingual former postal clerk born in 1880 in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who talked his way into a badge after the 18th Amendmen...

The phrase "up the river" dates to 1891 and describes a real trip: roughly 30 miles up the Hudson from New York City to Sing Sing. In May 1825, warden Elam Lynds brought a hundred men from Auburn Prison to a 130 acre site in Mount Pleasant that held no walls and no cells, only a marble quarry. The inmates mined the stone and built their own cage under the Auburn system, a regime of total silence e...

Deadwood was never supposed to exist. The 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie guaranteed the Black Hills to the Lakota, so every prospector and merchant who arrived was a squatter breaking federal law. After the Custer expedition found gold on French Creek in 1874, the rush overwhelmed the army, and by 1876 as many as 25,000 people filled a narrow gulch with no government at all. This episode shows who fi...

If a black mamba bites you, the treatment that saves your life is made much as it was more than a century ago: by injecting diluted venom into horses, sheep, or even camels and harvesting the antibodies from their blood. This episode explains why. Venom works too fast for the body to build its own defense, so a large animal serves as a surrogate immune system. The plasma is purified and often free...

The showdown at high noon, with two men waiting for a flinch above low holsters, is mostly a Hollywood invention. This episode sets the cinema against the record. In the Old West, being quick on the draw meant being hot tempered and ready to pull a weapon over a slight insult. Real gunfights were spontaneous, close range, and often drunken. The rare formal duel was a crude version of the Southern...

In the earliest surviving ballads, Robin Hood punches a friend over an archery contest, and one of his men murders a page boy to leave no witness to a prison escape. This episode traces how that figure became the cheerful nobleman who robs from the rich to give to the poor. The Robin of 15th century texts such as Robin Hood and the Monk is a yeoman, a self-sufficient commoner with no title, who fi...

On a 17th century Italian dressing table, among the perfume and combs, sat a small glass vial painted with the image of a saint. It was sold as Manna di San Nicola, a common devotional item, and it held a poison blamed for more than 600 deaths. This episode tells the story of Giulia Tofana and the network that sold it to women with no other way out. Marriage was an unbreakable contract, divorce di...

Pioneers in the 1800s believed that breathing near a Gila monster could kill you. Today a drug modeled on a peptide in its venom is injected into millions of people. This episode separates the frontier legend from the animal: the largest native lizard in the United States, up to 22 inches long, armored with bony plates and patterned in pink, yellow, and black. It was named Heloderma suspectum in 1...

On April 21, 1986, some 30 million people watched Geraldo Rivera break into a sealed chamber beneath Chicago's Lexington Hotel, once Al Capone's headquarters, and find dirt, debris, and a few empty bottles. This episode tells how The Mystery of Al Capone's Vaults came to exist. A construction survey of the derelict hotel turned up walled-off chambers, and producers John Joslyn and Doug Llewelyn in...

The nickname suggests a man breaking kneecaps in an alley. The real Frank Nitti delegated violence and watched the numbers. Born in 1886 in the Campania region of Italy, he arrived in Brooklyn at seven, left school after the seventh grade, worked as a barber, and left home at 14. He ran with Al Capone's older brothers in the Navy Street Boys, though the two men were never cousins. An early scheme...

The Wild Bunch of the 1890s, also called the Doolin-Dalton Gang, began with a pay dispute. Bill Doolin, George Newcomb, and Charlie Pierce were hired guns for Bob Dalton until a bloody train robbery at Adair in July 1892 convinced them he was shortchanging them. They quit. Three months later Dalton tried to rob two banks at once in Coffeyville, Kansas, and four of the five gang members involved we...

She rode with Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch as the companion of Harry Longabaugh, the Sundance Kid, and was hunted by the Pinkerton Detective Agency across two continents. Yet almost nothing about Etta Place can be proven. A Pinkerton description from 1906 gives her age as 27 or 28, her height as about five foot four, her weight as 110 to 115 pounds, and her hair as brown. There is no birth certifica...

The killer bee panic of the late 20th century began with a farming problem. In 1956, Brazilian biologist Warwick E. Kerr imported African honeybees to cross with European strains that were sluggish in tropical heat. He kept them near Rio Claro behind queen excluders, metal screens that let workers out and kept queens in. In October 1957 a visiting beekeeper, thinking the screens were slowing the w...

In 1800, Alexander von Humboldt watched fishers drive wild horses into a muddy South American pond until electric eels rose from the water and shocked two of them into drowning. This episode explains the animal behind that scene, starting with a correction: electric eels are not eels at all but neotropical knifefishes. For 250 years, from Carl Linnaeus in 1766 onward, science assumed there was a s...

In 1808, two men rose over Paris in hot air balloons and fired blunderbusses at each other's envelopes. A century later, at the 1908 London Olympics, competitors in heavy coats and metal helmets shot each other with wax bullets. This episode connects those scenes to a serious institution. Dueling began as medieval judicial combat, a trial in which God was expected to grant victory to the honest pa...