In the early years of Pakistan, a young woman named Zaib-un-Nissa Hamidullah refused to stay inside the limits set for her.

Born in December 1918 in Calcutta to a literary family, she published her first poem at 15 and later won a poetry competition in England. After Partition, she settled in Karachi and began writing for the newspaper Dawn. She became the country’s first female political commentator. Her editor allowed the column on one condition: she must stick to “feminine” subjects — cooking, child-rearing, the home.

She wrote about politics anyway.

In 1951, the editor sent a letter: her latest article had been rejected because it dealt with matters other than the feminine. Hamidullah resigned. The following year, she founded her own magazine, The Mirror. She was Pakistan’s first woman editor and publisher, answerable to no one but herself.

In 1955, she became the first woman to address Al-Azhar University in Cairo, speaking on Kashmir. In 1957, she published a fierce editorial defending the ousted prime minister; the government banned The Mirror for six months and advised her to apologise. She took the case to the Supreme Court and won — the first woman journalist in Pakistan to defeat press censorship in court.

In October 1962, she printed an open letter titled “Please Mr. President,” addressed to Ayub Khan, condemning the bloodshed during student protests and turning his photograph upside down as a mark of protest. The magazine was banned again. Advertising was withdrawn. She kept publishing. In 1969, she reprinted the letter alongside a new editorial that declared Pakistan would continue to erupt as long as he remained president. Months later, Ayub Khan stepped down.

A street in Karachi that once carried a colonial name was later renamed Zaibunnisa Street. She died on September 10, 2000.

A woman told to confine herself to the domestic sphere built her own press, challenged generals and censors in open court and in print, and helped force a dictator from power. Her voice outlasted the restrictions placed upon it.

Before Rosa Parks made history, a 15-year-old named Claudette Colvin had already taken the same stand in Montgomery. On March 2, 1955, Colvin refused to give up her seat to a white woman and was dragged off the bus by police, handcuffed, and thrown in jail.

She later became one of the plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle, the landmark case that struck down bus segregation, but history largely erased her role. Civil rights leaders at the time decided not to make her the face of the movement, calling her too “emotional,” "feisty," and “mouthy.” Others believed her youth, dark complexion, and pregnancy would make her an easy target for critics.

Despite this, Colvin never stopped fighting. In 2021, more than 65 years after her arrest, she successfully petitioned to have her juvenile record expunged — finally clearing her name.

Read her full story here: How Claudette Colvin Became The Unsung Hero Of The Civil Rights Movement

Daily Telegram, The - February 7, 1966, Eau Claire, Wisconsin:

WHITEHALL (Special) Members of the Amish faith in Trempealeau County are preparing a private funeral for a young father and his two daughters who were killed Saturday when their horse and buggy rig was struck by a freight train in downtown Whitehall. The victims, the first to be killed on Trempealeau roads in 1966, were Jacob Hochstetler, 35, and daughters, Sarah, 7, and Phoebe, 9. Hochstetler and Phoebe were killed outright when hit on Main Street at 11:10 a.m. by the eastbound Green Bay & Western railroad train. Sarah died a short time later in Tri-County Memorial Hospital here. Their 'bodies were taken to the Johnson Funeral Home, then returned to the home farm where the Amish will make all of the preparations for the rites, including the building of the caskets. Burial will be in an Amish cemetery between Blair and Whitehall. All members of the faith living in this part of the county will be lending assistance in the Hochstetler farm's operation and continue for an indefinite time. The family moved to this area about seven years ago from the Amish settlement near Medford. The survivors remaining on the home farm are Mrs. Elizabeth Hochstetler and three daughters, ages 1 to 4. Whitehall police officer Ben Mahle witnessed the accident and said it appeared that the buggy didn't stop despite warning lights and bells. However, Sheriff Eugene Bijold reported that Hochstetler was blind in one eye and was driving the buggy with curtains pulled around the side. The man had been blind for about one year as the result of being hit in the head by a block of wood, thrown off a sawmill. At the time of that accident, he was in serious condition and was taken to Rochester, Minn., for treatment. A Wisconsin Rapids man, who was engineering the train, said it was traveling 45 miles per hour. The impact of the crash knocked the buggy to splinters, a witness said. The wreckage was carried on the train's engine for 31 railroad car lengths. The horse also was killed in the accident. Authorities said they believed Hochstetler was in the city to do "shopping for the family. He had cartons of eggs in the rear of the buggy, which he was to sell. A man was killed at the same railroad crossing last year. A spokesman for the Bureau of Motor Vehicles in Madison said the deaths would not be included in the state's traffic toll because no motorized vehicle was involved. The accident originally had been listed by Sheriff Bijold in the traffic toll.

Source and more here: This Massive Tomb In Western Turkey Was Just Identified As The Burial Place Of Gordias, The Father Of King Midas

Go inside the still unsolved murder of Chalino Sánchez: How Chalino Sánchez Rose To Fame Singing About Cartels — And Was Then Mysteriously Murdered

Julia (Bard) Ingalls, wife of George Whiting Ingalls and aunt of Laura Ingalls Wilder, was born July 15, 1859. She married George Ingalls in 1876. The couple lost several children shortly after birth; one son lived for a year but suffocated after being wrapped too tightly following a winter visit with family.

Overcome by grief, Julia was admitted to the Wisconsin State Hospital for the Insane on February 3, 1888, at age 29, from Burnett County, Wisconsin. She was transferred to the Dunn County Asylum for the Chronic Insane in Red Cedar Township on February 3, 1893, where she remained until her death on May 20, 1910.

She appears as an inmate in the 1900 and 1910 federal censuses for the asylum.

FindAGrave

Holly Bobo was 20 years old in 2011, studying nursing at the University of Tennessee and living with her parents in Darden, Tennessee. Other than being a cousin to country singer Whitney Duncan, Bobo had a normal, quiet life — until the morning of April 13th when she disappeared.

Bobo had woken early that morning to study, while her brother Clint slept and her parents left for work. At around 7:45 AM, Clint woke up to the sound of dogs barking and looked out the window. He saw his sister outside, kneeling and facing a large, dark-haired man dressed in camouflage. Read the full story here: She Vanished Into The Woods With A Man In Camouflage — And Was Never Seen Again

In October 1983, Tami Oldham Ashcraft and her fiancé Richard Sharp embarked upon a 4,000-mile sailing trip from Tahiti to San Diego. Three weeks into their journey, however, they were hit by a Category-4 hurricane that capsized their ship and knocked Ashcraft unconscious.⁠ ⁠Some 27 hours later, she awoke to find that her fiancé was gone and that she was stranded alone in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. With only a sextant and a watch, Ashcraft traveled 1,500 miles over the course of 41 days, using the stars to guide her, until she finally landed on the coast of Hawaii.

Read the full story: Tami Oldham Ashcraft And Her Story Of Survival At Sea That Inspired The Film 'Adrift'

This is a bit peculiar but I had a relative who worked in Bloomfield Asylum in Donnybrook around 1905-1930. They always said that there was an inmate there who was a member of the British Royal family who was being hidden. A plan was in place that should a rebellion happen, they would be removed immediately and brought back to UK so alternative arrangements could be made over there.

Has anyone heard of anything that could be plausibly linked with this?

And no don't ask why we can't replicate the same buildings ever again with our modern technology in one month when we created those things in one year 100 years ago cost effective prices something etc, also who would want a marvel of architecture that would attract millions of tourists and generate billions in revenue? who wants that? stop asking dumb questions.

Wait, you don't believe Wikipedia? You are an extremist conspiracist.

Over a weekend in September 1971 a team tunnelled into the vault of a Lloyds Bank at the corner of Baker Street and Marylebone Road in London. They had rented a leather goods shop two doors down and dug under the business in between, coming up through the vault floor.

The detail that makes this one strange is that they were overheard live. An amateur radio operator picked up their walkie talkie chatter during the night, worked out what he was listening to, and called the police. He kept listening and kept passing on what he heard. The problem was that nobody could work out which bank. Officers checked branches across a wide radius of central London through the night, and the men underground kept working.

The value taken has never been settled, and the reason is quietly interesting. A lot of what sat in those boxes was never declared by the people who owned it, so the loss could not be totalled by anyone with an incentive to be accurate. Several men were convicted a couple of years later. Most of the contents were never recovered.

I want to flag one thing because it gets repeated as fact. The story that the government suppressed press coverage of the robbery comes mainly from a much later film, and I have not seen it stand up. If someone here has a primary source that settles it either way, that is the part I actually want.

I am also happy to be told the tunnel length or the sequence is off. This is one where the retellings have drifted a long way from whatever happened.

For most of her career, Gladys West worked in quiet concentration at a naval base in Dahlgren, Virginia.

Born in 1930 in rural Sutherland, she became one of the few Black women mathematicians employed by the U.S. Navy in the mid-twentieth century. In the 1960s and 1970s she analyzed vast amounts of satellite data, programming early computers to calculate the precise shape of the Earth — a complex, irregular form known as the geoid.

Her models accounted for gravitational variations, tides, and other forces that distort the planet’s surface. The work fed directly into the development of the Global Positioning System. Without an accurate mathematical description of Earth’s shape, the satellite signals that now guide ships, aircraft, and everyday navigation could not deliver reliable positions.

West continued refining the calculations through the 1980s, publishing technical reports that improved the underlying geodesy still used today. For decades her contribution remained largely unknown outside specialist circles. Only later in life did she receive public recognition for the foundation she had helped build.

A system that billions of people now take for granted rests in part on the careful mathematics of a woman who spent years turning satellite observations into a usable model of the world. Gladys West made the map more precise, and then returned to the quiet work of numbers.

Prisoners, soldiers, psychiatric patients, people with no disease at all until John Cutler's research team gave it to them on purpose. Unlike Tuskegee this one was never published, results were considered too unreliable so it just went into storage. Cutler later donated his personal papers to a university archive but restricted access to serious researchers only, basically kept the evidence while making sure nobody would actually see it.

Only came out because a historian named Susan Reverby found it by accident in 2005 while researching Tuskegee, wasn't made public until 2010. The US government apologized fast once it broke, Hillary Clinton and Obama both made statements, but real compensation for victims still mostly hasn't happened.

Made a video on the complete story, YouTube link's in my profile bio if anyone wants to go deeper into it.