Growing up in the White House, Tad Lincoln was a "notorious hellion," a wide-eyed observer of the catastrophe of the Civil War, and the apple of his father's eye.

Adventurer and spy Sidney George Reilly did daring espionage work for Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, earning him the moniker "Ace of Spies" — until Stalin put an end to him.

From 1943 until the end of the war, these brave men and women risked everything to sneak into German-held territory and aid the resistance.

Before dying at just 23, Princess Victoria Ka’iulani was the last heir to the Hawaiian crown — and one of its last hopes in keeping the monarchy alive in the face of American imperialism.

In the 1930s, Japan launched the so-called “Fugu Plan” to draw in tens of thousands of Jewish refugees in order to bolster the country’s economic prosperity.

Despite being an amputee, Virginia Hall bolstered the Allied resistance in France so successfully that the Gestapo launched special missions just to find her. They never did.

Yukio Mishima was the most renowned author in Japan before he descended into political extremism and attempted a failed coup that ended with him committing ritual suicide.

Often described as the voice of Chile’s poor, Víctor Jara was brutally tortured and executed during the military coup that installed General Augusto Pinochet as dictator in 1973.

Bobby Sands was a member of the Irish Republican Army and spent the last 66 days of his life on hunger strike in HM Prison Maze fighting for political prisoner status.

At one of the darkest points of the Cultural Revolution, political strife devolved into extreme brutality in China’s southern region of Guangxi, where hundreds were cannibalized.

On October 7, 2006, Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaya was shot dead in her Moscow apartment building after having spent years criticizing Vladimir Putin and the Second Chechen War.