After John Wilkes Booth killed Abraham Lincoln, Union soldier Thomas "Boston" Corbett was sent to Virginia with orders to capture Booth alive. He shot and killed him instead.

In the 1930s, Sir Oswald Mosley led the 50,000-member British Union of Fascists and drew audiences of up to 30,000 people when speaking at nationalist and anti-Semitic rallies.

In 1905, August Vollmer became town marshal of Berkeley, California. In just a few years, he transformed his department into the first modern police force — and laid the groundwork for the heavily-armed police of today.

Born Ilich Ramírez Sánchez in Venezuela, Carlos the Jackal found worldwide infamy in the 1970s as a Marxist revolutionary and terrorist who admitted to killing at least 80 people.

Days after learning his family had been shipped off to a refugee camp beside 12,000 other Jews, 17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan bought a gun and snuck into the German embassy in Paris.

In 1898, French soldiers Paul Voulet and Julien Chanoine were sent to unify colonies in Africa. But they brutalized them instead.

With Europe in turmoil after World War I, German architect Herman Sörgel became convinced his Atlantropa project was the only way to prevent another conflict.

In 1928, Henry Ford broke ground on Fordlândia, a rubber-producing town in Brazil that he hoped would supply his car factories and serve as a model industrial society. Instead, it devolved into a dystopia.

Rather than accept defeat, up to 20,000 die-hard Confederates moved to the slaveholding Empire of Brazil to establish colonies of Confederados. Their descendents still honor them today.

In the 1970s, Bantu Steve Biko fought against South Africa's racist regime until his brutal death.

Lope de Aguirre called himself the "Wrath of God, Prince of Freedom, King of Tierra Firme." But his fellow explorers just called him a madman.