On this date in 1916, Roger Casement was hanged for treason by the British crown that had knighted him only a few years before. Casement died for his part in the Easter Rising, but this Irish nationalist hero’s layered story has long made him a very different sort of cultural marker than, say, James Connolly. Casement came to public prominence for his damning report on Belgium’s atrocious treatment of natives in its Congo colony, e.g.: [T]he great decrease in population, the dirty and ill-kept towns, and the complete absence of goats, sheep, or fowls — once very plentiful in this...