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On this date in 1828, William Dyon, 45, and his son, John, 23, were hanged for the murder of William’s brother, who was also named John. The brothers had fallen out over their father’s inheritance; William Dyon Sr. had favored John’s family over William Jr.’s. Writing dramatically of the case in his book Foul Deeds and Suspicious Deaths in Doncaster, Stephen Wade described the brothers as sons of a Lincolnshire farmer, and the two boys were so different that this tale almost attains a biblical resonance, with jealousy, brooding and resentment, and finally a deathly hatred that led one brother...

On this date in 1601, Queen Elizabeth’s last great favorite became the last man beheaded in the Tower of London. Vain and dashing Robert Devereux rolled into the royal court in 1584 around age 19 and immediately established himself as the new favorite of the monarch, 30-some years his senior. They spent long walks and late nights in enchanted private company, and Devereux “commeth not to his owne lodginge tyll the birdes singe in the morninge.” Ye olde walke of shayme. In becoming the (presumed) lover* of the aging Virgin Queen, the Earl of Essex was only following the family**...

On this date in 1795, general Charles de Virot, marquis de Sombreuil was shot for leading the royalist invasion of Quiberon in the west of France. It was not even a year since the end of the Paris Terror — indeed, Sombreuil would have the honor of dying on the anniversary of Robespierre’s beheading — when 5,000 emigres backed by British ships crowded like sardines onto a peninsula famous for canning them, intending to join and lead the domestic Chouan resistance. Amid the uncertain interim of the Directory a yet-Republican France wracked by war, economic crisis, and political uncertainty looked...

On this date in 1730, the pirate Olivier Levasseur was hanged at Reunion Island– legendarily hurling into the crowd cryptic directions to his vast hidden treasure. Supposedly a bourgeois son of Calais, Levasseur (English Wikipedia entry | French) made his start on the briny deep as a French naval officer-turned-privateer during the War of Spanish Succession, transitioning to full-time buccaneer after that conflict ended in 1714. By the 1720s — and with a bad eye necessitating that most trite of pirate accessories, the eyepatch — Levasseur had a mixed-race crew raiding the east African coast and the Indian ocean. His...

The Truk Atoll, in Micronesia, is more commonly known today as Chuuk. It’s a hot diving location notable for the many sunken World War II Japanese hulks to be explored there — the legacy of its once-pivotal position in the Pacific War. Japan used Truk as forward naval base in the South Pacific, and armored up its little islands like an armadillo. Rather than capture it outright, the U.S. Navy bombed Truk right out of the war in February 1944, leaving that enormous warship graveyard and a stranded stronghold of starving soldiers who were left to wither on the vine....