Joan was accused of being a witch and a heretic due to the voices she heard and visions she witnessed, but the crime that condemned her to death was that of wearing men’s clothing.
Kidd was executed for piracy and murder at Execution Dock on the River Thames, and his body was subsequently placed in gibbet and displayed over the River Thames at Tilbury Point.
Although found unanimously guilty by a jury of 27 peers, the evidence against Anne was questionable. Only the Flemish musician Mark Smeaton admitted to having an affair with her, and this confession is reputed to have been extracted under torture.
Salem’s witch hysteria began in January 1692 when both the daughter and niece of the Reverend Samuel Parris each began to suffer violent fits. In total twenty people were executed, and a further seven died in jail, before the paranoia came to an end.
Centred around Hans Scholl and his sister Sophie, the small group of university friends who formed the White Rose printed and distributed anti-Nazi leaflets but were spotted by university janitor and Nazi Party member Jakub Schmid who immediately called the Gestapo.
The group, which included six foreign Franciscan friars, three Japanese Jesuits, and seventeen Japanese lay Christians, was sentenced to death by Toyotomi Hideyoshi after statements from a shipwrecked crew suggested that missionaries prepared the way for military conquest.
Under Yezhov’s leadership the NKVD launched a campaign of arrests targeting party members, military officers, and civilians that saw widespread purges, forced confessions, and executions. Estimates of those killed range into the hundreds of thousands.
British nurse Edith Cavell was executed by a German firing squad during the First World War.
Guevara was shot nine times in a way designed to make the injuries look like they had been caused during a battle with the Bolivian army.
The Romanov family were all shot or stabbed by bayonets, and their bodies were taken away in a truck and disposed of in a forest twelve miles north of the city.
28th June 2015
11th November 2025
11th November 2025
1st September 2018
9th November 2019
