NAKARAJAN

  The final days of Marie Antoinette   1793 OCTOBER 15 TRIAL-EXECUTION OCTOBER 16 When queen of France Marie Antoinette was indicted in August 1793, months after the execution of her husband Louis XVI during the French Revolution, she asked that she would not "suffer long". However, she went on to spend more than two months living in squalor before her trial and eventual execution for treason on 16 October 1793. Here, Will Bashor shares the final events of Marie Antoinette's life, including an escape attempt which would become known as the Carnation Affair… “I was a queen, and you took away my crown; a wife, and you killed my husband; a mother, and you deprived me of my children. My blood alone remains: take it, but do not make me suffer long.” These words are reported to have been said by Marie Antoinette, after the prosecutor read his indictment. But little did the fallen queen know then that she would spend two-and-a-half months before her trial and execution in a nois...

The Execution of Mata Hari, 1917 Mata Hari was the stage name Dutch-born Margaretha Zelle took when she became one of Paris' most popular exotic dancers on the eve of World War I. Although details of her past are sketchy, it is believed that she was born in the Netherlands in 1876 and married a Dutch Army officer 21 years her senior when she was 18. She quickly bore him two children and followed him when he was assigned to Java in 1897. The marriage proved rocky. The couple returned to the Netherlands in 1902 with their daughter (their other child, a son, had died mysteriously in Java). Margaretha's husband obtained a divorce and retained custody of his daughter. The daughter of a prosperous hatter, she attended a teachers' college in Leiden. In 1895 she married an officer whose family was of Scottish origin, Captain Rudolph MacLeod, in the Dutch colonial army, and from 1897 to 1902 they lived in Java and Sumatra. The couple returned to Europe but later separated...

THE BRAZEN BULL THE DANGEROUS EXECUTION DEVICE FOUNDED IN SICILY The brazen bull, bronze bull, or Sicilian bull, was a torture and execution device designed in ancient Greece.[1]  Perillos being forced into the brazen bull that he built for Phalaris. According to Diodorus Siculus, recounting the story in Bibliotheca historica, Perillos of Athens invented and proposed it to Phalaris, the tyrant of Akragas, Sicily, as a new means of executing criminals.[2]  The bull was made entirely of bronze, hollow, with a door in one side. [3] The bull was in the form and size of an actual bull and had an acoustic apparatus that converted screams into the sound of a bull. The condemned were locked in the device, and a fire was set under it, heating the metal until the person inside roasted to death. Reign of Phalaris[edit] Phalaris commanded that the bull be designed in such a way that its smoke rose in spicy clouds of incense.[citation needed] The hea...