5 of the World’s Most Devastating Financial Crises

Ambrose Bierce


Bierce, Ambrose
Ambrose Bierce, detail of an oil painting by J.H.E. Partington.
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Ambrose Bierce, a newspaper and short-story writer, was well known for his satirical column “Prattler,” which ran in a number of West Coast papers such as the San Francisco Examiner. He served in and survived the American Civil War (his experiences in which he detailed in his best-known stories) and eventually married and had three children. While he continued as a newspaper columnist, he also wrote many novels and short stories as well as The Devil’s Dictionary, a book of social commentary disguised as a collection of dark and witty definitions for well-known terms. He left the U.S. for Mexico about 1913, during the Mexican Revolution. After December of that year there remains no record of him, though numerous theories have been put forth over the past century.

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  George Mallory
  

Mount Everest: 1921 expedition
George Mallory (seated, far left) and Guy Bullock (seated, third from the left), planners of the reconnaissance expedition to Mount Everest in 1921. The other mountaineers shown are (clockwise from top left) A.F.R. Wollaston, Charles Howard-Bury, Alexander Heron, Harold Raeburn, Henry T. Morshead, and Oliver Wheeler.
From Mount Everest, the Reconnaissance, 1921, by Charles Howard-Bury and other members of the Mount Everest Expedition, 1922
George Mallory was a schoolmaster in England and a seasoned mountain climber. He had trained on the most-difficult routes up the Alps before being recruited for the first major climbing expedition up Mount Everest in 1921. That first attempt was thwarted by high winds, and a second attempt in 1922—which also failed—involved an avalanche and the death of seven porters. Finally in 1924 he set out on a third expedition. Mallory and another climber, Andrew Irvine, went off to attempt the summit on June 8 and were never seen again. They left the world to wonder what had taken place on that fateful day, including whether before disappearing they had become the first climbers ever to reach the summit. Irvine’s axe was found in 1933 at about 27,750 feet (8,460 meters), which seemed to indicate that they did not make it to the top and likely fell to their deaths. Seventy-five years later, in 1999, an expedition discovered Mallory’s body at 26,760 feet (8,160 meters). As of 2015, Irvine’s remains had not been found, and the exact circumstances of their deaths are as yet undetermined.

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  Wallace D. Fard
  

Wallace D. Fard, the founder of the Nation of Islam (NOI), rose from being a silk peddler on the streets of Detroit to become a preacher and self-identified savior of the African American people. He had a short but influential stint as the outspoken NOI leader in Detroit from 1930 to 1934, with a number of run-ins with the law during that time. Very little documented biographical information about him exists, though several stories about his origins circulate. He claimed to have been born in Mecca, though the FBI’s findings suggest that he was born in New Zealand and led the life of a minor scofflaw once he arrived in the United States. He disappeared in 1934. Often referred to as “the Prophet” and thought to be the incarnation of Allah by followers of the Nation of Islam, he is celebrated each year on February 26, Saviors’ Day.

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