Every generation seems to discover a technology that is definitely, absolutely, positively going to wreck civilization. Sometimes the worries contain legitimate concerns. Other times, they age about as gracefully as predictions that nobody would ever need a computer at home. Somehow, society kept going—and usually bought millions of the supposedly dangerous gadgets.

Doctors thought they understood ulcers. Then two Australian doctors came along with a very different idea. But when much of the medical world still refused to believe them, one of the doctors stopped arguing and did something much, much harder to ignore.

During the Gilded Age, wealthy American families discovered that a daughter’s fortune could purchase something even new money struggled to obtain at home: an ancient European title. The result was an extraordinary marriage market where dowries rescued crumbling estates, ambitious parents gained prestige, and brides sometimes discovered that the most expensive wedding of their lives had very little to do with romance.

Percy Fawcett dedicated his life to finding a lost city in the Amazon rainforest—but the more obsessed he got, the more he sealed his dark fate.

Long before celebrity families fought in front of television cameras, America and Europe’s richest dynasties were already dragging siblings, parents, widows, and cousins through court over inheritances worth staggering sums. These fortunes bought mansions and social power, but they also created grudges that survived far longer than the people who earned the money.

History class has a habit of turning complicated events into wonderfully tidy stories. One hero rides through the night. One inventor has a light-bulb moment. One explorer proves everyone else wrong. The trouble is that memorable stories aren’t necessarily accurate ones. Archaeology, surviving documents, scientific research, and generations of historical scholarship have dismantled plenty of “facts” that once seemed unquestionable.