Gender

Investigators, forensic examiners and a Pakistani government all offered different accounts of exactly how Benazir Bhutto died in December 2007, and none of the competing versions has ever satisfied every observer of the case.

The commission that investigated Israel's near-disastrous unpreparedness for the 1973 war cleared Golda Meir of direct responsibility for the failure, yet historians still rate her handling of that single crisis well below the rest of her long career in office.

Nur Jahan was the only Mughal empress to have coins struck in her own name, a real and unusual mark of power that later chroniclers then padded with achievements a modern historian has called beyond all realistic possibility.

1789

The claim that Wu Zetian murdered her own infant daughter to frame a rival first appears in the historical record roughly four centuries after her death, which is a strange amount of time for a damning eyewitness detail to wait before surfacing.