From its very earliest days, America has been the land of the free and the brave … and the outlaw.

The American colonies proved to be a convenient destination for English convicts, who were sent to the “New World” as early as 1615. A century later, Parliament passed the Transportation Act, opening the door to the mass deportation of convicts to be sold to colonial merchants, landowners and others as indentured servants.

Despite protests on this side of the Atlantic, more than 50,000 English convicts would be sent to the colonies between 1700 and 1775 by order of His Majesty’s courts — a surprising quarter of British immigrants during the 18th century, according to The History Press, while there was no shortage of homegrown criminals in the new nation.

Interested in scandal, violence and all forms of deviant behavior, audiences eagerly followed their exploits in the nation’s burgeoning press — and later, in books and film, on radio and television, and in other forms of popular culture. These representations catapulted these infamous criminals into the annals of American history.

Brutally slaughtering as many as 50 people in Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois and Mississippi, including several of their own children, cousins Micajah Harpe (c. 1748-1799) and Wiley Harpe (c. 1750-1804) have the dubious honor of being the United States’ first serial killers.

Beginning in about 1775, “Big Harp” and “Little Harp,” as they would be known for their disparate statures, compiled a “black catalogue” of crimes that included theft, kidnapping, torture, rape and murder from Virginia to the Western frontier. Communities were horrified by the cruelty of the Harpes’ attacks, as victims were frequently disemboweled or decapitated.

Despite public outcry, posted rewards and pursuit by citizens and state authorities, the Harpes would continue their heinous crimes until 1799, when Micajah was shot by a posse, following the murders of a woman and her four-month-old baby in Kentucky. Wiley was later captured and sentenced to death by hanging in 1804.

Accounts of the Harpe brothers were published in newspapers and later in an 1833 novel, The Harpe’s Head: A Legend of Kentucky, by James Hall.

Born into a prominent family in late-18th century New Orleans, socialite Marie Delphine Macarty LaLaurie (1787-1849) provoked public outrage when it was discovered that she had tortured and murdered a number of enslaved people, probably including children.

LaLaurie was married to her third husband, a New Orleans doctor 15 years her junior, when a fire broke out in the family home on April 10, 1834. Police, fire marshals and bystanders rushed in to free the enslaved people trapped inside, only to find a number of people shackled in the attic, showing signs of torture and starvation. Bodies of additional victims were later found buried on the property.

The enraged community ransacked and destroyed the home, while LaLaurie and her family escaped to France.

Newspapers described LaLaurie’s “barbarous and fiendish atrocities,” and English abolitionist Harriet Martineau featured the story in her widely circulated book, Retrospect of Western Travel, in 1838.

LaLaurie was portrayed by Kathy Bates in “American Horror Story,” in 2013. The rebuilt LaLaurie mansion, known as “the Haunted House,” can be visited in New Orleans.

Often compared to Robin Hood, it has been argued that California outlaw Joaquín Murrieta (1829-1853) was the true-life Zorro, a Mexican-born bandit set on a path of revenge by the murder of his brother and the lethal rape of his wife at the hands of Anglo attackers.

A land of racial tension in the 1850s, California was already home to thousands of Chinese immigrants and Native Americans, in addition to Californios, the original Spanish-speaking population, when thousands of Anglo Americans poured into the Gold Rush state to test their luck.

After the attack on his family, the legend goes, Murrieta turned to a life of vigilante crime, leading a gang that stole horses, raided mining camps and robbed and killed Chinese and Anglo residents.

After a bounty was offered by the governor, a band of California Rangers allegedly killed Murrieta — though the identity of the victim, whose head was displayed for a number of years in a jar of alcohol, was disputed.

Half legend, half historical, Murrieta has been immortalized in books, songs and movies, beginning with a widely read contemporary work, The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta: The Celebrated California Bandit, by Native American novelist John Rollin Ridge, in 1854. It is upon this novel that Johnston McCulley’s Zorro was purportedly based.

Terrorizing settlers across at least 10 states on the American frontier, Frank James (1843-1915) and his brother Jesse James (1847-1882) were embittered Confederate sympathizers whose legendary post-war crime spree included bank robberies, stagecoach and train ambushes, and the murder of at least 17 people. Newspaper editors contributed to their fame by comparing them to Robin Hood and other romanticized historical figures.

Wanted “dead or alive,” Jesse James was killed in his own home in St. Joseph, Missouri, by a member of his gang, hoping to collect a bounty. Following his brother’s death, Frank surrendered to authorities but was acquitted at trial. He lived the rest of his days in less-terrorizing pursuits, working as a shoe salesman, theater ticket-taker and lecturer — career choices that may have dimmed his share of the dazzling legend that remained attached to his brother.

The James brothers have been memorialized in books, films, songs and video games. On the big screen, Frank has been portrayed by eminent performers such as Henry Fonda, Johnny Cash, Stacy Keach and Leonard Nimoy, while Jesse has been portrayed by actors such as Tyrone Power, Roy Rogers, Audie Murphy, Robert Duvall, Rob Lowe and Brad Pitt.

Among the nation’s most-famous criminals, it may be argued, is an individual who was found innocent by a jury of her peers.

Born in Fall River, Massachusetts, Lizzie Borden (1860-1927) was accused of butchering her father and stepmother at their home in the morning hours of Aug. 4, 1892. With crime-scene photography and gruesome details, the inquest and subsequent trial received remarkable public attention and media coverage.

Though she was acquitted, no one was ever convicted of the crime, and Lizzie lived, according to her local newspaper, as “a recluse … damned by public opinion.”

While Lizzie’s celebrity has endured in song, television, theater and video games, the Borden home has become a museum and bed and breakfast.

An Italian immigrant living in Boston, Charles Ponzi (1882-1949) was a financial con artist who rose from rags to riches by swindling his clients out of millions of dollars.

It wasn’t all high-stakes fraud for the charismatic Ponzi, who started his career in the United States doing odd jobs and short-changing customers in a Boston restaurant. His crimes escalated, however, as he was prosecuted for forgery and smuggling Italian immigrants into the U.S.

Despite short-lived attempts to stay on the straight-and-narrow, Ponzi struck gold with his scheme to sell stock in his “Securities Exchange Company” between January and August 1920, using newer investments to pay off earlier investors. With a team of agents and branch offices in several states, he stole around $20 million from his mostly working-class clients, or more than $300 million in today’s dollars.

The Boston Post brought the well-dressed swindler down with a series of investigative stories that revealed the scheme. Convicted of mail fraud and larceny, Ponzi served several terms in prison. He was eventually deported to Italy and died, impoverished, in Brazil.

When Al Capone (1899-1947) was at the top of his game between 1925 and 1929, he was perhaps the most well-known, powerful and feared organized crime figure in the nation.

Kicked out of Catholic school at age 14 for striking a female teacher in the face, Capone built his street smarts as a member of the notorious Five Points Gang in New York City, where he was slashed on the cheek for insulting a woman at a Coney Island dance hall.

“Scarface” would also be known as “Public Enemy No. 1” after the 26-year-old took the helm of a Chicago-based crime syndicate that pursued Prohibition-era bootlegging, gambling, prostitution, racketeering and bribery.

Among those receiving bribes were public officials who often looked the other way, allowing Capone to earn as much as $100 million, or about $1.8 billion today.

Ultimately, FBI investigations led to multiple arrests and a 1931 conviction for tax evasion. After seven years in prison, the 48-year-old Capone died of heart failure at his home in Palm Island, Florida, the result of advanced syphilis.

Perhaps the most-famous spies in American history were Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were sentenced to death by electrocution after they were convicted of providing nuclear and other top-secret technology intelligence to the Soviet Union.

Julius (1918-1953), an electrical engineer with the U.S. Army, and Ethel (1915-1953), a secretary and union organizer, were convicted of espionage in a 1951 trial. The prosecution argued that Julius shared thousands of documents, including weapon designs, with Soviet officials from about 1941 through 1949, during and after the Second World War, when fear of a communist Soviet Union was high. Controversially, Ethel’s role was less clear, with witnesses asserting that she was a co-conspirator who typed up the documents.

Protesters and political leaders across the nation and abroad, including Pablo Picasso and Pope Pius XII, argued for clemency to no avail, and the couple was executed in 1953. Efforts to exonerate Ethel have continued through the present day.

Katrina J. Quinn is a professor at Slippery Rock University and author of two books on journalism history, “Adventure Journalism in the Gilded Age: Essays on Reporting from the Arctic to the Orient” (2021) and “The Civil War Soldier and the Press” (2023).