The Priors of Tyburn Tyburn, May 4, 1535 On May 4, 1535, three monks were drawn through London to Tyburn, the city’s usual ground for public execution. John Houghton, prior of the London Charterhouse, went first. With him were Robert Lawrence, prior of Beauvale Charterhouse in Nottinghamshire, and Augustine Webster, prior of Axholme Charterhouse in … Read more

The Pastry Shop, December 1828 In December 1828, a riot swept through the Parian, a market for luxury goods in the Zócalo, Mexico City’s central square. Soldiers sent to put it down wrecked the shop of a French pastry maker, sometimes named as Monsieur Remontel, and his damage claim came to 1,000 pesos. (Some accounts … Read more

Beginning in 1973, ranchers across the American West and Midwest started finding cattle stripped of ears, eyes, and genitals, in cuts they called surgical. A few fired on helicopters, convinced Washington was behind it. The explanation a historian eventually settled on involved scavengers, not scalpels. Dugway, 1968 On March 13, 1968, a nerve-agent test went … Read more

The Clear Morning November 1, 1755 was All Saints’ Day, one of the major feast days on the Catholic calendar, and Lisbon’s churches were full that morning. Many households had lit candles for Mass. An English merchant living in the city later wrote that nothing in the sky or the air gave any warning of … Read more

A Court Moves North In 1526, a dynasty fighting to hold its southeastern frontier looked for ground it could keep. As Ottoman forces advanced on Hungary, Ferdinand I of Habsburg took the crowns of Bohemia, Hungary, and Croatia. From then on, the Habsburgs treated Prague, seat of the Bohemian crown, as a place to retreat … Read more

Two Days in Baghdad, June 1941 On April 2, 1941, a group of pro-Axis army officers known as the Golden Square, backed by nationalist politician Rashid Ali al-Gaylani, seized power in Baghdad from the pro-British government. Britain, at war with Germany, moved against the new regime, and by early June al-Gaylani had fled. On June … Read more

A Three-Month-Old Sails for Zanzibar In May 1882, a steamer pulled away from a London dock carrying Annie Boyle Hore and her son, Jack, just three months old. According to one surviving record, the ship was the Quetta. Their destination was Zanzibar, the East African island that served as the gateway to the interior, and … Read more

St John’s Field, Late February 1461 Sometime around the turn of March 1461, a crowd gathered at St John’s Field, open ground outside London’s walls in what is now Clerkenwell. One chronicler, writing later in the 15th century, puts the date at February 28; most other secondary sources place it a day later, on March … Read more

The Ice on the River In December 1831, a French magistrate named Alexis de Tocqueville stood on the bank of the Mississippi River at Memphis and watched a group of Choctaw families cross the river in the cold of December. He had no stake in what he was watching. Tocqueville and his traveling companion, Gustave … Read more

The Floating Court King Hans of Denmark and Norway had his flagship built in 1485, its timbers felled the previous winter in what is now northeastern France, the hull likely finished in a shipyard in the Low Countries. He named it Gribshunden; a letter dated May 16, 1486, calls it simply “our ship Griffon.” It … Read more