Petrograd, February 1917 In February 1917, Tsar Nicholas II signed a decree dissolving the Duma, the elected legislature that gave Russia’s opposition its only legal platform. Among the deputies sent home was Alexander Kerensky, a lawyer in his mid-thirties who had been elected to the Fourth Duma in 1912 as a member of the Trudoviks, … Read more
The Waterfront, September 13, 1922 By September 13, 1922, fire was moving through the Greek and Armenian quarters of Smyrna, on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor, the city known today as Izmir, Turkey. Turkish forces had entered the city four days earlier, on September 9. Flames ran block by block through the Christian districts … Read more
A lament survives from the fall of Jerusalem, written by people who had lived through the destruction or its aftermath. It preserves a belief that ran through the ancient Near East: when a great city fell, survivors did not blame only an enemy’s army. They said the city’s own god had withdrawn and let it … Read more
A Print Shop on Old Tenochtitlan Ground José Guadalupe Posada Aguilar was born on February 2, 1852, in Aguascalientes City, in central Mexico, the son of Germán Posada Serna and Petra Aguilar Portillo. Around 1870, a date different sources place anywhere between 1866 and 1870, he joined the print studio of José Trinidad Pedroza, learning … Read more
The Morning of May 6, 1933 The building at In den Zelten 10, on the edge of Berlin’s Tiergarten park, was more than an archive. By the spring of 1933 the Institute for Sexual Science held a research library, medical and case records, and consultation rooms where staff treated sexually transmitted infections and offered marriage … Read more
A Parcel From a Lawyer According to Terrall’s research, as reported by JSTOR Daily, Ferchault de Réaumur once unwrapped a package that had traveled up from the provinces to his rooms in Paris, likely around 1733. Inside were a few stalks of asparagus, some loose leaves, and, tucked among the greenery, the beetles and bugs … Read more
A Gift With No Name On January 26, 1928, Winston Churchill, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, told the country it had received what he called “a benefaction of a character hitherto exceptional in the relations between the State and its Citizens.” An anonymous donor, he announced, had set aside £500,000 to be held in trust … Read more
The Farmhouse Doarlish Cashen, Manx for “Cashen’s Gap,” was a sheep farm set about 725 feet (221 meters) up a hillside near the hamlet of Dalby on the Isle of Man, in country long tied in local folklore to fairies. James and Margaret Irving had settled there around 1916 or 1917 with their daughter Voirrey, … Read more
A Manuscript With No Name In 1584 a manuscript began moving through the English court under an unwieldy title, “The Copie of a Leter wryten by a Master of Arts of Cambrige.” No printer’s name appeared on it, and the crown had never licensed it. It had in fact been printed in France and smuggled … Read more
The Pension Desarzens, June 1868 In June 1868, a 24-year-old woman named Marie-Catherine Fritzgès was staying at the Pension Desarzens, a boarding house in the Plainpalais district of Geneva. A fellow guest, a private nurse named Marie Jeanneret, then 32, had befriended her. Soon afterward, Fritzgès fell seriously ill. She survived. That alone set her … Read more