Martin Hale

The Student Who Went Too Far In 1927, Wilhelm Reich was one of the most promising figures in Vienna’s psychoanalytic circle, a man Sigmund Freud once called a “wunderkind.” That year Reich published The Function of the Orgasm, arguing that repressed sexuality lay at the root of most psychological disorder. In 1933, he went further: … Read more

A Seat at the Table: Iraq and the League of Nations, 1932 The Vote On October 3, 1932, the League of Nations Assembly, meeting for its thirteenth annual session in Geneva, voted unanimously to admit the Kingdom of Iraq. It was the first Arab country to join the League, and the only mandated territory ever … Read more

Off Cape Town, December 1794 The São José Paquete de Africa left Lisbon on April 27, 1794, bound for Mozambique’s coast to purchase enslaved people before sailing on to Brazil. Under Captain Manuel João, the ship took on between 400 and 512 enslaved Mozambicans, sources disagree on the exact count, and departed on December 3, … Read more

Between the late 1700s and the 1890s, several Rhode Island families facing repeated deaths from the same wasting illness dug up a relative already buried and looked for signs the body was not fully at rest. What they found decided whether a heart came out of the chest and went into a fire. The Exhumation … Read more

An Empty House On September 8, 1560, Amy Robsart sent the entire household at Cumnor Place, a manor near Oxford, Oxfordshire, off to Abingdon Fair for the day. The house was leased at the time by Anthony Forster, a member of Parliament for Abingdon who acted as an agent for Amy’s husband, Robert Dudley. By … Read more

The Puppet Theatre of Alma-Ata In 1941, the capital of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic was Alma-Ata, a city that had carried that name only since February 1921, when it was still known as Verny. The republic’s capital had since moved there, and with it came the machinery of Soviet cultural administration, including a government-run … Read more

The Woman at the Counter On Saturday, December 11, 1926, a well-dressed young woman walked into Farmers National Bank in Buda, Texas, a town some 15 miles (24 km) south of Austin. She told the cashier, identified in different accounts as Frank Jamison or B.E. Jamison, that she was a reporter for the Beaumont Enterprise … Read more

The Roads to London In the spring of 1381, people in the county of Essex refused to pay a new poll tax, and the refusal did not stay local. Bands of rebels formed in Essex and, separately, in Kent, encouraged by the preaching of a priest named John Ball, and both began marching toward London. … Read more

Before Dawn on Berners Street At five o’clock on the morning of November 27, 1810, a chimney sweep knocked at the door of 54 Berners Street, a house in Westminster just north of Oxford Street. He told the maid he had been sent for. She said no one in the house had placed such an … Read more

A Bad Harvest and a Countess’s Order In the summer of 1524, in the southwestern corner of the Holy Roman Empire, roughly the region of the Black Forest and Upper Swabia, trouble started small. Villagers argued with their lords over tithes owed to the church, over the days of unpaid labor a household owed each … Read more