Martin Hale

A Letter From Madagascar, March 1894 In March 1894, John Lewis Waller wrote to John Mercer Langston with news worth putting on paper. Langston was a veteran Black statesman and diplomat, one of the most senior Black political figures in the United States at the time, and Waller had reason to want him informed. Queen … Read more

— **HEADLINE:** Lady with an Ermine hung in Hans Frank’s Wawel office after 1939 **ARTICLE:** A Court Commission in Milan Sometime between 1489 and 1491, in Milan, Leonardo da Vinci painted a young woman holding a white ermine. He was working at the time as court painter to Ludovico Sforza, known as “Il Moro,” Duke … Read more

On the night of October 8, 1871, people in Chicago blamed a cow. According to a story that took hold almost as fast as the fire itself, a cow owned by Mrs. Kate O’Leary kicked over a lantern in a barn on DeKoven Street and started a blaze that killed about 300 people and burned … Read more

No other errors of subject–verb agreement, articles, verb tense, pronoun/homophone use, spelling, punctuation, or capitalization were found. The text uses consistent American spelling, correct absolute dates throughout (no relative-to-today references), and no forbidden time phrasing. All other elements are grammatically correct and internally consistent. The only change needed was adding the closing quotation mark in … Read more

55 Strelitzer Strasse On the evening of October 4, 1964, Andreas Springer, 21, had a last dinner with his family in East Berlin, saying nothing about where he was going. Afterward he set out to find 55 Strelitzer Strasse, where he had been told a way out of the city was waiting. Springer had been … Read more

A Homecoming That Didn’t Finish The East Indiaman Götheborg left Sweden in March 1743 and reached Canton (present-day Guangzhou), China, in early June 1744. By September 1745 she was on the final leg home, thirty months out, carrying tea, silk, spices, and porcelain for the Swedish East India Company. At least 35 men had already … Read more

The Bridge at Sant’Angelo Before dawn on September 11, 1599, guards led three prisoners across the bridge at Sant’Angelo, in front of the castle of the same name in Rome. Beatrice Cenci was twenty-two years old. She was beheaded with a small axe, and beside her, her stepmother, Lucrezia Petroni, was beheaded as well. Her … Read more

On the Newsstand, 1957 In June 1957, a fifty-cent magazine called Duke, positioned from the start as a “Black Playboy,” went on sale in Chicago, published by the newly formed Duke Publishing Co. Set beside a copy of Playboy on the same rack, the resemblance was immediate: black-and-white pages broken by a color cover, and … Read more

A New Theater, a Full House On May 29, 1913, the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris opened its doors for a performance meant to crown its first season. The hall itself was new that year, built for exactly this kind of evening, and it was full. Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes had brought Paris something new … Read more

Two Companies, One Drawing Board In 1964, officials from Britain and France began talking about building a combat aircraft together instead of separately. Handel Davies co-chaired the British side of the working group; his French counterpart was Ingénieur-Général Lecamus. Out of those talks came two proposals, and in May 1965 the two governments signed a … Read more