Martin Hale

The Frenchman on the Riverbank In the winter of 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville stood on the bank of the Mississippi River at Memphis and watched a crowd of Choctaw men, women, and children cross the water on ice. He had come to the United States to study American prisons and, more broadly, American democracy, the … Read more

One car ferry. Three acts of violence, fourteen years apart. Two murders under one name, then a sinking that killed 852 people under another. A Ferry Called Sally On June 29, 1980, a new ferry entered service for the Finnish company Rederi Ab Sally, running between Turku and Stockholm via Mariehamn in the Åland Islands. … Read more

Homer, Ohio Victoria California Claflin was born on September 23, 1838, in Homer, Ohio, one of ten children. Her mother was illiterate; her father had a criminal record. The family moved through small Midwestern towns running a traveling medicine show, selling homemade tonics and telling fortunes for money. By her teens, Victoria was part of … Read more

A Piece of Blue-Penciled Fabric The object is a strip of tracing cloth, 6 inches (15.2 cm) tall and 18 inches (45.7 cm) wide, covered in blunt block capitals written in blue pencil. Under the lettering runs a rough sketch in blue and yellow ink: a port, a building with a spire, a barn, and … Read more

A Mother Waits Thirteen Years On the morning of Sunday, July 24, 1927, about 700 mothers and widows arrived at Ypres (today Ieper, Belgium), many traveling on trips paid for by charity. Among them was Caroline Merriman, whose two sons, Arthur and John, were both listed among the missing. John had disappeared in October 1914, … Read more

Coronations are remembered for their pageantry: the crown, the abbey, a new king’s name entering the record. Less remembered is what a coronation could change for people who had no vote in choosing who wore that crown. In August 1274, one such change started a clock running for England’s Jewish community that would not stop … Read more

A Steamer Called Confucius At some point between 1853 and 1856, on his third expedition to the Far East, the Scottish botanist Robert Fortune boarded an American steamer named Confucius off the coast of Fujian Province. Fortune, born in 1812, had already made his name five years earlier by taking tea plants and trained tea … Read more

The valley that went under In 1965, the Tryweryn Valley in Merionethshire (now Gwynedd) disappeared under rising water northwest of the market town of Bala. The reservoir that formed there, Llyn Celyn (Lake Celyn), covered land estimated at roughly 800 acres (324 hectares) that had belonged to Capel Celyn, a small Welsh-speaking village. Twelve houses … Read more

In 1961, Charles de Gaulle awarded the Legion of Honor, France’s highest civilian distinction, to Maurice Papon, the head of the Paris police. That same year, officers under his command killed dozens of Algerian demonstrators, by some estimates far more. Papon did not stand trial for his role in the Holocaust until 1998, at age … Read more

Edgar Allan Poe is remembered today for “The Tell-Tale Heart,” for “The Raven,” and for more or less inventing detective fiction. None of that was his best-selling work while he was alive. That distinction belongs to a seashell guidebook published in Philadelphia in 1839, a book he did not fully write and could not fully … Read more