Martin Hale

Everything But One Copy In Louisville, Georgia, the legislature elected in 1796 ordered every printed copy of a law passed the year before to be rounded up and destroyed. The law was the Yazoo Act. According to an account handed down through the state’s local histories, unconfirmed by any institutional source, the copies were burned … Read more

The Snowless Race The winter of 1970 arrived on Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula without the one thing the region counts on: snow. Hancock and the surrounding Upper Peninsula usually disappear under hundreds of inches of it by midwinter, and snowmobiling had become part of the local economy, not just a pastime. By one regional account, the … Read more

Kyrö, November 25, 1596 On the night of November 25, 1596, peasants in Kyrö, a district of South Ostrobothnia in the Finnish provinces of the Kingdom of Sweden, set fire to the manor houses of the local gentry. They wrecked outbuildings, tore down fences, and in at least one recorded episode broke the ice on … Read more

The Woods Outside Lenoir In 1906, a 25-year-old man named Henry Lawrence Nelson vanished from Lenoir, North Carolina, a small town in Caldwell County where his family was well known. He worked for the Gwynn Veneer company. His father, Rev. John Hugh Nelson, pastor of Nelson’s Chapel church, put a newspaper notice offering $100 for … Read more

The Courtroom, February 21, 1431 On February 21, 1431, Joan of Arc appeared before a tribunal of 43 clergy and university men inside the castle at Rouen, in English-held Normandy. The court had been assembled by Pierre Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, a diocese that had fallen back under French control. That left Cauchon without a … Read more

The Firm of Delattre and Worth In 1870, wine merchants Delattre and Worth ran their business the way many small firms trading across the English Channel did: one partner in each capital, ledgers and letters crossing the water more often than the partners themselves. Frederick Gonner Worth, the junior partner, handled the London side from … Read more

The Body on the Court In 1941, Alice Marble turned professional and put her name behind the government’s home-front fitness campaign. She toured the country in exhibition matches with fellow player Mary Hardwick, promoting conditioning for women and children, playing for servicemen and servicewomen, visiting military hospitals, and helping sell war bonds. She had reached … Read more

In February 1887, a roll call of Paris’s most decorated painters, architects, poets, and composers signed a public letter calling Gustave Eiffel’s half-finished tower a disgrace to their city. They lost the argument almost as soon as they made it. Within two years the tower stood complete on the Champ de Mars, and within a … Read more

Tilbury, June 22, 1948 On the morning of June 22, 1948, the troopship HMT Empire Windrush tied up at Tilbury Docks on the Thames east of London. Built in Germany and seized by Britain during the war, it had, as late as 1936, still carried holiday passengers between Hamburg and London, more than 20 such … Read more

Before the Walkout On April 3, 1897, nineteen artists sat down in a Viennese coffee house and agreed to break away from Vienna’s official art establishment. What they built afterward, a magazine, a building, a name borrowed from ancient Rome, outlasted the unity that had founded it by less than a decade. The Coffee House, … Read more