Martin Hale

The First Name in the Register The exact moment the practice took hold in the West is disputed. Records from the 1550s show castrated male singers beginning to appear in western European sacred music, but the Sistine Chapel is where the institutional history sharpens. One reading of the choir’s records identifies an unnamed Spaniard entering … Read more

A Town That Already Had a History Tordesillas sits on the Duero River in the province of Valladolid, about 15 miles (25 km) southwest of the provincial capital. By the time Spanish and Portuguese negotiators arrived in June 1494, the town had been carrying political weight for roughly five centuries. It had served as a … Read more

A Coast Already Marked Around 1800, a girl was born into the Tommeginne clan, whose territory ran along the northwest coast of the island Aboriginal people called Trowunna. The Tommeginne were a maritime people; their land centered on the Table Cape peninsula, and the sea was central to how they lived. By the time of … Read more

A Dollar an Ounce, a Bird a Second In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the millinery trade turned North American wading birds into a raw material. Egret plumes, the delicate nuptial feathers grown only during breeding season, were fetching roughly $32 per ounce in London and New York by the turn of … Read more

The Mare Came Home Alone On the evening of August 10, 1867, Ruggero Pascoli was returning from the market at Cesena by horse-drawn carriage along a narrow road near Savignano di Romagna [now Savignano sul Rubicone], roughly 12 miles (19 km) inland from the Adriatic coast. Someone waiting at the roadside shot him. He died … Read more

Seven Centuries in One Room The Public Record Office of Ireland opened at the Four Courts complex in Dublin in 1867, with Sir Samuel Ferguson as its first deputy keeper. Its purpose-built, six-story granite treasury on the River Liffey held records reaching back to 1174, the period following King Henry II’s establishment of his lordship … Read more

Rome, 11 September 1599 On September 11, 1599, three members of the Cenci family were brought to Ponte Sant’Angelo in Rome for public execution. Lucrezia Cenci, the stepmother, and Giacomo, the eldest brother, died first. Then came Beatrice, aged 22, beheaded with a small axe. A fourth family member, Bernardo, aged 12, was made to … Read more

One Hundred Coffins The cable ship CS MacKay-Bennett left Halifax, Nova Scotia, at 12:28 p.m. on April 17, 1912, two days after the RMS Titanic went under. In its hold: approximately 100 wooden coffins, 100 long tons of ice, all the embalming fluid the city could supply, and 12 long tons of iron bars to … Read more

One Hundred and Fifty Feet of Strategic Problem The Eastern white pine (Pinus strobus) grew across a broad corridor from what is now Maine south to northern New Jersey, and it grew large. Mature specimens reached 150 ft (c. 46 m). What mattered to a ship carpenter was the trunk: straight-grained, relatively light, resistant to … Read more

The Salesman and the Bales On July 5, 1778, a twenty-nine-year-old traveling salesman named Jean-François Favarger left La Neuveville, a small town roughly ten miles (approximately 16 kilometers) north of Neuchâtel, and set out on a circuit that would carry him approximately 1,200 miles through provincial France. His route ran south through Lyon and Marseille, … Read more