Martin Hale 
The Measurement On May 29, 1919, two British expeditions set up telescopes on opposite sides of the Atlantic: one at Sobral, in northern Brazil, and one on the island of Príncipe, off the west coast of Africa. A total solar eclipse would cross the equator that day, and the astronomers needed to photograph the Hyades … Read more
The Ornamental Life The twins were born in Brooklyn in November 1885 (some records, including JSTOR Daily, give 1886; the American Battle Monuments Commission, Wikipedia, and Green-Wood Cemetery all favor 1885). Their father, Frederic Cromwell, served as treasurer of the Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York and held interests in several railroad and transportation … Read more
The Address of Afonso Mendes In February 1626, Afonso Mendes stood before the court of Emperor Susenyos I and delivered an address that, according to the primary account, ran to 30,000 words. Mendes was Portuguese, a Jesuit, and had been appointed Latin Patriarch of Ethiopia by Pope Urban VIII in December 1622. He had landed … Read more
The Bonfires of Dalat Dalat sits on the Lang Biang Plateau in Vietnam’s Central Highlands, at approximately 4,921 feet (1,500 m) above sea level. Before 1975, it had functioned as a resort city, drawing French colonial administrators and Vietnamese families to its cooler air. It was also where a fifteen-year-old named Quynh Dao was living … Read more
The German Monopoly In 1913, the United States spent $13 million importing potash, and nearly all of it came from one place. The salt deposits around Staßfurt in Saxony-Anhalt, in what was then the German Empire, controlled roughly 95 percent of world production. A state-sanctioned cartel called the Kalisyndikat set the prices, and American buyers … Read more
The Dover Appointment The first surviving record of Thomas Tallis as a working musician places him at a small Benedictine priory in Dover, Kent, around 1530. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography puts the earliest firm documentary evidence in 1531, when his name appears in the house accounts alongside an annual fee of £2. Tallis … Read more
The Submerged Colony The winter of 1716–1717 came early to New England. Cold and snow had been building since November 1716 across Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Connecticut, and by late February the landscape bore little resemblance to what lay beneath it. In some sheep pastures, Cotton Mather, Boston’s prominent Puritan minister, recorded drifts reaching 16 … Read more
The Incident at Pension Desarzens In June 1868, a 24-year-old woman named Marie-Catherine Fritzgès collapsed at the Pension Desarzens boarding house in Geneva’s Plainpalais district. Her physician recognized poisoning symptoms and notified the authorities. Fritzgès survived. The nurse assigned to her care, a 32-year-old from Le Locle named Marie Jeanneret, was arrested on June 28, … Read more
The Slope of Kholat Syakhl On February 26, 1959, a search party in the northern Ural Mountains found an abandoned tent on the eastern slope of Kholat Syakhl, cut open from the inside. Footprints led away downhill toward a tree line roughly 1 mile (1.6 km) away. The group that pitched that tent consisted of … Read more
The Medford Storm Sometime around 1868 or 1869, a storm struck Medford, Massachusetts, and tore apart the nets in which Étienne Léopold Trouvelot was keeping his caterpillar specimens. The caterpillars were European spongy moths, known to science as Lymantria dispar (and called the “European gypsy moth” until the Entomological Society of America changed the common … Read more