Martin Hale

In Thailand, her desserts are better known than her name. Sangkhaya fak thong, a coconut-pumpkin custard, and foi thong, egg-yolk threads cooked in syrup, trace through court tradition to a woman remembered as Thao Thong Kip Ma, the “Queen of Thai Desserts.” Her real name was Maria Guyomar de Pinha, and the road to the … Read more

Eastleigh, 4:35pm On the afternoon of March 5, 1936, a single aircraft stood ready at Eastleigh Aerodrome in Hampshire, on the site that is now Southampton Airport. It was the only one of its kind: prototype K5054, built to a design that had taken Reginald Joseph Mitchell and his team at Supermarine more than a … Read more

The Editor’s Office, 1922 In 1922, the editor of The Field, a magazine built around fox-hunting and country sport, sat down with representatives of the Medical Research Council to talk about a problem that was killing dogs across Britain. The Council had scientific standing but not nearly enough money to fund research at the scale … Read more

A New Kind of Tournament In June 1975, English cricket grounds staged a tournament unlike anything the sport had tried before: a contest decided in a single day, sixty overs to a side, rather than over four or five. The Prudential World Cup, named for its sponsor, split eight teams into two groups of four. … Read more

A Wok at 7,000 Feet In the winter of 1867, crews of Chinese laborers working for the Central Pacific Railroad were boring the Summit Tunnel through solid granite at Donner Summit, high in California’s Sierra Nevada. The site sat at roughly 7,030 feet (2,143 meters), reportedly the highest railroad tunnel in the world at the … Read more

The Colony on the Plain Half a mile north of the rail depot at Ludlow, in Las Animas County, Colorado, several hundred canvas tents stood in rows on bare ground. From September 1913 through April 1914, the tent colony held an estimated 1,200 people, mostly immigrant families from Greece, Italy, Mexico and Eastern Europe. They … Read more

A Stone With Two Dates In Richmond, Texas, a small gray marker stands in Morton Cemetery, placed there by the Texas Historical Commission in 1992. It gives Walter Moses Burton’s birth year as 1840, the same year the Texas State Historical Association’s own handbook uses. At least one other account, from BlackPast, puts his birth … Read more

A Line in the Weekly Tally In mid-June 1725, a London newspaper called the Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer published its routine list of notable deaths from the week before: three Londoners drowned, one died falling from a cart, one was killed with a sword, and an infant was recorded as “overlain,” the period’s word … Read more

The Last Morning On June 7, 1692, Port Royal was doing what it had done for decades: running a crowded Caribbean waterfront on Jamaica’s southern coast, under British control. Ships rode at anchor in the harbor now called Kingston Harbour, and the town itself stood on a narrow spit of sand, holding an estimated 8,000 … Read more

Eighty-One Hands by the Fire In the mid-1890s, at a gendarmerie outpost enforcing rubber quotas deep inside the Congo Free State, the missionary William Henry Sheppard was led to a fire where, according to his own diary account, eighty-one human hands hung smoking in the heat. Sheppard, a Black American Presbyterian missionary who had spent … Read more