Martin Hale

The Marble Worksite In the summer of 1949, the first prisoners came ashore on Goli Otok, “Barren Island,” a treeless rock in the northern Adriatic Sea off the coast of what is now Croatia, then part of Tito’s Yugoslavia. There was no camp waiting for them, and no fresh water anywhere on the island. Their … Read more

In February 1763, on the coastal plain where the Berbice, Demerara, and Essequibo Rivers meet the Caribbean Sea, in what is now Guyana, an enslaved man working under the name Coffij helped lead an uprising that held Dutch authority at bay for close to a year. By the time it was over, he had declared … Read more

In the summer of 1952, Congress passed an immigration law that did two things at once. It let a generation of immigrants become citizens after thirty years of being barred from it, and it shut a door that another generation of immigrants had used for just as long. Same act, same vote, same year. The … Read more

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We Are Numbers Workers On April 29, 1980, charter buses from Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Harlem brought about 1,500 people to the downtown Manhattan offices of Governor Hugh Carey. They marched to announce that they worked for an illegal business: Harlem’s numbers game, a street lottery that had run in New York for sixty years. … Read more

A Story in Forum In January 1930, the magazine Forum printed a short story called “Sanctuary.” It ran only a few pages: a Black mother shelters a wounded man fleeing the law, only to learn partway through hiding him that he is the one who killed her son. The story ends without spelling out what … Read more

Indianola, May 1856 The USS Supply came into the harbor at Indianola, Texas, in May 1856, carrying one of the odder cargoes the US Navy ever delivered. On board were 34 camels, bought during a months-long buying trip through Tunisia, Malta, Greece, Turkey, and Egypt. One animal had died crossing the Atlantic, but two calves … Read more

The Next Big Thing In 1975, a promoter for 20th Century Records named Billy Smith gave a club interview and called disco “the next big thing.” At that point the word had no official standing. It was simply the sound coming out of certain dance floors, spun by club DJs, with no awards category of … Read more

Say “money laundering” and most people picture cartel cash moving through shell companies, not a civil servant ironing dollar bills. But the first recorded use of the phrase, in an official US government document, describes exactly that: a machine in a Treasury basement that washed and pressed dirty money back into circulation. A Basement in … Read more

An Amsterdam Estate Draws the World Gerrit Braamcamp spent his life collecting Dutch paintings in Amsterdam. When he died in 1771, his estate went to auction, and the sale became one of the city’s biggest events of the year. An estimated 20,000 people came to view the collection before it changed hands, and roughly 2,000 … Read more