Martin Hale

A Narrow Brief In early 1803, two American diplomats sat down in Paris with a ceiling on what they were permitted to discuss. Robert R. Livingston had been serving as American minister to France since December 1801. James Monroe arrived on April 12, 1803, sent by President Thomas Jefferson as a special envoy with one … Read more

A Darkening Sky, Mistaken for Weather Maria Chuprina was thirteen years old on August 23, 1942. According to an account published by History Today, which has not been independently verified, she was at home in Stalingrad (now Volgograd, Russia) that day, together with her mother and her uncle. The morning passed without incident. At 15:18 … Read more

The Last Summer The cover photograph appeared in July 1937. Zheng Pingru, approximately nineteen years old, wore a qipao and a finger-wave bob on the front of Liángyǒu, The Young Companion, one of Shanghai’s most widely read pictorials. Her father, Zheng Yueyuan, was a Nationalist official who had taught at Fudan University; her mother, Hanako … Read more

A Week of Photographs On April 11, 1945, soldiers of the US Army’s 6th Armored Division entered Buchenwald. The SS guards had already gone; prisoners who had armed themselves held the watchtowers. Four days later, British forces arrived at Bergen-Belsen. Established on July 16, 1937 on Ettersberg hill, roughly 4.5 miles (approximately 7.2 km) northwest … Read more

What the Builders Laid Down First The foundation of the western rampart at Wolseong was built from packed shells and earth. Radiocarbon dating places the work in the mid-fourth century CE, at what is now Gyeongju, in southeastern Korea. When the foundation layer was finished and the stonework had not yet begun, someone placed three … Read more

A Place Built for Ordinary Life Before June 1944, Oradour-sur-Glane was a village people went to on weekends. It sat beside the river Glane, roughly 9 to 12 miles (15 to 20 km) west-northwest of Limoges, in the Haute-Vienne department of the Limousin region of France. By June 10, 1944, the population present numbered approximately … Read more

Eighty Stabs and a Letter to the Pope On the night of January 8, 1354, armed men forced their way into an inn at L’Aigle, Normandy, and stabbed Charles de la Cerda, Constable of France and closest confidant of King Jean II, approximately 80 times. That figure comes from medieval narrative sources and should be … Read more

Beidaihe, After Midnight Sometime after midnight on 13 September 1971, a convoy left the leadership retreat at Beidaihe and drove to Shanhaiguan Airport, carrying Lin Biao, his wife Ye Qun, and his son Lin Liguo. At approximately 00:32, a Hawker Siddeley HS-121 Trident 1E aircraft, registration B-256, lifted off without clearance, without completing routine pre-flight … Read more

The Studio on the Strait Singapore in 1940 was a British Crown Colony, a major port, and a city moving fast. Workers were arriving from across the region, cash wages were replacing older arrangements, and the population was acquiring habits that could not have existed a generation before. One of those habits was cinema. Before … Read more

The Silence Came First Rescuers reaching the villages around Lake Nyos in the days after August 21, 1986, reported something that stayed with them: not the bodies, though there were many, but the quiet. No insects hummed. No birds called. Cattle lay dead at elevations up to 330 feet (100 meters) above the crater rim. … Read more