Martin Hale

Gunners Hall, Baltimore, October 3, 1849 On October 3, 1849, a Baltimore printer named Joseph W. Walker found a man slumped outside Gunners Hall, a tavern at 44 East Lombard Street being used that day as a polling place. The man was, in Walker’s phrase, “in great distress.” He wore a cheap suit and a … Read more

On December 6, 1922, a proclamation signed by King George V gave legal force to a new constitution, and the Irish Free State came into being. Twenty-six of the island’s thirty-two counties now answered to a government in Dublin instead of London. Tucked into that number, unremarked in the day’s ceremony, were three counties of … Read more

The Accountant Who Bought a Record In 1886, Frank Lenz, a young accountant in Pittsburgh, paid $100 for a high-wheeled bicycle: a 52-inch (132 cm) front wheel, 55 pounds (25 kg) of iron and rubber. It cost him a full month’s wages, and he did not treat it lightly. He joined the Allegheny Cyclers, the … Read more

A Morning at Chestnut Hill On March 17, 1892, a small group walked into Chestnut Hill Cemetery, known locally at the time as Shrub Hill, in Exeter, Rhode Island, to open three graves in the Brown family plot. Relatives and neighbors suspected that one of the dead women buried there was still drawing life from … Read more

Two Ships, Two-Thirds Sick In October 1793, two French ships, the frigate Recherche and the smaller Espérance, dropped anchor about 25 miles off Surabaya, a Dutch colonial port on the island of Java, in what is now Indonesia. Surabaya is now the country’s second-largest city. Aboard both vessels, an estimated two-thirds of the crew were … Read more

A Familiar Habit By September 1781, Brighton was not a new experience for Thomas Hughes. He was 22 years old, a British officer who had returned from service in the American Revolutionary War, and he had made trips to this stretch of English coast before. Brighton in this period was a fashionable resort, drawing officers … Read more

The Faint Image Lacock Abbey, 1835 In 1835, William Henry Fox Talbot began pressing chemically treated paper against the windows of Lacock Abbey, his family home in Wiltshire, England. He had started, two years earlier, with a camera lucida, an optical drawing aid; when his attempts to sketch with it failed, he turned to paper … Read more

The Stall at Green Market On the evening of October 30, 1858, a Saturday, William Hardaker set up his sweets stall at Green Market in Bradford, Yorkshire, in what is now Kirkgate Market. Locals knew him as “Humbug Billy,” an established fixture at the market rather than a manufacturer himself. He bought his stock wherever … Read more

The Africains By February 1848, France had been fighting to conquer Algeria for eighteen years, since 1830. That war produced a particular kind of officer, men who had learned to break resistance not by meeting it in open ground but by sealing it in. One tactic they carried home was the enfumade: lighting fires at … Read more

A Bad Night on the rue de Bruxelles On September 28, 1902, Émile Zola and his wife Alexandrine returned to their house at 21 bis rue de Bruxelles, in the 9th arrondissement of Paris, after a stretch at their country home in Médan. The weather was wet and cold, so a smokeless coal fire was … Read more