Between the late 1700s and the 1890s, several Rhode Island families facing repeated deaths from the same wasting illness dug up a relative already buried and looked for signs the body was not fully at rest. What they found decided whether a heart came out of the chest and went into a fire. The Exhumation … Read more
An Empty House On September 8, 1560, Amy Robsart sent the entire household at Cumnor Place, a manor near Oxford, Oxfordshire, off to Abingdon Fair for the day. The house was leased at the time by Anthony Forster, a member of Parliament for Abingdon who acted as an agent for Amy’s husband, Robert Dudley. By … Read more
The Puppet Theatre of Alma-Ata In 1941, the capital of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic was Alma-Ata, a city that had carried that name only since February 1921, when it was still known as Verny. The republic’s capital had since moved there, and with it came the machinery of Soviet cultural administration, including a government-run … Read more
The Woman at the Counter On Saturday, December 11, 1926, a well-dressed young woman walked into Farmers National Bank in Buda, Texas, a town some 15 miles (24 km) south of Austin. She told the cashier, identified in different accounts as Frank Jamison or B.E. Jamison, that she was a reporter for the Beaumont Enterprise … Read more
The Roads to London In the spring of 1381, people in the county of Essex refused to pay a new poll tax, and the refusal did not stay local. Bands of rebels formed in Essex and, separately, in Kent, encouraged by the preaching of a priest named John Ball, and both began marching toward London. … Read more
Before Dawn on Berners Street At five o’clock on the morning of November 27, 1810, a chimney sweep knocked at the door of 54 Berners Street, a house in Westminster just north of Oxford Street. He told the maid he had been sent for. She said no one in the house had placed such an … Read more
A Bad Harvest and a Countess’s Order In the summer of 1524, in the southwestern corner of the Holy Roman Empire, roughly the region of the Black Forest and Upper Swabia, trouble started small. Villagers argued with their lords over tithes owed to the church, over the days of unpaid labor a household owed each … Read more
A Letter From Madagascar, March 1894 In March 1894, John Lewis Waller wrote to John Mercer Langston with news worth putting on paper. Langston was a veteran Black statesman and diplomat, one of the most senior Black political figures in the United States at the time, and Waller had reason to want him informed. Queen … Read more
— **HEADLINE:** Lady with an Ermine hung in Hans Frank’s Wawel office after 1939 **ARTICLE:** A Court Commission in Milan Sometime between 1489 and 1491, in Milan, Leonardo da Vinci painted a young woman holding a white ermine. He was working at the time as court painter to Ludovico Sforza, known as “Il Moro,” Duke … Read more
On the night of October 8, 1871, people in Chicago blamed a cow. According to a story that took hold almost as fast as the fire itself, a cow owned by Mrs. Kate O’Leary kicked over a lantern in a barn on DeKoven Street and started a blaze that killed about 300 people and burned … Read more