Kyrö, November 25, 1596 On the night of November 25, 1596, peasants in Kyrö, a district of South Ostrobothnia in the Finnish provinces of the Kingdom of Sweden, set fire to the manor houses of the local gentry. They wrecked outbuildings, tore down fences, and in at least one recorded episode broke the ice on … Read more
The Woods Outside Lenoir In 1906, a 25-year-old man named Henry Lawrence Nelson vanished from Lenoir, North Carolina, a small town in Caldwell County where his family was well known. He worked for the Gwynn Veneer company. His father, Rev. John Hugh Nelson, pastor of Nelson’s Chapel church, put a newspaper notice offering $100 for … Read more
The Courtroom, February 21, 1431 On February 21, 1431, Joan of Arc appeared before a tribunal of 43 clergy and university men inside the castle at Rouen, in English-held Normandy. The court had been assembled by Pierre Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, a diocese that had fallen back under French control. That left Cauchon without a … Read more
The Firm of Delattre and Worth In 1870, wine merchants Delattre and Worth ran their business the way many small firms trading across the English Channel did: one partner in each capital, ledgers and letters crossing the water more often than the partners themselves. Frederick Gonner Worth, the junior partner, handled the London side from … Read more
The Body on the Court In 1941, Alice Marble turned professional and put her name behind the government’s home-front fitness campaign. She toured the country in exhibition matches with fellow player Mary Hardwick, promoting conditioning for women and children, playing for servicemen and servicewomen, visiting military hospitals, and helping sell war bonds. She had reached … Read more
In February 1887, a roll call of Paris’s most decorated painters, architects, poets, and composers signed a public letter calling Gustave Eiffel’s half-finished tower a disgrace to their city. They lost the argument almost as soon as they made it. Within two years the tower stood complete on the Champ de Mars, and within a … Read more
Tilbury, June 22, 1948 On the morning of June 22, 1948, the troopship HMT Empire Windrush tied up at Tilbury Docks on the Thames east of London. Built in Germany and seized by Britain during the war, it had, as late as 1936, still carried holiday passengers between Hamburg and London, more than 20 such … Read more
Before the Walkout On April 3, 1897, nineteen artists sat down in a Viennese coffee house and agreed to break away from Vienna’s official art establishment. What they built afterward, a magazine, a building, a name borrowed from ancient Rome, outlasted the unity that had founded it by less than a decade. The Coffee House, … Read more
The Studio on Gower Street In 1851, John Everett Millais was finishing a painting in his studio at 7 Gower Street in London. He had spent months on the banks of the Hogsmill River in Surrey, painting reeds, willows, and running water exactly as they grew, for a scene from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” that the play … Read more
The Carcass in the Field In 1973, ranchers across the American West and Midwest began finding something in their pastures that did not look like the ordinary business of death on the range. A steer would turn up dead with its eyes gone, its ears gone, its rectum and sex organs cut away. The edges … Read more