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
Camp Wikoff, Long Island In August 1898, the US Army opened a camp on more than 5,000 acres near Montauk Point, at the eastern tip of Long Island, New York. Secretary of War Russell Alger had picked the site to quarantine troops shipping home from the war against Spain in Cuba. The camp took its … Read more
What the Dutch Found In 1645, the Dutch held part of Pernambuco, taken from Portugal a decade earlier. They sent a party inland expecting a mocambo, a rough runaway camp likely to scatter at the first sign of soldiers. Palmares had already stood for roughly forty years by then, founded around 1605 by escaped slaves … Read more
Everything we know of Joan of Arc’s own words comes from two church trials, a generation apart, run by people who each needed a particular answer from her. The first, in 1431, convicted her of heresy and sent her to the stake. The second, closed in 1456, declared her innocent. What survives between them is … Read more
On February 8, 1942, Albert Speer was almost on the wrong plane. He had planned to leave East Prussia that morning on the same Heinkel He 111 as Fritz Todt, the engineer who had spent nine years building Adolf Hitler’s roads, walls, and armaments plants. A late-night meeting with Hitler kept Speer on the ground … Read more
Before Dawn at Well No. 1 At three o’clock in the morning on October 14, 1927 (a few sources put the actual strike a day later, at dawn on October 15), a drilling crew was still on shift at a test well near Kirkuk, about 100 miles (161 km) southeast of Mosul, in what was … Read more
A Squash for Someone Else’s Table Before 1791, on plantations across the French colony of Saint-Domingue, in what is now Haiti, a soup took shape in kitchens where the cooks were enslaved and the diners were not. Soup joumou starts with a whole calabaza-type squash, cooked down until soft, then lifted out, pureed, and stirred … Read more
The Tiger on the Throne Seringapatam, the fortress capital of the Kingdom of Mysore, sat on an island in the Cauvery River (today’s Srirangapatna, Karnataka). Tipu Sultan was born Fateh Ali on December 1, 1751, in Devanahalli, and took the throne on the death of his father, Haidar Ali, crowned at Seringapatam Fort on December … Read more
The Morning of April 14, 1943 On the morning of April 14, 1943, a prisoner at Sachsenhausen concentration camp walked toward the electrified perimeter fence and did not stop when a sentry ordered him to halt. The guard fired. The prisoner was Yakov Dzhugashvili, 36 years old, held in a section of the camp the … Read more
Two Bands, One Afternoon By around two in the afternoon on January 21, 1824, the British-led column camped near Nsamankow, close to present-day Bonsaso in what is now Ghana, could hear the Ashanti army moving through the forest before it could see it. Thousands of men were closing on a position held by a few … Read more