A Three-Month-Old Sails for Zanzibar In May 1882, a steamer pulled away from a London dock carrying Annie Boyle Hore and her son, Jack, just three months old. According to one surviving record, the ship was the Quetta. Their destination was Zanzibar, the East African island that served as the gateway to the interior, and … Read more
St John’s Field, Late February 1461 Sometime around the turn of March 1461, a crowd gathered at St John’s Field, open ground outside London’s walls in what is now Clerkenwell. One chronicler, writing later in the 15th century, puts the date at February 28; most other secondary sources place it a day later, on March … Read more
The Ice on the River In December 1831, a French magistrate named Alexis de Tocqueville stood on the bank of the Mississippi River at Memphis and watched a group of Choctaw families cross the river in the cold of December. He had no stake in what he was watching. Tocqueville and his traveling companion, Gustave … Read more
The Floating Court King Hans of Denmark and Norway had his flagship built in 1485, its timbers felled the previous winter in what is now northeastern France, the hull likely finished in a shipyard in the Low Countries. He named it Gribshunden; a letter dated May 16, 1486, calls it simply “our ship Griffon.” It … Read more
The Last Man in a Habit On August 4, 1540, guards led a prisoner named Thomas Epsam from Newgate, the London gaol, to stand before the king’s justices. Epsam had once been a Benedictine monk of Westminster Abbey, one of England’s grandest religious houses. He had spent the previous three years locked up in Newgate … Read more
Robert Falcon Scott and four companions died returning from the South Pole in 1912, and the story that reached Britain was one of heroic sacrifice. A new book, “Widows of the Ice” by historian Anne Fletcher, follows the three wives left behind and how each one learned, long after the fact, that her husband was … Read more
He had been gone four years, and the man who stepped off the ship at Dover in August 1274 was already king. He just hadn’t been crowned yet. What he did with that crown, once the ceremony was behind him, would reach far beyond his own reign, and it would land hardest on a community … Read more
State House, June 25, 1894 On June 25, 1894, a crowd of about 500 gathered outside the Massachusetts State House in Boston to see off a woman on a bicycle. Annie Cohen Kopchovsky was 23 or 24, though newspapers at the time put her closer to 27. She sold advertising space for Boston newspapers, was … Read more
The Cliff, June 6, 1984 On the morning of June 6, 1984, Ronald Reagan stood on a stretch of cliff above the Normandy coast in France and spoke to a group of old men seated in front of him. Forty years earlier, at dawn on June 6, 1944, a force Reagan’s prepared remarks put at … Read more
Six Clerks, Every Night Somewhere in late-eighteenth-century Paris, behind the public counters of an ordinary post office, a small room served a second function that had nothing to do with delivering mail. Six clerks worked there after dark, by candlelight, reading letters not addressed to them. The process was deliberate. A clerk pressed a small … Read more