What Fanny Borden Did In March 1934, a Vassar College librarian named Fanny Borden wrote to Marianne Moore on behalf of a graduating senior who had been reading Moore’s 1924 collection Observations with enough attention to ask questions about it. Borden and Moore had known each other since childhood. She had tried this kind of … Read more
The Coastline They Came To On the night of April 16–17, 1961, a flotilla of small boats and landing craft moved toward the southern coast of Cuba, making for the Bahía de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs), a marshy, remote inlet on the Zapata Peninsula. The men aboard were organized under the designation Brigade 2506, or … Read more
A Merchant’s Claim in Fécamp In 1863, a wine merchant named Alexandre-Prosper-Hubert Le Grand came across an old manuscript in his family library in Fécamp, a port town on the Normandy coast of France. He believed the document contained a herbal recipe devised in 1510 by a Benedictine monk named Dom Bernardo Vincelli at the … Read more
What Dr. Dixon Received According to a memorial published in the Illustrated Police News on August 29, 1885, a woman named Annie Parker died in the infirmary of the Greenwich workhouse. She was 38, per that account; one other source gives her age as 35, and the newspaper account is preferred here. The cause was … Read more
The Comfortable Radical Henry Gaylord Wilshire was born in Cincinnati on June 7, 1861, into the kind of family where money arrived before ambition was required. His father was a banker. Wilshire spent a year at Harvard, 1880 to 1881, without completing a degree, and moved through a series of ventures before settling in Los … Read more
A Union of Crowns, a Century of Friction The Kalmar Union was assembled in June 1397 at Kalmar, its premise straightforward: one monarch would rule Denmark, Norway, and Sweden together. The political architect was Queen Margaret I of Denmark; the first king crowned under the arrangement was Erik of Pomerania, on June 17, 1397. The … Read more
All Saints’ Morning Saturday, November 1, 1755. In Lisbon, the feast of All Saints’ Day had drawn a large part of the city’s estimated population of 250,000 to 275,000 into mass. The churches along the hills above the Tagus were full for the morning liturgy. An English merchant present in the city left an account … Read more
Off the Road On the evening of June 22, 1635, Hans Heberle left Neenstetten. He was a shoemaker and small farmer, born in the village in the spring of 1597, and he had lived through seventeen years of war already. He took his wife and their three young children and walked south toward Ulm, but … Read more
The Summons In early April 1942, official notices went out to diamond merchants across Amsterdam. The instructions were straightforward: appear at the Beurs voor den Diamanthandel on the Weesperplein at noon on April 16, and bring the full stock of your company. The paperwork framed the visit as a routine inventory registration, the kind of … Read more
The First Name in the Register The exact moment the practice took hold in the West is disputed. Records from the 1550s show castrated male singers beginning to appear in western European sacred music, but the Sistine Chapel is where the institutional history sharpens. One reading of the choir’s records identifies an unnamed Spaniard entering … Read more