The Silence Came First Rescuers reaching the villages around Lake Nyos in the days after August 21, 1986, reported something that stayed with them: not the bodies, though there were many, but the quiet. No insects hummed. No birds called. Cattle lay dead at elevations up to 330 feet (100 meters) above the crater rim. … Read more
Fifty-Three Dead Before the Bunting Came Down On November 17, 1921, Edward, Prince of Wales, came ashore at Apollo Bunder in Bombay [now Mumbai] aboard HMS Renown, greeted by Viceroy Lord Reading and the Governor of Bombay, Sir George Lloyd. Across the city, hartals, mass shutdowns organized as public mourning, had paralyzed dozens of towns … Read more
The Pyrenees Run France collapsed in June 1940. Andrée Borrel, twenty years old and recently employed as a shop assistant after leaving school at fourteen, did not wait to see what settled. She moved south into the unoccupied zone and joined an escape line pulling downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees into Spain. On one … Read more
A House Set Apart On March 26, 1915, sixteen blinded soldiers and sailors moved into St Dunstan’s Lodge in Regent’s Park, London. The house had been lent, free of charge, by Otto Hermann Kahn, an American financier who also maintained the 15-acre (roughly 6-hectare) grounds and permitted structural alterations. The villa’s name derived from a … Read more
A Promise Written at a Distance On April 4, 1660, Charles II was still in exile at Breda when he signed the Declaration of Breda, offering “a liberty to tender consciences” and promising that no one would be “disquieted or called in question for differences of opinion in matter of religion which do not disturb … Read more
What the Altimeter Saw A radar altimeter sends a radio pulse straight down, waits for it to bounce back, and converts the round-trip travel time into a height reading. Pilots trust it the way they trust a fuel gauge. Over glacial ice, the principle breaks. Certain radio frequencies pass through ice rather than reflecting off … Read more
A Settlement, Not a Battlefield Tú Cung hamlet sits on the central Vietnamese coast, about 7 miles (11 km) northeast of Quảng Ngãi city. In March 1968 it was part of the larger village of Sơn Mỹ, and on the morning of March 16 its population was what you would find in any coastal farming … Read more
Rome, 1650: A Portrait Judges Its Own Subject On March 19, 1650, the feast of Saint Joseph, the Congregazione dei Virtuosi held its annual exhibition under the portico of the Pantheon in Rome. Diego Velázquez submitted one canvas: an oil portrait, 32 by 27.5 inches (81.3 by 69.9 cm), of a man named Juan de … Read more
Sixty-Five Pounds and Three Weeks’ Wages Around 1970, Chris Wright was working as a librarian at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. He bought an oil portrait at a small antique shop in the city for £65, roughly three weeks’ wages. The painting showed a woman in a black habit, rendered in three-quarter bust … Read more
The Measurement On May 29, 1919, two British expeditions set up telescopes on opposite sides of the Atlantic: one at Sobral, in northern Brazil, and one on the island of Príncipe, off the west coast of Africa. A total solar eclipse would cross the equator that day, and the astronomers needed to photograph the Hyades … Read more