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

Fotheringhay, Before Dawn Around two in the morning on February 8, 1587, Mary Stuart sat down to write a letter. She was forty-four years old, confined to Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire, England, and she had been informed the night before that she would be executed that morning. She had been a prisoner in England for … Read more

The City and the Mountain In the spring of 1902, Saint-Pierre was the commercial and cultural capital of Martinique, the “Paris of the Antilles”, with a population of 28,000 to 30,000. Mount Pelée, a stratovolcano reaching 4,583 feet (1,397 m), stood roughly 4 to 6 miles (7 to 10 km) to the north. The volcano … Read more

What the Knife Was Not Allowed to Touch Every ophthalmologist uses the word “retina.” It comes from the Latin for net. Before that Latin rendering, it was the Greek word amphiblestroides, coined by a physician named Herophilus, born around 330 BCE in Chalcedon (today: Kadıköy, Istanbul, Turkey), who thought the membrane lining the back of … Read more

One Coat, Twenty Days In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a basic coat cost £1, roughly twenty days’ wages for a skilled tradesman. It was not a luxury item; it was the only coat he was likely to own. Working and middling-class people in this period typically kept one or two outfits. A … Read more