A Kitchen Designed by Calculation, Not Experience In 1926, at a drafting table in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky laid out a kitchen she had never needed herself. She had trained as an architect, among the first Austrian women to do so, but she had never run a household or cooked a family’s dinner. … Read more

Rome Declares, the World Takes Notice At midnight on May 23, 1915, Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary. On April 26, Rome had signed a secret agreement with Britain, France, and Russia, the Pact of London, promising Italy territory for joining the Allied side, and on May 3 the government tore up its old alliance with … Read more

Before Dawn In the hours before daylight on February 26, 1936, Japanese Army units moved through central Tokyo on orders from a cell of junior officers. Twenty-two of them commanded more than 1,400 soldiers, with later estimates ranging from 1,483 to 1,558 men. They occupied the Prime Minister’s official residence, the War Ministry, the Metropolitan … Read more

A Barge in Two Lives In the United States, sometime in the 1950s, a shipyard built a flat steel barge for ordinary freight work. It had no legs, no derrick, nothing to mark it as anything but a hull for hauling cargo. The exact year it went into the water isn’t recorded in the account … Read more

In June 1940, Benito Mussolini led Italy into the Second World War convinced that the nation’s “historic destiny” demanded nothing more than a brief, low-cost show of force. The idea behind that conviction had been years in the making, and it was tested in Africa within about eighteen months. Thirty Centuries of History In 1934, … Read more

Gniezno, March 1000 In March 1000, Holy Roman Emperor Otto III traveled to Gniezno, then the capital of the young Polish duchy, for what chroniclers called an amicable meeting with Duke Bolesław I, soon known as Bolesław the Brave. On March 11, Otto acknowledged Bolesław’s sovereignty and set a diadem on his head. He also … Read more

The Ship from Calais On August 14, 1561, a young widow boarded ship at Calais for a country she had not set foot in since she was a small child. Mary, Queen of Scots, was 18 years old. She had held the crown since she was six days old, had been sent to France at … Read more

A Letter Returned Unread In 1853, Lady Jane Franklin wrote to her husband one more time. By the reviewer’s account, she asked that if they could not be together on earth, they might be reunited in heaven. She sealed the letter and sent it north, toward the ice where Sir John Franklin had last been … Read more

The Dime Museum, February 1886 Austin & Stone’s dime museum sat in downtown Boston, Massachusetts, a hall built for variety acts rather than news production. Ahead of the contest, the owners sent in forty carpenters, gasfitters, and upholsterers to rebuild the main auditorium into something resembling a newspaper composing room, complete with type cases and … Read more

London, 1866 In 1866, cholera returned to London for a fourth time. It would be the last major outbreak of its kind the city saw. By the time it burned out, an estimated 5,500 people had died, most of them in the crowded, poorly drained streets of East London. The epidemic did not create the … Read more