The Shelves Go Empty Before September 29, 1939, when German forces completed their occupation of Warsaw, Basia Temkin-Berman worked as a librarian at the National Library of Poland on Koszykowa Street. She was one of the very few Jews employed there. Within days of occupation, that fact became an administrative liability. Jewish lending libraries in … Read more

330 Tons on a Moving Floor In July 1960, cargo aircraft and ships delivered the disassembled components of the PM-2A reactor to Thule Air Force Base on the northwestern coast of Greenland. Army engineers loaded the 330-ton shipment onto tracked vehicles and hauled everything 138 miles across the ice sheet to Camp Century, a network … Read more

The Halberd and the Refusal In October 1868, imperial forces were moving through Aizu domain [modern Fukushima Prefecture] fast enough that thousands of fighters and civilians had begun converging on Tsuruga Castle. Among them was Nakano Takeko, born in Edo [modern Tokyo] in April 1847, trained since childhood in naginatajutsu, the use of the naginata, … Read more

A Narrow Brief In early 1803, two American diplomats sat down in Paris with a ceiling on what they were permitted to discuss. Robert R. Livingston had been serving as American minister to France since December 1801. James Monroe arrived on April 12, 1803, sent by President Thomas Jefferson as a special envoy with one … Read more

A Darkening Sky, Mistaken for Weather Maria Chuprina was thirteen years old on August 23, 1942. According to an account published by History Today, which has not been independently verified, she was at home in Stalingrad (now Volgograd, Russia) that day, together with her mother and her uncle. The morning passed without incident. At 15:18 … Read more

The Last Summer The cover photograph appeared in July 1937. Zheng Pingru, approximately nineteen years old, wore a qipao and a finger-wave bob on the front of Liángyǒu, The Young Companion, one of Shanghai’s most widely read pictorials. Her father, Zheng Yueyuan, was a Nationalist official who had taught at Fudan University; her mother, Hanako … Read more

A Week of Photographs On April 11, 1945, soldiers of the US Army’s 6th Armored Division entered Buchenwald. The SS guards had already gone; prisoners who had armed themselves held the watchtowers. Four days later, British forces arrived at Bergen-Belsen. Established on July 16, 1937 on Ettersberg hill, roughly 4.5 miles (approximately 7.2 km) northwest … Read more

What the Builders Laid Down First The foundation of the western rampart at Wolseong was built from packed shells and earth. Radiocarbon dating places the work in the mid-fourth century CE, at what is now Gyeongju, in southeastern Korea. When the foundation layer was finished and the stonework had not yet begun, someone placed three … Read more

A Place Built for Ordinary Life Before June 1944, Oradour-sur-Glane was a village people went to on weekends. It sat beside the river Glane, roughly 9 to 12 miles (15 to 20 km) west-northwest of Limoges, in the Haute-Vienne department of the Limousin region of France. By June 10, 1944, the population present numbered approximately … Read more

Eighty Stabs and a Letter to the Pope On the night of January 8, 1354, armed men forced their way into an inn at L’Aigle, Normandy, and stabbed Charles de la Cerda, Constable of France and closest confidant of King Jean II, approximately 80 times. That figure comes from medieval narrative sources and should be … Read more