The First Current Twenty-five witnesses filed into Auburn State Prison on August 6, 1890, to witness what no official execution had ever produced: death by electric chair. The man in the chair was William Kemmler, aged thirty, a produce merchant from Buffalo convicted of killing his common-law wife, Matilda “Tillie” Ziegler, with a hatchet on … Read more
The Banks of the Derwent September 25, 1066, fell on a Monday. The English army arrived at Stamford Bridge, a crossing on the River Derwent somewhere between 5 and 7 miles (8 to 11 km) east of York, sources differ on the precise figure, and found the Norwegian camp unprepared. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, … Read more
The Omaha Spill A bridge over Nebraska’s Elkhorn River gave way in the summer of 1873 while a westbound train was crossing it. The rear car had been stripped of its original use and rebuilt as a rolling aquarium: Livingston Stone and his U.S. Fish Commission assistants had converted a Central Pacific fruit car, fitting … Read more
What Rosewood Had In January 1923, Rosewood was a small but established Black community in Levy County, Florida, sitting about 3 miles (4.8 km) east of Sumner, a company lumber town run by Cummer & Sons. Its population stood at roughly 120 people, down from a peak of 355 in 1915. Residents owned property, ran … Read more
The Failure at the Printing Office On a February night in 1672, fire broke out in one of Joan Blaeu’s printing offices on the Gravenstraat in Amsterdam. Blaeu was the city’s most celebrated cartographer, chief map-maker to the Dutch East India Company, and the man behind the Atlas Maior, a twelve-volume French edition containing 594 … Read more
The Labor Divide In April 2026, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics published state-level figures on average private-sector workweeks for all 50 states and the District of Columbia, drawn from the Current Employment Statistics program, a monthly survey reaching roughly 119,000 businesses and approximately 622,000 individual worksites. The figures measure average weekly hours (AWH) for … Read more