The Signal in the Cathedral Easter Sunday, 26 April 1478. High Mass was under way inside Florence’s cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. At approximately 11 a.m. a bell rang to mark the elevation of the host, the moment when every head in the building bowed. That bell was the signal. Two clerics, Antonio Maffei … Read more

What the King Carried In the autumn of 1216, King John of England kept his treasury close. A civil war had been grinding for over a year, Prince Louis of France held London and much of the south and east, and no fixed location was safe. The wealth traveled with him. What that wealth amounted … Read more

The Last Known Position On May 29, 1925, at a jungle waypoint in the Brazilian Mato Grosso called Dead Horse Camp, Percy Fawcett handed a packet of letters to the guides he was about to dismiss and told them to carry it back to civilization. One letter went to his wife, Nina. He expressed confidence … Read more

What the Camera Caught at Stromboli, 1987 In 1987, the PBS Nature series broadcast The Volcano Watchers, showing two French scientists at work on Italian volcanic sites: two figures in metallic heat-reflective suits and astronaut-style helmets, standing at crater rims where volcanic gases were corrosive enough to dissolve ordinary fabric. Chlorine, carbon dioxide, and sulfuric … Read more

What Stands in Hope Cemetery Hope Cemetery occupies 65 acres on the edge of Barre, Vermont, a granite-cutting city 45 miles southeast of Burlington that has carried the informal title “Granite Capital of the World” for more than a century. Established in 1895, the cemetery holds more than 10,000 memorials, nearly all cut from Barre … Read more

What He Carried Across the Isthmus In 1680, William Dampier crossed the Isthmus of Darien (present-day Panama) with a party of 44 buccaneers over 21 days, raiding alongside crews who were there for plunder. He was also filling notebooks. At river crossings, he sealed them inside a bamboo tube stopped at both ends with wax … Read more

The Knocking in the Walls The Fox family had been in their Hydesville farmhouse only a few months when the sounds started. John Fox, a blacksmith and farmer, moved his wife and two youngest daughters to the hamlet in Wayne County, upstate New York, in December 1847. The sounds that began that winter were specific … Read more

What Fanny Borden Did In March 1934, a Vassar College librarian named Fanny Borden wrote to Marianne Moore on behalf of a graduating senior who had been reading Moore’s 1924 collection Observations with enough attention to ask questions about it. Borden and Moore had known each other since childhood. She had tried this kind of … Read more

The Coastline They Came To On the night of April 16–17, 1961, a flotilla of small boats and landing craft moved toward the southern coast of Cuba, making for the Bahía de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs), a marshy, remote inlet on the Zapata Peninsula. The men aboard were organized under the designation Brigade 2506, or … Read more

A Merchant’s Claim in Fécamp In 1863, a wine merchant named Alexandre-Prosper-Hubert Le Grand came across an old manuscript in his family library in Fécamp, a port town on the Normandy coast of France. He believed the document contained a herbal recipe devised in 1510 by a Benedictine monk named Dom Bernardo Vincelli at the … Read more