A Wheelbarrow Full of Gin London, around 1735. By one estimate, some 1,500 stills were running across the city, turning out more than six million gallons (approximately 27,276,000 liters) of raw spirit a year, and none of it needed to pass through a licensed tavern to reach a drinker. Gin moved through the city from … Read more

Thousands of Palestinian Arabs put on British uniforms between 1939 and 1943 and served in France, in North Africa, and in the rescue work that followed German air raids over England. They did it alongside Jewish volunteers from the same stretch of British-administered territory, against the same enemy. When the fighting ended, no memorial went … Read more

The Ledger of 1938 In 1938, seven pounds in every ten of food value eaten in Britain had been grown or raised abroad and shipped in. Grain, meat, cheese, and butter were the categories most exposed. No other country in Europe came close: the nearest rival, Switzerland, imported only 35 percent of what it consumed, … Read more

Round Valley, Before Round Valley lies in Mendocino County, in Northern California, and was Yuki land for generations before anyone called it that. Historians estimate, and it is only an estimate, that close to 20,000 Yuki lived there before sustained contact with outsiders. California entered the Union in 1850, two years after gold turned up … Read more

James Joyce’s novel Ulysses went on sale in Paris on February 2, 1922, published by Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company in a first edition of 1,000 copies. Within the same year, the British government decided the book could not legally cross its border. The case against it rested on far less reading than the decision … Read more

The Note On October 5, 1923, Iowa State’s football team reached Minneapolis to play the University of Minnesota the next afternoon. Jack Trice, the team’s only Black player, spent that night in a separate hotel from his teammates, standard practice then for a Black traveler in the city. Before he slept, he wrote a short … Read more

The Woman Who Wrote Herself a Part On April 26, 1926, a play called “Sex” opened at Daly’s 63rd Street Theatre in Manhattan. The script was credited to Jane Mast, a pen name Mae West had used since the early 1920s. There was no real mystery about who stood behind the curtain: West had written … Read more

The Call to the Exchange On April 16, 1942, diamond merchants across Amsterdam received the same instruction: report at midday to the Amsterdam Diamond Exchange (Diamantbeurs) on the Weesperplein, and bring the complete stock of their firms. The notice, they were told, was for registration and valuation, nothing more. Jewish and non-Jewish dealers were summoned … Read more

In Thailand, her desserts are better known than her name. Sangkhaya fak thong, a coconut-pumpkin custard, and foi thong, egg-yolk threads cooked in syrup, trace through court tradition to a woman remembered as Thao Thong Kip Ma, the “Queen of Thai Desserts.” Her real name was Maria Guyomar de Pinha, and the road to the … Read more

Eastleigh, 4:35pm On the afternoon of March 5, 1936, a single aircraft stood ready at Eastleigh Aerodrome in Hampshire, on the site that is now Southampton Airport. It was the only one of its kind: prototype K5054, built to a design that had taken Reginald Joseph Mitchell and his team at Supermarine more than a … Read more