A Week’s Invitation In 1712, Isaac Watts was pastor of a Congregationalist chapel on Mark Lane in the City of London, one of the Dissenting congregations that worshiped outside the Church of England. He was already known in London’s Dissenting circles: his 1707 collection had given the city the hymn “There is a land of … Read more
People who recognize the name Häxan usually remember one image: a Danish director in horns and a forked tongue, playing Satan in his own film. Fewer know that the same picture was pitched to its first audiences as serious science, that it was banned in the United States within a year of its American release, … Read more
Tozeur, June 28, 1913 On June 28, 1913, a notice went up in Tozeur, a desert town in western Tunisia built around its palm groves and irrigation channels. Tunisia had been a French protectorate since 1881, and matters of this kind were handled locally, by French officials on the ground rather than by any single … Read more
The Square, the Cold, the Wait On December 14, 1825, close to 3,000 soldiers formed up in Senate Square in St. Petersburg. They were not a crowd pulled in off the street. They were regular army units, marched there before dawn by officers who had spent years preparing for this exact morning. They had been … Read more
The Bear He Didn’t Catch In spring 1852, Augustus T. Dowd was hunting meat for a crew building an irrigation ditch for the Union Water Company near Murphys, in Calaveras County, California. He wounded a grizzly bear and followed its trail into the forest, but the bear got away. What he found instead was a … Read more
A Comedian Takes a Gamble In 1920, Charlie Chaplin began work on his first full-length feature, built around a tramp, an abandoned infant, and the boy who would play him. The boy was Jackie Coogan, born October 26, 1914, in Los Angeles. Chaplin had spotted him in a vaudeville act with his father, John Henry … Read more
A man who said he had nearly starved alone in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado walked out of them in the spring of 1874 looking neither thin nor poor. He had more cash on him than anyone could account for. That contradiction unraveled into one of the most notorious killings of the American West, … Read more
Forty Thousand People, One Morning In 1851, the English sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins unveiled life-sized models of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals in a park in South London. He built them in concrete and brick, posed as if alive, and later accounts put opening-day attendance at an estimated 40,000 people. Nobody else in the world … Read more
The Field Each October On October 14, 1066, King Harold Godwinson’s English army met Duke William of Normandy’s force on a ridge above a valley in Sussex. William won. Harold did not survive the fight, and the town that grew up around the battlefield took its name straight from what happened there: Battle, East Sussex, … Read more
A kingdom carved out of the bloody capture of Jerusalem in 1099 nearly came apart within a century, not from the armies waiting across its border, but from the noblemen inside its own court, fighting over who would succeed a king who was slowly dying of leprosy. The Walls Come Down The army of the … Read more