The Mare Came Home Alone On the evening of August 10, 1867, Ruggero Pascoli was returning from the market at Cesena by horse-drawn carriage along a narrow road near Savignano di Romagna [now Savignano sul Rubicone], roughly 12 miles (19 km) inland from the Adriatic coast. Someone waiting at the roadside shot him. He died … Read more

Seven Centuries in One Room The Public Record Office of Ireland opened at the Four Courts complex in Dublin in 1867, with Sir Samuel Ferguson as its first deputy keeper. Its purpose-built, six-story granite treasury on the River Liffey held records reaching back to 1174, the period following King Henry II’s establishment of his lordship … Read more

Rome, 11 September 1599 On September 11, 1599, three members of the Cenci family were brought to Ponte Sant’Angelo in Rome for public execution. Lucrezia Cenci, the stepmother, and Giacomo, the eldest brother, died first. Then came Beatrice, aged 22, beheaded with a small axe. A fourth family member, Bernardo, aged 12, was made to … Read more

One Hundred Coffins The cable ship CS MacKay-Bennett left Halifax, Nova Scotia, at 12:28 p.m. on April 17, 1912, two days after the RMS Titanic went under. In its hold: approximately 100 wooden coffins, 100 long tons of ice, all the embalming fluid the city could supply, and 12 long tons of iron bars to … Read more

One Hundred and Fifty Feet of Strategic Problem The Eastern white pine (Pinus strobus) grew across a broad corridor from what is now Maine south to northern New Jersey, and it grew large. Mature specimens reached 150 ft (c. 46 m). What mattered to a ship carpenter was the trunk: straight-grained, relatively light, resistant to … Read more

The Salesman and the Bales On July 5, 1778, a twenty-nine-year-old traveling salesman named Jean-François Favarger left La Neuveville, a small town roughly ten miles (approximately 16 kilometers) north of Neuchâtel, and set out on a circuit that would carry him approximately 1,200 miles through provincial France. His route ran south through Lyon and Marseille, … Read more

Anmer, the King’s Horse At approximately 3:10 in the afternoon on June 4, 1913, the fifteen horses running in the Epsom Derby came around Tattenham Corner. Emily Wilding Davison stepped from the infield rail onto the track. Anmer, owned by King George V and running third from last, struck her with his chest, pitched onto … Read more

Eighteen Cents The Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1902 was one of the most densely populated urban districts on earth. The men who ran its slaughterhouses and distribution networks operated in a market where their customers had nowhere else to turn. On the evening of May 14, 1902, a group of housewives gathered to … Read more

Flour, Fat, and a Ship Manifest Francisco Pizarro founded Lima in January 1535, two years after his forces seized Cusco. Within a decade it was the administrative capital of the Viceroyalty of Peru, formally established November 20, 1542, by royal decree of King Charles I of Spain. The colonial period that followed lasted approximately 288 … Read more

The World That Gathered in Buffalo The Pan-American Exposition opened in Buffalo, New York, on June 1, 1901, built to demonstrate that the Western Hemisphere had arrived at modernity. Its organizers had not initially planned for Black Americans to appear except on the midway, where two attractions, “Darkest Africa” and “The Old Plantation”, offered African … Read more