Coal Hill, Before Dawn The hill north of the Forbidden City was not a natural feature. It had been built from earth excavated when the palace moat was dug, an artificial mound overlooking the northern wall. Its name was Wansui Hill, though it was also called Coal Hill and later Jingshan. On the morning of … Read more

A General Without an Army On the evening of June 18, 1940, Charles de Gaulle stood at a BBC microphone in London and read a statement into the French service. He was 49, a temporary brigadier general who had held the post of Under-Secretary of State for National Defence and War for eleven days. Marshal … Read more

The Ground Before the Fire On August 1, 1838, full emancipation took effect across the British Caribbean, ending compulsory apprenticeship in Jamaica. The British government distributed roughly £20 million in compensation to former slaveholders across the Caribbean. The people who had been enslaved received nothing. In the parish of St. Thomas-in-the-East, the years after 1838 … Read more

A Working Stop on a Working Tour On the evening of June 13, 1587, between nine and ten o’clock, two members of the Queen’s Men met in an enclosure in Thame, a market town in Oxfordshire, and one of them did not walk away. The location the coroner recorded was White Hound Close. The company … Read more

The Bush, the Warrant, and the Man Albert “Ginger” Goodwin got his nickname from his bright red hair. Born in Treeton, Yorkshire, on May 10, 1887, the son of a coal miner, he arrived in Canada in September 1906. By 1911 he was in Cumberland, British Columbia, working the seams for Canadian Collieries. The 1912–1914 … Read more

A Company on the Road The Queen’s Men, formally Queen Elizabeth’s Men, had existed for barely four years when the killing happened. Founded on March 10, 1583, by order directed to Edmund Tilney, Master of the Revels, the company was assembled under the direction of Sir Francis Walsingham by recruiting the best performers from several … Read more

The Garment and the World It Announced The suit was hard to miss. High-waisted trousers ballooned at the thigh and tapered sharply to the cuff. The jacket fell to mid-thigh, with padded shoulders, sprawling lapels, and enough fabric to trouble any tailor’s ledger. A wide-brimmed, fedora-style hat and a long watch chain completed the silhouette. … Read more

The Shelves Go Empty Before September 29, 1939, when German forces completed their occupation of Warsaw, Basia Temkin-Berman worked as a librarian at the National Library of Poland on Koszykowa Street. She was one of the very few Jews employed there. Within days of occupation, that fact became an administrative liability. Jewish lending libraries in … Read more

330 Tons on a Moving Floor In July 1960, cargo aircraft and ships delivered the disassembled components of the PM-2A reactor to Thule Air Force Base on the northwestern coast of Greenland. Army engineers loaded the 330-ton shipment onto tracked vehicles and hauled everything 138 miles across the ice sheet to Camp Century, a network … Read more

The Halberd and the Refusal In October 1868, imperial forces were moving through Aizu domain [modern Fukushima Prefecture] fast enough that thousands of fighters and civilians had begun converging on Tsuruga Castle. Among them was Nakano Takeko, born in Edo [modern Tokyo] in April 1847, trained since childhood in naginatajutsu, the use of the naginata, … Read more