The Plot That Wasn’t There In 1678, a clergyman named Titus Oates told a story about a Catholic plot to kill King Charles II. The plot did not exist. The trials that followed it did. Before the year was out, courts in London had begun sending real people to the gallows on testimony invented from … Read more

A Gift for Men Who Lived on Water In 1891, officers serving with an Imperial Russian training squadron paid for the making of a large icon of St. Nicholas. In Orthodox tradition, St. Nicholas is the saint who watches over sailors, travelers, and merchants, which made him the obvious choice for men whose work and … Read more

Essex Road, a Saturday Morning in July 1897 Essex Road ran through Islington, a shopping street about a mile north of central London, lined with stalls that opened every market day. On a Saturday morning in July 1897, John Hurley set up his pitch there and laid out fruit he had bought cheap: pears and … Read more

A Dam Called Progress In 1952, revolution brought a new government to power in Egypt, one that made economic modernization its central promise. That promise took shape as the Aswan High Dam, meant to generate electricity, open farmland through irrigation, and control the Nile’s seasonal floods. The dam’s engineering specifications were fixed before anyone decided … Read more

The Printers Deliver, Eighteen Days Too Late In the summer of 1662, London printers raced a deadline fixed by Parliament: every parish in England and Wales had to adopt a newly revised Book of Common Prayer by August 24, St Bartholomew’s Day. The first printed copies came off the press on August 6, 1662, leaving … Read more

A Body in the Doorway On the evening of October 13, 1761, the Calas family sat down to dinner above their shop on a cloth merchants’ street in Toulouse. Jean Calas, a Huguenot textile merchant in a city that was almost entirely Catholic, was at the table with his wife, Anne-Rose, two of his sons, … Read more

The Gallows, 1778 On July 2, 1778, four people condemned for murder were led out to a gallows near Worcester, Massachusetts. An estimated 5,000 spectators had traveled in to watch, in what accounts from the day describe as a carnival-like atmosphere. Among the condemned was Bathsheba Spooner, convicted of arranging the killing of her husband, … Read more

On the morning of June 28, 1914, a stalled car on a Sarajevo street corner turned a regional killing into grounds for a continental war. The documented record is specific and well established. The popular version that followed, including retellings published around the war’s 2014 centenary, is not. A sandwich, a missing reverse gear, a … Read more

King’s Lynn, October 9, 1216 On October 9, 1216, King John rode into King’s Lynn, then called Bishop’s Lynn, on the Norfolk coast. The townspeople turned out for him, and the chroniclers who recorded the visit called the welcome a warm one, which was not something John could count on that autumn. Magna Carta had … Read more

Three Months In In the summer of 1799, the Directory, the five-man executive that governed France after the Revolution, appointed Joseph Fouché as its Minister of Police. Accounts differ on the exact month, July or August, but the timing matters less than what the job controlled: a network of spies and informants, the paperwork that … Read more