Winston Churchill built his wartime reputation on speeches most people have never actually heard him deliver live. The recording that plays on television every anniversary, the one promising that Britain will fight on the beaches and never surrender, was not made in the middle of the crisis it describes. Churchill made it years later, out … Read more

Landfall at Dover On September 10, 1224, nine Franciscan friars stepped off a boat at Dover. They were the first members of their order to reach England, a handful of men with no church, no house, and no arrangement waiting for them on either side of the Channel. At Canterbury, five stayed behind. The other … Read more

Barfleur, November 1120 By late November 1120, King Henry I of England had reason to think the year had gone well. His long war to hold Normandy against the French crown had ended in a peace, secured years earlier by a marriage: in February 1113, Henry and Fulk V of Anjou had agreed near Alençon … Read more

HEADLINE: Moscow’s British Colony: 188 Foreigners Who Survived the 1812 Fire ARTICLE: A Census Before the Fire In 1811, Moscow’s police compiled a count of the city’s foreign residents. Alongside the French, German, and Italian colonies, they listed 188 British subjects: 111 men and 77 women. The record names occupations, not personalities. Merchants and entrepreneurs … Read more

A Vionnet Gown, Cheaply Copied In the late 1920s, a gown that left Madeleine Vionnet’s workshop in Paris could appear within weeks in an American department store, cut from cheaper fabric and sold for far below its original price. No one had faked a label or a trademark. The design itself, the cut, the drape, … Read more

Sixty Copies In April 1939, John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath, a novel about an Oklahoma farm family pushed west by drought and debt into California’s fields. It sold fast from the start. In Kern County, the setting the book described, the county librarian, Gretchen Knief, saw the early notices and expected demand. She … Read more

The Only Bridge for Miles Around 1700, anyone wanting to cross the Thames in London had exactly one option within the built-up city: London Bridge. The crossing was already old by then. Around AD 50 the Romans put up a first bridge on the site; the Saxons replaced it with one in timber, and that … Read more

A League of Their Own On August 20, 1939, 22 Black bowlers gathered at Paradise Valley’s Frogs Club in Detroit, Michigan, and founded the National Negro Bowling Association. The American Bowling Congress, the sport’s governing body since 1895, kept a whites-only clause in its constitution, and so did the Women’s International Bowling Congress. The new … Read more

The Only Obstacles Left On November 2, 1960, Rafael Trujillo, who had run the Dominican Republic since a coup around 1930, said in public that he had only two problems left to deal with. One was the Catholic Church. The other, according to the account that has come down to us, was three sisters: Patria, … Read more

A Bankrupt Writer at Sea Mark Twain likely boarded the steamer SS Warrimoo in Vancouver in 1895, traveling to lecture his way out of debt. He had lost an estimated $300,000, his own money and his wife’s, on the Paige Compositor, a mechanical typesetting device that failed. By one estimate, that sum would equal roughly … Read more