The Address of Afonso Mendes In February 1626, Afonso Mendes stood before the court of Emperor Susenyos I and delivered an address that, according to the primary account, ran to 30,000 words. Mendes was Portuguese, a Jesuit, and had been appointed Latin Patriarch of Ethiopia by Pope Urban VIII in December 1622. He had landed … Read more

The Bonfires of Dalat Dalat sits on the Lang Biang Plateau in Vietnam’s Central Highlands, at approximately 4,921 feet (1,500 m) above sea level. Before 1975, it had functioned as a resort city, drawing French colonial administrators and Vietnamese families to its cooler air. It was also where a fifteen-year-old named Quynh Dao was living … Read more

The German Monopoly In 1913, the United States spent $13 million importing potash, and nearly all of it came from one place. The salt deposits around Staßfurt in Saxony-Anhalt, in what was then the German Empire, controlled roughly 95 percent of world production. A state-sanctioned cartel called the Kalisyndikat set the prices, and American buyers … Read more

The Dover Appointment The first surviving record of Thomas Tallis as a working musician places him at a small Benedictine priory in Dover, Kent, around 1530. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography puts the earliest firm documentary evidence in 1531, when his name appears in the house accounts alongside an annual fee of £2. Tallis … Read more

The Submerged Colony The winter of 1716–1717 came early to New England. Cold and snow had been building since November 1716 across Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Connecticut, and by late February the landscape bore little resemblance to what lay beneath it. In some sheep pastures, Cotton Mather, Boston’s prominent Puritan minister, recorded drifts reaching 16 … Read more

The Incident at Pension Desarzens In June 1868, a 24-year-old woman named Marie-Catherine Fritzgès collapsed at the Pension Desarzens boarding house in Geneva’s Plainpalais district. Her physician recognized poisoning symptoms and notified the authorities. Fritzgès survived. The nurse assigned to her care, a 32-year-old from Le Locle named Marie Jeanneret, was arrested on June 28, … Read more

The Slope of Kholat Syakhl On February 26, 1959, a search party in the northern Ural Mountains found an abandoned tent on the eastern slope of Kholat Syakhl, cut open from the inside. Footprints led away downhill toward a tree line roughly 1 mile (1.6 km) away. The group that pitched that tent consisted of … Read more

The Medford Storm Sometime around 1868 or 1869, a storm struck Medford, Massachusetts, and tore apart the nets in which Étienne Léopold Trouvelot was keeping his caterpillar specimens. The caterpillars were European spongy moths, known to science as Lymantria dispar (and called the “European gypsy moth” until the Entomological Society of America changed the common … Read more

The First Current Twenty-five witnesses filed into Auburn State Prison on August 6, 1890, to witness what no official execution had ever produced: death by electric chair. The man in the chair was William Kemmler, aged thirty, a produce merchant from Buffalo convicted of killing his common-law wife, Matilda “Tillie” Ziegler, with a hatchet on … Read more

The Banks of the Derwent September 25, 1066, fell on a Monday. The English army arrived at Stamford Bridge, a crossing on the River Derwent somewhere between 5 and 7 miles (8 to 11 km) east of York, sources differ on the precise figure, and found the Norwegian camp unprepared. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, … Read more