History

The October 1904 notice in the West Plains Gazette was mundane enough to pass without remark. The county jail would close temporarily for structural improvements. The three-story limestone building that had stood since 1883 was showing its age. Moisture had weakened the foundation, according to the official report submitted by county commissioner Thomas Wilford. It … Read more

The sheriff’s deputy who typed the final line into the file used the word “evacuated,” and that was the word Cassian Marbone could not let go of. He had used it himself, on paper, in other assignments. It meant the settlement was gone, taxes uncollected, dwellings removed or fallen into ruin. It meant a decision … Read more

In 1994, in a field in southwestern Quebec, archaeologists confirmed that they were standing on top of a village. Not a camp, not a scatter of tools, but a village with houses, with rubbish heaps, with the ground still holding the outlines of where people had lived, farmed, argued, cooked, and buried their broken things. … Read more

In October 1649, in the small town of Navalcarnero just outside Madrid, the king of Spain came in secret to see his bride with his own eyes. He was forty-four years old. She was fourteen. She was also his niece, the daughter of his own sister. Three years earlier, she had been promised to his … Read more

The compass needle stayed still for a moment, then slowly drifted. It turned about ninety degrees to the west and stopped. He shook it. It swung back to north. He waited. It drifted again, the same ninety degrees, and held steady. He knelt down. He placed the compass on a flat rock and stepped back … Read more

The men sent by Cesare Borgia moved through the darkened rooms of the Vatican palace with a single purpose. Lucrezia had stepped away from her husband’s bedside only moments before, persuaded by her brother’s gentle assurances that she needed rest. She had trusted him, as she always had. It was a trust that had survived … Read more

The red and white sign still glowed above the door, but the shelves inside had already begun to thin. The employees who once helped customers find a single resistor or a hard-to-fault cable now stood waiting for word. It was 2015, and Radio Shack, the store that had introduced thousands of families to the personal … Read more

The boy gripped the plastic ring, shook his wrist, and the two hard acrylic balls clattered together, over and under, over and under, in a rhythm that sounded like a tiny, chaotic machine. In the schoolyards of the 1970s, Clackers were the height of cool, and everyone wanted to prove they could keep the fastest, … Read more

The crowd broke through the guards sometime after midnight. The doors of the chapel at Versailles had been left unguarded, the men at their posts having slipped away to drink, and now a mass of people pushed inside to see the body of the woman who had lain in the king’s bed. What they did … Read more