Blog Biz

In June of 323 BC, the air inside the palace of Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon carried the sweet, wrong smell of a body beginning to corrupt. On a golden couch lay Alexander the Great, dead for days at thirty-two, his skin darkening in the Mesopotamian heat. Around him stood his generals, the companions who had marched … Read more

Dopis dorazil v úterý. Těžký krémový papír s reliéfní hlavičkou, ten typ, u kterého poskočí srdce dřív, než vůbec zlomíte pečeť. Zírala jsem na něj celou minutu ve své ztísněné garsonce, obklopená prázdnými obaly od instantních polévek a učebnicemi slepenými izolepou. S potěšením vám oznamujeme, že jste byla přijata do doktorského programu. Jmenuji se Rosálie … Read more

In 1901, a traveling portrait photographer named Elmore Cisk drove his wagon up a lane in the western North Carolina mountains to the house at Sinner’s Bend, a seven-acre bench of ground on the Little Fool River that had changed hands eleven times in twenty-seven years before a man named Roland Thrill finally held onto … Read more

At 5:24 on the morning of November 21, 1944, the radar screen aboard the American submarine USS Sealion showed a Japanese battleship that had stopped moving. The torpedo tubes had just been reloaded. The submarine’s commander, Eli T. Reich, had spent more than two hours regaining an attack position he had lost earlier that night. … Read more

In 1904, a family celebration in Boston appeared utterly unremarkable—until a sharp-eyed historian noticed the cat. Margaret Chen, an expert in historical photograph evaluation at the Smithsonian Institution, was examining a sepia-toned portrait that had arrived in a collection of old photographs from Boston. The image showed an elegant family of seven gathered around a … Read more

In the autumn of 1887, a surveyor named Cordell Acheson rode into Dresden Hollow, a coal settlement of roughly two hundred souls pressed into a narrow Appalachian valley where the Elk River bent sharply south. He had been sent by the Allegheny Land and Mineral Company to map mineral rights along the Elk River Basin, … Read more

At 7:55 on the morning of December 7, 1941, the first of two waves of Japanese carrier aircraft struck Pearl Harbor. The attack cost the Japanese only 29 planes. American deaths numbered roughly 2,400, with another 1,200 wounded, and more than half of the US military aircraft on the ground were damaged or destroyed. The … Read more

On the morning of May 26, 1637, just before dawn, the air over the Mystic River in southeastern Connecticut was cold and still. Inside a palisade of sharpened posts, several hundred Pequot men, women, and children slept in a village of closely packed wigwams. Outside the walls, in the darkness, 77 English soldiers and roughly … Read more

Nearly one in five men in Spain and Portugal today carries DNA that traces back to Sephardic Jews, the people expelled from the Iberian Peninsula more than five hundred years ago. Geneticists uncovered this hidden legacy while mapping the ancestry of Jewish communities across the world, and the results rewrote the story of a people … Read more

Ich erwachte aus dem Koma in einen leeren Raum. Kein Vater, kein Bruder, kein vertrautes Gesicht. Nur die surrende Neonröhre über mir und ein einzelner Zettel auf dem Nachttisch, mit vier Wörtern, die mich tiefer trafen als es der Unfall je getan hatte: „Wir haben aufgehört zu zahlen. Viel Glück. “ Für einen Moment glaubte … Read more