The Bordereau That Tore France in Half
A torn-up scrap of paper from a German embassy wastebasket convicted the wrong man in 1894. France spent the next twelve years arguing about it.
Read the story →14 stories from this century.
A torn-up scrap of paper from a German embassy wastebasket convicted the wrong man in 1894. France spent the next twelve years arguing about it.
Read the story →John Polidori was twenty-five. He had written the first English vampire novel, been disowned by Byron, and lost a libel suit. He drank prussic acid on a Wednesday.
Read the story →George Pullman built a model factory town south of Chicago in 1880. He ran it like a benevolent autocracy until 1894, when his workers stopped accepting the rent.
Read the story →On the same evening as the Great Chicago Fire, a wildfire two hundred and fifty kilometers north killed five times as many people. Almost nobody heard about it.
Read the story →The Great Chicago Fire killed three hundred people and burned a quarter of the city. Mrs. O'Leary's cow had nothing to do with it. A reporter admitted he made the story up.
Read the story →Henry Whitehead set out to disprove John Snow's water theory. He spent six months knocking on doors in Soho. By the end he had identified the index case.
Read the story →In the 1850s the central business district of Chicago was raised four to fourteen feet on jackscrews while continuing to operate. People kept eating at the hotels.
Read the story →Eight years after Frankenstein, Mary Shelley published a novel about a global pandemic that kills everyone except one narrator. Critics hated it. They had reasons.
Read the story →In September 1854, John Snow walked door to door through Soho with a map, a hypothesis, and a problem the city wouldn't believe.
Read the story →Tambora killed more people than Krakatoa, cooled the planet for two years, and started the Year Without a Summer. The Western press barely noticed.
Read the story →On a Monday morning in August 1883, a volcano in the Sunda Strait made a noise that was registered, four thousand eight hundred kilometers away, as gunfire.
Read the story →In June 1816 it rained for a month at Lake Geneva. Five English visitors were stuck indoors. One of them was eighteen years old, and she had a dream.
Read the story →Félix Faure had ambitions of being Caesar. On a February afternoon in 1899, he became something else.
Read the story →London's sewer system was funded in eighteen days. It took a heatwave, a river of feces, and a Parliament that could not breathe.
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