A place

Memphis

3 stories from this place.

The Coroner’s Report July 25, 2026 · Mississippi River above Memphis

The Sultana Explosion of 27 April 1865, America's Deadliest Maritime Disaster, Which History Overlooked

The steamboat Sultana, legally certified for 376 people, was carrying more than 2,100 — most of them Union soldiers just released from Confederate prison camps — when her patched boiler exploded on the Mississippi above Memphis on 27 April 1865. Around 1,200 died, more than on the Titanic, in a week when the newspapers were full of Lincoln's funeral and the death of John Wilkes Booth.

Read the story →

The Coroner’s Report June 27, 2026 · Lorraine Motel, Memphis

The Assassination of Civil Rights Leader Martin Luther King Jr on the Balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis at 18:01 on 4 April 1968

Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr was shot at 18:01 Central Standard Time on 4 April 1968 while standing on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. He was pronounced dead at St Joseph's Hospital at 19:05. The shooter was identified as James Earl Ray, who was arrested at Heathrow Airport on 8 June 1968 and pleaded guilty in March 1969.

Read the story →

The Cabinet June 24, 2026 · Alexandria

The Six-Century Syncretic Religion Ptolemy I Invented and Theodosius Suppressed

Serapis was a deliberately syncretic Greco-Egyptian deity created under Ptolemy I around 305 BC to unite the Ptolemaic kingdom's Greek and Egyptian populations under a shared imperial cult. The Serapis cult flourished across the Hellenistic and Roman Mediterranean for six centuries before the 391 AD Christian suppression substantially erased it.

Read the story →