Stories & Ideas
Worth Exploring

Frontier land grabs were won at the recorder's office, not the O.K. Corral. How forged patents, bought judges, and quit-claim deeds took the American West.

In October 1647 the council of the New Model Army met in a Putney church and argued whether every man in England should have a vote. The record sat in shorthand, unread, for two centuries. What was said, who said it, and what happened next.

Everyone knows the Great Fire of 1666 burned the Great Plague out of London. The weekly death figures, a map of what burned, and the rest of Europe say otherwise. Here is the evidence, and the question that is still open.