Migration

Alaric spent most of his career trying to win a legitimate place inside the Roman military system, and the sack of Rome looks like his last resort after every offer to negotiate one was refused.

1965

Plague pits in Siena were dug so deep the chronicler said dogs dragged out the dead, but nobody recording the disaster could say how many people the plague actually killed.

1855

A modest twenty ounces of gold near a creek in 1858 built a territory within three years, and the same rush of settlers set in motion the pressures that led, six years later, to a massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho people at Sand Creek.

1598

Food kept leaving Ireland by ship while roughly a million people starved, a fact that turns the argument over this famine less into what happened and more into what to call it.

A law that spoke only of voluntary land exchange produced forced marches that killed thousands, and a Supreme Court ruling against it changed nothing because the president simply declined to enforce it.

William Clark's enslaved manservant York walked and paddled the same 8,000 miles as everyone else on the expedition, even got a vote on where to camp, and came home to the one reward none of his companions received: continued bondage.

A name coined by a German geographer in 1877 for a network no ancient traveller, including Marco Polo, ever actually called by that word.

The chronicle that gives us most of what we know about the Viking raids was written by the side that eventually won, which is part of why its numbers for enemy fleets and armies do not entirely agree with each other.