Strange Chapters
The master historians set out to tell the story of America soberly — and still could not keep the strangeness out. Six episodes from the timeline where history reads like invention, each linking to the full reading.
The Half-Wit Who Broke a Siege
1777: to save Fort Schuyler, Benedict Arnold pardoned a condemned Tory, Hon-Yost Schuyler, had bullets shot through his coat, and sent him running into the enemy camp crying that the Americans were coming. Asked how many, he pointed at the leaves on the trees. St. Leger’s entire besieging army fled, abandoning tents, artillery and camp-equipage.
The Threshold of the Revolution
The Conquistador Buried in the River
De Soto had told the natives he was immortal — so when he died, his men buried him secretly outside the camp. When the fresh grave drew suspicion, they dug him up at night, wrapped the corpse in cloths made heavy with sand, and dropped it from a boat into the Mississippi he had discovered.
The Era of Discovery
The Colony That Vanished
When John White finally returned to Roanoke, the island was deserted — every colonist gone, with one word carved in the bark of a tree: Croatan. Storms kept him from following the clue, and, as the reading says plainly, “what was the fate of the colony never was known.”
The Era of Discovery
The Witchcraft Madness
The historians give the Salem panic of 1692 a full, unsparing account across several readings — the afflicted girls, George Burroughs, the Andover confessions, and Cotton Mather’s part in it — a colony’s courts persuaded, for one long year, that the invisible world was in session.
Progress of the Colonies
The Grim End of King Philip
The war chief Metacomet — King Philip — was shot in 1676 by an Indian called Alderman. The victors’ treatment of his body, recounted without flinching in the reading, was medieval: beheaded and quartered, the head and hand carried off as trophies. New England’s deadliest war ended as a spectacle.
Progress of the Colonies
The Panic of 1741
New York’s own Salem: on the testimony of a single indentured servant, Mary Burton, the city convinced itself of a vast arson conspiracy. The readings follow the accusations from Caesar to the schoolmaster John Ury — a sobering study, alongside Salem, of how a courtroom panic feeds itself.
Progress of the Colonies