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On 4 August 1306, sixteen-year-old King Wenceslaus III fell to an assassin’s blade in Olomouc, extinguishing the male Přemyslid line. This archival study examines his brief life, the four suspected parties, and the historical consensus pointing toward Bohemian nobility as the likeliest hand behind an unsolved murder.
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A field study of Victorian hairwork jewelry as material grief: the braiding of human hair into brooches, rings, and watch chains to preserve an incorruptible tether to the dead. This archival piece traces its craft, class economics, folklore, and the slow decay that now imperils the tokens themselves.
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Born enslaved and dying a woman of property, Aunt Caroline Dye of Newport, Arkansas, reigned as the Delta’s most renowned hoodoo seeress—examined here as artifact of race, gender, and folk-spiritual power, and traced to her immortality in the blues of W. C. Handy and beyond.
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Map of Mythical Thessaly: Locations of Witchcraft & Magic Here is a curated list of key locations for a digital map of Thessaly, centered on its mythical and magical significance. Each entry includes descriptions for map pins.
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A field study of William H. Mumler, whose accidental self-portrait birthed spirit photography. Set against a nation drowning in Civil War dead, this archival piece chronicles his rise, his celebrated forgeries of the Lincolns, his trial for fraud, and the enduring hunger that made a chemical accident feel like resurrection.
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A field study of Boudica, Iceni queen who set Roman Britain aflame in AD 60/61. This archival piece traces her contested name, the material vestiges of her rebellion, the lore woven around her, the rites of her cause, scholarly readings of the sources, and her long afterlife as a national ghost.
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The 1908 drowning of Hazel Drew in a remote New York millpond—an unsolved murder that gripped the nation, then faded—examined as artifact of class, gender, and regional folklore, and traced to its strange rebirth as the inspiration for Twin Peaks’ Laura Palmer.
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A field study of Eliza Gilbert—the Irish adventuress reborn as “Lola Montez,” Spanish dancer, royal mistress, and countess. This chronicle traces her serial reinventions across four continents, examining identity as artifact and the melancholy vestige of a woman who authored herself.
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Long before the witch trials of the modern era, the plains of Thessaly bred a legend of women who pulled the moon from the sky. This archival study chronicles the birth of the Thessalian witch—her origins in myth, geography, and the anxieties of a civilization confronting its own boundaries.
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In the summer of 1878, the outlaw Sam Bass rode into Round Rock, Texas, betrayed and hunted. What followed was a hail of gunfire, a contested killing shot, and a lonely death beneath a tree—a legend forever unresolved, awaiting the discerning collector who dares examine its record.