The Bertillon system that cataloged criminals by their physical measurements, 1894
Think about the raw chaos of law enforcement in the late 19th century. No computers, no DNA, no databases. If you were a criminal and clever enough to change your name, maybe grow a beard or move a few miles down the road, you could vanish into the crowd as easily as a ghost. For police and detectives, it was a maddening game of cat and mouse—with the mouse often disappearing for good.
Enter Alphonse Bertillon, a Parisian clerk with the soul of a scientist and the patience of a librarian. Bertillon looked at this mess and saw order just waiting to be imposed—if only you had the right system. He believed the solution lay in the bones, quite literally. His idea: you could classify and identify any human being using a combination of precise body measurements—head length, arm span, ear size, the width of the nose, the length of the left foot, and so on. The chances of two people sharing the exact same measurements across a dozen data points? Astronomically low, he reasoned.
This became the Bertillon system—a mad, brilliant, and deeply French attempt to fight crime with calipers and logbooks. In the 1890s, every major police force in Europe, and eventually America, raced to adopt this new technology. Suddenly, criminals weren’t just names and faces—they were records, numbers, charts. Repeat offenders who once relied on anonymity now had to contend with an officer carefully measuring the angle of their cheekbones and the span of their outstretched arms, then entering the data into an enormous registry.
But what’s most fascinating is how the Bertillon system marks a turning point—a moment where policing becomes obsessed with scientific certainty. In a way, it’s the ancestor of everything from fingerprinting to today’s facial recognition algorithms. There’s something both utopian and dystopian about it: the urge to reduce humanity to data, to catalog and control, to turn the messiness of people into the tidiness of records.
Of course, the system had flaws. Human bodies change. Measurements can be inconsistent. And, ironically, it was soon outdone by a technology even more precise and less ambiguous: the fingerprint. Bertillon’s own meticulous system—his life’s work—was, within decades, relegated to the archives, another quirky chapter in the ever-evolving history of crime and punishment.
Soldiers of the 369th wearing the Cross of War medal pose for a photo on their trip back to New York.
Imagine the rattle of a troop ship making its way back to New York Harbor, its decks crowded with men who, just months earlier, had faced machine gun fire and artillery shells in the mud of France. But these weren’t just any returning soldiers. These were the men of the 369th Infantry Regiment—the Harlem Hellfighters—Black Americans who, in a stunning twist of fate, found themselves more celebrated by the French than by their own countrymen.
There’s a certain poetry to the photograph of these soldiers, still in their uniforms, now proudly wearing the Croix de Guerre—the Cross of War—pinned to their chests. The French awarded them this medal for acts of bravery on the front lines: holding the line for weeks without relief, pushing forward under fire, and refusing to break when so many others might have. They fought alongside French units because the American Army, segregated and deeply racist, refused to let Black soldiers fight shoulder to shoulder with white Americans.
So there’s a paradox here: these men were sent across the Atlantic to fight for “democracy,” only to be denied the basic rights and respect at home. On the battlefields of Europe, they became legends. In the cafes and streets of Paris, they found a level of dignity and admiration that must have felt like science fiction compared to Harlem in 1917.
The medals gleam in the photo, but what you can’t see is the double consciousness—the knowledge that, for a fleeting moment, the world recognized their humanity and valor, even as their own country was waiting to re-impose second-class status the moment they set foot on American soil.
Fidel Castro with his five-member revolutionary tribunal in a court-martial of a local peasant, 1957
Let’s drop right into the tension of 1957 Cuba—a place so charged with revolutionary energy you could practically feel it in the air, the kind of place where the line between “liberator” and “judge” was alarmingly thin.
Here’s Fidel Castro—not the world leader yet, not the international symbol, but a bearded guerilla commander in the Sierra Maestra, still wearing boots muddy from the trails. Alongside him: his five-member revolutionary tribunal. These are not men in powdered wigs or black robes. These are fighters, true believers, maybe only recently farmers, teachers, or students themselves, now holding court—literally—over the fate of a local peasant accused of collaborating with the Batista regime.
In this moment, justice and power are inseparable. On one side, Castro’s tribunal claims the authority of the people, the righteousness of the revolution. On the other: a man whose life hangs on the decision of men who, days before, might’ve been strangers to law altogether. The rules? Written on the fly. The stakes? Everything.
This is the messy heart of revolutions. It’s easy, decades later, to paint it all in broad strokes—good guys, bad guys, freedom, tyranny. But the reality is so much more intimate, more chilling. For every rally and fiery speech, there’s a shadowy room in the mountains, a tribunal gathered, accusations flying, verdicts delivered on gut instinct and group loyalty as much as evidence.
Castro’s court-martials weren’t just about rooting out traitors. They were about sending a message: the revolution was watching. You couldn’t sit on the fence. Every trial was a lesson in loyalty, a reminder of who had the guns, who wrote the rules now.
Mary Smith, a famous knocker-upper in London’s East End, uses a pea blower to launch frozen peas at her client’s window. She charged a sixpence a week.
Picture London’s East End, fog curling between gas lamps, the streets alive before dawn with the clatter of carts and the shuffle of weary workers. And somewhere among the chimneys and narrow alleyways: Mary Smith, armed with a pea shooter and an alarm clock’s worth of responsibility.
Before alarm clocks became cheap, reliable, and omnipresent, people with early shifts faced a real problem: how do you make sure you wake up in time to get to the mill, the docks, or the market? Enter the “knocker-upper”—a human alarm clock, paid a few pence to make sure you didn’t sleep through your livelihood.
Mary Smith wasn’t just another knocker-upper. She became famous, almost legendary, for her precision. Instead of banging on doors or windows with a stick (and risking waking the whole street, or the wrath of a light sleeper), she used a pea shooter—a little tube and a mouthful of frozen peas. Thunk! Right against the glass. Silent enough not to cause a ruckus. Sharp enough to jolt even the heaviest sleeper out of bed. She’d charge sixpence a week—a small price to pay to keep your job, your reputation, and maybe even your place in the pecking order of working-class London.
A geisha poses for a photo after washing her hair (and before styling it), circa 1905.
Let’s drop right into early 20th-century Japan—a nation balanced between the old world and the new, where tradition and modernity coexist in the narrow alleys and quiet tea houses of Kyoto and Tokyo.
Here stands a geisha, freshly washed hair tumbling loose down her back, pausing for a photograph in 1905. It’s an intimate, in-between moment—one rarely seen, even by those who knew her best. The world outside might see only the finished product: the elaborate kimono, the painted face, the perfect coiffure. But this image, with her hair undone, captures something both vulnerable and quietly radical.
At the turn of the 20th century, photography itself was new enough to still feel a little magical, a little dangerous. To pose for a photo was to freeze a part of yourself for all time. For a geisha, whose profession was built on mystery, artifice, and the seamless performance of beauty, this exposure was almost an act of defiance—a fleeting glimpse behind the mask.
Washing a geisha’s hair wasn’t a simple affair. With styles like the shimada—heavy, intricate, held in place with pins and combs—a single wash could be an ordeal, sometimes lasting hours and requiring help from others. It happened maybe once a week, if that. In those brief, precious moments, a geisha was neither performer nor client’s fantasy—just a young woman, tired and human.
But even here, in this transitional space, ritual remains. The tools and techniques, the care and patience—it’s a microcosm of geisha life itself: discipline, endurance, and the constant interplay between public and private, seen and unseen.
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