Pushkin.

There's a place in our world where the known things go.

A quarter of the mind, along the walls shelves stocked with proof,

and all around the clutter of clues.

Here's a photograph of a corpse pasted onto the page of a moldering leather-bound

alba. it onto the page of a moldering leather-bound album. Here, a teetering stack of newspapers tied with twine.

Oh, and this, this is very good.

A detective's notebook.

Smells like tobacco.

And look over here on this oak stand,

a medieval manuscript.

Writing so tiny, it looks like an army of ants.

And down hidden, oh, I say it rolled under the shell.

A glass bottle, blue as indigo.

This place stores the facts that matter

and matters of fact.

It's all that stands between reasonable doubt and the chaos of uncertainty.

It lies in a time between now and then.

Welcome to the Last Archive, a place I like to go to figure out how we know, what we know, how we used to know things, and why it seems sometimes lately, as if we don't know anything at all. I'm the historian Jill Lepore.

Step through the door to an unfinished grave.

The body was found face down early in the morning of May 4th, 1919.

A rainy morning, a Sunday in springtime, a century ago.

...