Move through the centuries and meet the lives lived in each.

Otto von Bismarck

1897 - Friedrichsruh

Dismissal, founder grievance, and the comedy of inferior successors.

Dismissed, ageing, and deliberately sidelined, the architect of German unification watches his successors dismantle his work.

Queen Victoria

1900 - Osborne House

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Ceremony, ageing authority, and the slow conversion of a queen into institution.

Alone at Osborne House, an ageing queen confronts the cost of an empire built on duty and silence.

Susan B. Anthony

1905 - Rochester, New York

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In Rochester, after a lifetime of being arrested for voting, a suffragist reflects on the distance between rights declared and rights delivered.

Clara Barton

1906 - Glen Echo, Maryland

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The founder of the American Red Cross reflects on what she witnessed on battlefields that the official histories chose to sanitise.

Paul Cézanne

1906 - Aix-en-Provence.

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I went back to the motif after the collapse because the motif remains what it is regardless of the body, and if the body now protests, falters, surrenders its force in the rain beneath the mountain, that does not alter the mountain’s necessity or the unfinished canvas waiting in the studio with the same quiet and intolerable right it possessed the day before I dropped in the field.

Harriet Tubman

1912 - Auburn, New York

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At Auburn, a woman who freed hundreds through the Underground Railroad sets down the journeys that no document ever recorded.

Wilbur Wright

1912 - Dayton, Ohio

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With his lungs burning in Dayton, knowing he will not survive the year, the man who achieved powered flight sets down what the history books will get wrong.

Adolf Hitler

1913 - A working men's hostel in the Brigittenau district of Vienna, spring 1913 (the Männerheim, Meldemannstraße 27, XX. Bezirk; the figure resident since February 1910 and three weeks from departing for München).

A failed Academy of Fine Arts entrance candidate of twenty-four sits at the writing and painting table of a working men's hostel in the Brigittenau district of Vienna in the spring of 1913, paints a view postcard of the Karlskirche for the resale trade the hostel sustains, reads the day's pan-German pamphlet, and builds the account that keeps his circumstances from being his own fault.

Booker T. Washington

1914 - Tuskegee, Alabama

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At Tuskegee, a man who built an institution from nothing reflects on the cost of compromise with a nation that never intended to keep its promises.

Edgar Degas

1917 - Paris

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I am eighty-three years old, and if the matter is to be stated without the sentimental falsity with which old age is usually surrounded by those who do not yet suffer it, I am blind enough for the practical arts to have been taken from me and not blind enough to be spared the humiliation of knowing precisely what has been taken.

Theodore Roosevelt

1919 - Oyster Bay, New York

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Physical decline, post-power irrelevance, and appetite refusing retirement.

In Oyster Bay, a former president burns with unfinished energy and the knowledge that the country moved on without him.

Alexander Graham Bell

1921 - Beinn Bhreagh, Nova Scotia

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Hearing little now except the inner rushing of his own blood, the inventor of the telephone reflects on the sounds that changed everything.

Ernest Shackleton

1921 - London

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In London, with the weight of another departure pressing, the explorer whose greatest achievement was bringing every man home alive prepares for one last voyage.

Gustave Eiffel

1922 - Rue Rabelais, Paris

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In his ninetieth year on the Rue Rabelais, the builder of the tower that defined Paris reflects on the difference between monuments and memory.

Adolf Hitler

1923 - Munich

Munich, 1923.

Adolf Hitler

1924 - Landsberg fortress prison (the Festungshaft cell where the dictation is conducted), Bavaria

A failed putschist sits in a fortress cell dictating a book that assembles his personal grievances and the doctrines of his small party into a single system of self-justification, converting the catastrophe of November 1923 into the manuscript that will later be used to license violence against the categories the manuscript names as enemies.

Claude Monet

1926 - Giverny

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I am eighty-five years old and the garden is still outside the window.

Emmeline Pankhurst

1928 - London

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The woman who led the suffragette movement writes what polite history will refuse to include about the fight for the vote.

Roald Amundsen

1928 - Tromso

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In the quiet between departures, the first man to reach the South Pole reflects on the expeditions that defined him and the one that will end him.