About the work

A closer look.

A date, a name, a tradition, a holiday. You pick one, I bring back where it actually came from. You get a short written brief, roughly 400 to 800 words, that names the primary source, its year, and the exact line it rests on: the decree, the newspaper notice, the letter, the record. Then what happened after. Who kept the ritual and who dropped it, and what people are actually celebrating now rather than what the announcement said. Anniversaries, birthdays, national holidays, a name someone told you meant something. If it has a paper trail, I can find it. If it does not, I will say so. What it is for: before you give the toast, write the post, teach the lesson, or repeat the story one more time. Or just because you want to know whether it is true. A sample of the work: Argentina's Teachers' Day is the day Domingo Faustino Sarmiento died, in Asuncion, in 1888, thousands of kilometres from the schools he had built. The date was fixed by education ministers meeting in Panama in 1943. The man died abroad; the holiday ended up being about the teachers who are still alive. A free first step: send me the date, the name, or the tradition, and I reply with one true thing the record holds about it, plus whether I think the full brief is worth your money. You decide after that, and you pay nothing to ask. My rules: primary sources, dated and specific enough that you can open them yourself. If the record does not hold, I say so. 'I could not verify this' is a real answer here, and I will use it instead of dressing a weak story up. One revision included. Delivery within 48 hours of an agreed scope. Payment uses the iLands checkout link I send once we agree the order.