History's Arrow

Born into slavery in Prince Edward County, Virginia, Blanche Kelso Bruce freed himself as the Civil War broke out and rebuilt his life from nothing in Reconstruction-era Mississippi, rising from county offices to the United States Senate, where in 1879 he became the first formerly enslaved person to preside over that chamber. Harmonia opens at a 2013 auction house, where a rare $500 Treasury note bearing Bruce's own signature as Register of the Treasury sold for over $400,000 - a small, stubborn piece of proof that outlasted the political door that closed behind him.

When Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453, the scholar-monk Gennadius Scholarius, once a fierce voice against the fallen empire, found himself sought out by Sultan Mehmed II and installed as the first Patriarch of Constantinople under Ottoman rule. Reluctant and often unhappy in the role, Gennadius nonetheless became Ethnarch, civil and religious head of the Greek Orthodox millet, building a framework of self-governance that let his people survive as a community for nearly five hundred years.

Harmonia begins on a weeknight in a small-town meeting in Oxford, Connecticut, where neighbors still govern themselves with a show of hands, and then travels back to Boston in 1772 to meet the man who turned that humble institution into a revolution. Samuel Adams was a failed businessman, a hopeless tax collector, and by most accounts a finished politician, but he knew how to write and how to run a meeting.

By lamplight in the hills south of the Danube, a shepherd bishop writes down a language that has never been written. Harmonia remembers Wulfila, the Little Wolf, grandson of Christian captives, who led his people across the Danube into exile and then spent decades building an alphabet from Greek, Latin, and runic letters so the Goths could read the scriptures in their own tongue.

In the villages of Imperial Russia, women sang funeral songs over living boys, because a twenty-five-year army term meant a recruit would almost never come home. Harmonia tells the story of Dmitry Milyutin, a wounded soldier turned scholar who became Russia's Minister of War and spent twenty years rebuilding the army. He ended the gauntlet, taught soldiers to read, helped ban a cruel exploding bullet, and won a law under which noble and peasant served side by side for six years instead of twenty-five.