In 1972, Prince Richard of Gloucester was a Cambridge-educated architect, a full partner at a London firm, and a newlywed of just seven weeks. He had built a quiet, ordinary life far from royal…
On a hot, bright bank holiday Monday in August 1972, Prince Richard of Gloucester was at home with his new wife when the telephone rang. The caller was from an airfield near Wolverhampton. There had been an accident. His older brother William’s plane had crashed and exploded. William was gone. In that single instant, Richard … Read more
On June 22, 1863, Robert E. Lee ordered J.E.B. Stuart’s cavalry to screen his advancing Confederate army as it pushed into Pennsylvania. Stuart instead rode farther east, chasing supplies and…
On the night of July 2nd, 1863, a Confederate artillery officer named Edward Porter Alexander sat in the darkness near Gettysburg, watching the distant lights of the Union army on Cemetery Hill. The day had been brutal, and the worst was yet to come. He knew the Army of Northern Virginia was in trouble, that … Read more
On March 15, 44 BCE, Julius Caesar walked through Rome carrying a folded document naming every senator plotting to kill him within minutes. He never read it, tucking it away with other petitions…
Just before noon on March 15th, in the year 44 before the common era, a man in a white toga is walking through the streets of Rome. He is 55 years old. He is the most powerful human being alive. There is no army in the known world that has not either fought him or … Read more
On May 2, 1945, a young German rode a bicycle toward the American lines on a mountain road above Ruette instead of away from them. A sentry named Fred Schneikert ordered him to halt, then to raise…
The mountain road above Reutte, in Austrian Tyrol, on the second of May 1945. Most accounts give that date; one pushes it a day later. A young man rides a bicycle up the road, heading toward the American lines, not away from them. In a ditch beside the road stands a private on guard duty. … Read more
In September 1874, tuberculosis killed Katherine McCarty in Silver City, New Mexico, leaving her son Henry, roughly fourteen, with no one. His stepfather soon drifted away, and the boy took a job…
Billy the Kid said the words twice, in Spanish, into the darkness of Pete Maxwell’s bedroom. “Quién es? ” Who is there? No answer came back. He was barefoot, in his socks, holding a knife, his gun still holstered at his side. He had walked into this room a hundred times believing it was safe. … Read more
In April 1945, on a forest road in Bavaria, General George Patton’s three-vehicle convoy stopped when soldiers spotted coordinated movement in the trees: thirty to forty SS troops, heavily armed,…
April 1945. Bavaria, Germany. Patton’s convoy was moving along a road through the forest: three vehicles, twelve men, routine escort duty. Then the convoy stopped at the tree line on both sides of the road. Movement. Uniforms. SS uniforms. The soldiers in the convoy counted them. Thirty, maybe forty. Armed, positioned, waiting. The radio operator … Read more
When Prince Albert died of typhoid in December 1861, Queen Victoria withdrew from public life and wore black for the remaining forty years of her life. Her grief became national policy. Across…
The widow woke beside a body that had been cooling for hours, and before the sun was fully up, before she had eaten, before she had cried as much as she would need to cry, the household was already moving without her. The servants knew what to do because the servants had done this before. … Read more
In March 1840, sixty-five Penateka Comanches rode into San Antonio under a flag of truce to negotiate the release of captives. They brought one young woman, Matilda Lockhart, whose face and body…
The moon hung low and white over the southern plains, and somewhere in that darkness a Comanche war party was riding. They were not coming to kill you. Killing was the easy part, and it came first, and it came fast. What they intended to do to the people they carried home with them on … Read more
In 1641, King Charles I signed the death warrant of Thomas Wentworth, the Earl of Strafford, the man who had once been his most loyal enforcer. Years earlier, Wentworth had defied the king…
The royal assent had been given. The bill that would send Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, to the block had passed both Houses of Parliament, and the signature that made it law belonged to the man who had sworn on his honor to protect him. Within hours, the most powerful minister in England would be … Read more
In 1942, Detective Frank Morrison needed a suspect fast. Albert Romano, a connected mobster, had been shot three times outside Smalls Paradise nightclub in Harlem, and Morrison—a corrupt cop on…
The telephone rang at 11:58 on the night of June 11, 1943. Warden Mitchell had his hand raised, ready to signal the executioner. Strapped into the electric chair, his head already shaved for the electrodes, Bumpy Johnson had spoken his last words—protesting his innocence, forgiving the men who had put him there. One minute stood … Read more