In 1932, Father Anselm Kovac walked out of a cathedral in central Bohemia at four in the morning, sat on the steps in the cold, and told the deacon who found him that his feet would never again…
He had performed forty-seven exorcisms in eleven years. He was the man three dioceses called when a case passed the point where ordinary priests dared to intervene. Then, in the autumn of 1932, Father Anselm Kovac walked out of a cathedral in central Bohemia at four in the morning, sat down on the steps in … Read more
In June 1872, a 24-year-old Canadian named George Hoover parked a wagon load of whiskey exactly five miles and one step west of Fort Dodge, Kansas. He was exploiting a loophole: the fort commander…
On the night of July 18th, 1884, Assistant Marshal Thomas Nixon stood on the corner of Front Street and First Avenue in Dodge City, Kansas, doing his duty. He had no reason to expect that his rival, a saloon keeper named Mysterious Dave Mather, would come downstairs from the Opera House and deliberately shoot him … Read more
In 1957, Rusty Stevens joined Leave It to Beaver as Larry Mondello, Beaver’s freckled, troublemaking best friend. Over 67 episodes, he became a familiar face in America’s television childhood….
The telephone rang in the Cleaver house, and Wally answered. The caller wanted to know what Wally’s sister looked like. Wally hesitated, then said, “She’s sitting right here. ” It was the kind of moment that defined Leave It to Beaver, a show built on the small, innocent confusions of childhood in a sunlit suburb. … Read more
In November 1903, New York voters agreed to spend $11 million to replace the Erie Canal, the waterway that had made New York City the busiest port in the country, and rebuild it far bigger. They…
The foreman’s name was John J. Burke, and the headline in the Lockport paper on February 12th, 1912 said he had met death on the barge canal work. When the dynamite blast was coming, Burke was standing somewhere safe. He left that place, led several men who were out in the open away from the … Read more
In 1847, a traveling doctor was summoned to Thornfield plantation in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, to treat what the overseer called a minor infection. Behind the tobacco barns, he found a girl of…
On the evening of December 10, 1850, a fifteen-year-old enslaved girl named Mercy stood in the doorway of Cornelius Ashford’s office at Thornfield plantation in Dinwiddie County, Virginia. She had been summoned there countless times before, always to endure what her master called his lessons. This time, she had come to end them. Behind her, … Read more
On December 21, 1989, Nicolae Ceaușescu stepped onto a balcony above Palace Square in Bucharest, his wife Elena beside him, to address tens of thousands of workers bused in and ordered to cheer….
It was Christmas Day, 25 December 1989. While families across the world gathered around warm tables, an elderly couple was being marched across a frozen military courtyard in Romania. Their wrists were bound behind their backs. The firing squad was already waiting. Within seconds, the crack of gunfire would tear through the silence, and the … Read more
In 1851, on the courthouse steps of St. James Parish, Louisiana, a wealthy planter named Alistair Finch auctioned a nineteen-year-old enslaved woman named Hettie for fifteen copper cents—the price…
No one was ever supposed to know what happened on that April morning in 1851. The official record was burned, the ashes scattered in a Louisiana swamp, fed to the cypress knees and the alligators. For more than two hundred years, the truth waited there, hidden in the murk. And then a receipt surfaced, not … Read more
In 1947, Alex Schoenbaum scraped together $2,500 to open a small drive-in next to his father’s bowling alley in Charleston, West Virginia. He called i…
In April of 1988, a married couple named Billy and Henry Elliot, both managers at Shoney’s, were fired. Their offense, according to the lawsuit that followed, was refusing to go along with the company’s discriminatory hiring practices. They lost their jobs for refusing to discriminate, and they went to a lawyer named Tommy Warren, a … Read more
In 1969, with more than 400,000 people packed onto a farm in Upstate New York, twenty McIntosh amplifiers sat bolted beneath the Woodstock stage in po…
In August of 1969, beneath the stage at a festival in Upstate New York, twenty amplifiers sat bolted into wooden racks in the dark. Above them, a crowd of over 400,000 people strained against an infrastructure that had collapsed under its own weight. Roads were blocked. Food lines were empty. Helicopters were the only reliable … Read more
In 1951, EC Comics published a short story called “Made of the Future,” about a man who builds an artificial human companion from a special kit. More …
In August 1985, a strange comedy about two suburban teenagers who conjure a magical woman from a home computer opened in theaters. It looked like a lightweight teenage wish-fulfillment fantasy, but the story behind the film was as improbable as the plot itself. It began decades before the cameras rolled, on the pages of a … Read more