In October 1852, Dr. Ambrose Beirhart rode two days into the hills of western Virginia to reach a dying woman, Zilfa Sheldrick, at a house he had never seen. Her son Osmond had come for him in the…
On the morning of October 11, 1852, Ambrose Fairhart opened his door before dawn to find a stranger standing in the rain on his porch in Meriday, Virginia. The man was tall, with a face like the side of an axe, and he wore the wet like he was used to it. He said his … Read more
On October 5, 1871, in Abilene, Kansas, Marshal Wild Bill Hickok confronted a drunken gambler named Phil Coe, who had just fired a revolver into the street. When Coe drew a second gun and fired…
The bullet struck the sidewalk. The second one clipped the hem of Phil Coe’s coat. Coe stood in the glow of the kerosene lamps outside the Alamo Saloon in Abilene, Kansas, a revolver still in his hand, having just fired twice in the direction of the town marshal. Wild Bill Hickok had come to investigate … Read more
By 1969, the Lesney works in London’s East End were producing a million toy vehicles a day, shipping Matchbox cars to more than 120 countries. Thousan…
The weight of a Matchbox car is a thing almost everyone who grew up in Britain between the 1950s and the 1970s remembers. The little box, made up to look like a box of matches, sold for the price of a bar of chocolate, sat by the till where fathers bought their cigarettes. At its … Read more
On June 25, 1876, after the gunfire on Last Stand Hill finally stopped, Cheyenne and Lakota women climbed toward the bodies of Custer’s five companies, searching first for their own dead. Among…
The silence came before the bullets, and it stayed long after the noise had died. In the middle of the afternoon on June 25th, 1876, under the scorching Montana summer sun, in the hills above the Little Bighorn River, the guns of George Armstrong Custer’s five cavalry companies fell silent one by one. The exact … Read more
On February 17, 1905, Grand Duke Sergey of Russia dismissed his aide and rode alone into the Kremlin, carrying a bomb hidden in newspapers straight toward his carriage. Two days earlier, the…
She found him in the wreckage of the carriage, what was left of him scattered across the cobblestones and thrown up onto the rooftops. The explosion had obliterated the vehicle where Grand Duke Sergey Alexandrovich had been sitting moments before, and the horses had bolted, dragging the remnants of the carriage and the wounded coachman … Read more
On October 28, 1965, ironworkers climbed onto a work platform atop two steel legs rising 630 feet above the Mississippi River in St. Louis, carrying an eight-ton stainless steel wedge. For two…
On the morning of October 28, 1965, a crew of ironworkers stepped onto a platform at the top of two steel legs rising 630 feet above the banks of the Mississippi River in St. Louis, Missouri. The legs had been climbing since 1963. Each weighed thousands of tons, and after two years of construction they … Read more
In May 1940, a bored former Vienna policeman named Maximilian Grabner arrived at a new camp being built near the Polish town of Oświęcim. The Germans called it Auschwitz. Within weeks, he was…
At dawn on a January morning in 1948, a 42-year-old man stood in a prison in Kraków, waiting for the rope. His name was Maximilian Grabner, and for more than three years he had decided the fate of thousands in Auschwitz. Now the decision was his own. The executioner’s noose was the end of a … Read more
On April 28, 1945, inside Hitler’s Berlin bunker, SS General Hermann Fegelein was stripped of his rank and decorations, then taken into the Reich Chancellery Garden and shot by firing squad on…
On April 29th, 1945, with the Red Army fighting block by block through Berlin’s government quarter, Adolf Hitler finally agreed to marry Eva Braun in a brief civil ceremony conducted by a city official. She signed her name in the marriage register as Eva Hitler. She would bear that surname for less than forty hours. … Read more
On May 10, 1941, Rudolf Hess, deputy to Adolf Hitler and one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany, secretly climbed into a Messerschmitt fighter and flew alone toward Scotland, hoping to…
The family’s ordeal began, as it would end, in a moment of deliberate concealment. For nearly two decades, Ilse Hess and her son Wolf Rüdiger could not set eyes on Rudolph Hess. He had vanished into British captivity when the boy was three, been sentenced to life at Nuremberg when the boy was nine, and … Read more
In December 1939, a Polish noblewoman strapped on skis and crossed the frozen Tatra Mountains alone, carrying a strip of microfilm hidden inside her silk stockings. Christine Granville had talked…
The knife came from nowhere. Dennis Muldowne had been pleading with her all evening, following her through the corridors of the Shelbourne Hotel in London, desperate, obsessed. Christine Granville turned away. She had refused him before, and she refused him again. But this time he did not accept it. Moments later, his blade found her … Read more