On the morning of November 6, 1895, Fifth Avenue was packed from curb to curb. Around St. Thomas Church at the corner of 53rd Street, the crowd had been gathering for hours. Thousands of people pressed against the carriages, and a line of police held them back from the doors. Inside, the church smelled of … Read more

In the summer of 1910, a powderman working the south face of a granite cliff above the Skeena River in northern British Columbia drilled a line of holes with a steel drill, holes his partner had begun at first light, then loaded each hole with dynamite in sequence, walking along a flat ledge about eighteen … Read more

In the early summer of 1929, in a quiet set of rooms in London, a jeweler began to price the private collection of a dead empress. Diamonds, sapphires, ropes of pearls were laid out in the daylight and weighed one by one. The firm was R. G. Hennel and Sons, and their valuation of the … Read more

On September 18, 1873, the banking house of Jay Cooke and Company closed its doors. The firm had financed the Union during the Civil War and funded railroad construction across the North. Everyone assumed it was invincible. If Jay Cooke could fail, anyone could fail. Within hours, panic swept Wall Street. Depositors rushed to banks … Read more

By the early 1700s, the Spanish were baffled. For decades, the Apache had raided their settlements in New Mexico with relentless fury, killing, stealing horses, and vanishing into the western terrain. Then, suddenly, the attacks stopped. Reports surfaced that the Apache were abandoning their farms and plains settlements, fleeing in haste. The Spanish heard whispers … Read more

On the night of November 21st, 1840, the most powerful woman in the world lay in an overheated room, fully conscious and without pain relief, surrounded by people she had not chosen. Ministers, physicians, ladies in waiting, household staff—all of them present because the British constitution required witnesses at a royal birth, and no one … Read more

In the spring of 1864, a young Austrian archduchess sailed for Mexico with her husband, convinced they were bound for an empire. Charlotte of Belgium, born a princess and married into the House of Habsburg, was about to become Empress Carlota of Mexico. Within three years, her husband would face a firing squad and she … Read more

In March 1984, twenty-year-old Victoria Gotti married Carmine Agnello in a Manhattan ceremony that looked like the crowning of a dynasty. Six hundred guests filled the Helmsley Palace Hotel, a twelve-piece orchestra played, and the bride wore a twenty-five-thousand-dollar dress. Her father, John Gotti, had just orchestrated the assassination of Paul Castellano and seized control … Read more

In the last week of November 1872, a laborer working on a temporary scaffold above the Niagara River at Black Rock, New York, looked downstream toward Lake Erie and saw what he had been told to watch for. The surface of the river had changed. The current, which had been running clear, dark, and fast … Read more