Alan Ladd’s death remains shrouded in mystery. Two years before he died, he was found at home lying half-dead in a pool of blood, with a bullet lodged in his chest. The media played it off as an accident. Those close to him could not ignore the possibility of something else. Whether the end was … Read more

The second you touched the big plastic knob on the television set, the day’s first battle began. You turned it until it clicked into the channel you wanted, and then you waited. The picture didn’t just appear; it bloomed from a single bright dot in the center of the screen, growing outward until the whole … Read more

The winter of 1898 found Thomas Garrett among the dead. That was how it felt, anyway, as the town clerk of Harper’s Ferry worked his way through the municipal archives, organizing birth records that reached back to 1867. The stone building overlooking the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers had stood since 1851, and … Read more

Deep in the East Texas woods in 1862, Erin Bellamy waded into water that armed patrolmen were afraid to cross. Her husband had disappeared into the swamp after fighting with an overseer who attacked her. She carried food every few nights through the flooded trees to keep him alive. She trusted the darkness, the stillness … Read more

On the night of November 12th, 1879, Dr. William Thorne was pulled from his sleep by a sound he would later describe, in a hand trembling with agitation, as unlike any he had heard emanate from a human throat. The clock at Massachusetts General Hospital read approximately 3:15 a. m. He rushed to room 237 … Read more

The shot came from a small, unassuming revolver that no one in the street would have looked at twice. Charles Guiteau raised it in the Washington railway station, aimed at President James A. Garfield, and fired. The weapon was a British Bulldog, a compact pocket pistol produced in quantity by American manufacturers like Forehand & … Read more

The whole thing began, as it so often did, with music. On an evening in 1854, Tennessee enslaver Edmond Harrow believed he owned everything that mattered on his plantation—the land, the labor, the roads, even the music played inside his own home. He never noticed that the blind Black fiddler seated before his guests heard … Read more

At the funeral, the women of Fort Sumner did not hold back their grief or their rage. One of them, a girl named Paulita Maxwell, would carry a secret with her for the rest of her life, a secret that historians, genealogists, and fortune hunters have chased ever since. Did she carry the child of … Read more

The storm had been building all day, and by the time night fell over Magnolia Plantation, the Mississippi ran black beneath an October moon. Sarah pressed her calloused hands against the rough wooden wall of her cabin, feeling the vibration of thunder roll across the Louisiana sky, and she knew the rain would come soon. … Read more