In 1943, the Gestapo put a five-million-franc bounty on Nancy Wake, making her the most wanted person in France. They called her the White Mouse because she kept slipping through their fingers….
The German sentry saw her at the same moment she saw him. He was larger, stronger, and he had only to shout once for the whole Gestapo headquarters to be alerted. Nancy Wake had no gun. She had no time to call for help. Her entire unit was closing on the building, and if this … Read more
On November 23, 1942, Egon Meyer shot down three American heavy bombers in a single raid over France, ending a frustrating three-month stretch with no victories. The young German squadron leader…
The P-47s had been waiting five thousand feet above the bomber stream, and the two Focke-Wulf 190s below them had not seen a thing. Walt Gresham, a young flight leader from Virginia with no kills to his name, watched the German fighters line up on the B-17s and knew he had been handed the moment … Read more
In 1974, after a comeback performance at the Westbury Music Fair, Connie Francis checked into a nearby hotel. That night, a man broke into her room an…
Born Conetta Rosa Maria Franconero in 1937 in Newark, New Jersey, the woman the world would come to know as Connie Francis grew up in a working-class Italian-American household where music was not a choice but a calling. Her father, George Franconero Sr. , was strict, controlling, and fiercely ambitious. He believed his daughter was … Read more
In the early 1970s, roughly 13% of American adults were obese; today, nearly 42% are. Yet the people in those old photographs weren’t health-conscious. Nobody meal prepped, owned a food scale, or…
Look at any photograph from 1975—a backyard barbecue, a public pool, a high school yearbook—and one thing stands out. Everyone is thin. Not just the athletes or the models. Everyone. A whole generation that never set foot in a gym, never thought twice about a carbohydrate, and for whom staying thin was the easiest thing … Read more
In 1891, a census taker named Merrick walked into the county seat and asked the clerk to strike an entire town from the records. Ashkam Hollow had not burned. Its mine had not closed. No flood had…
The clerk at the county seat, forty miles east of the hollow, saw the man come in out of the winter and knew before he spoke that this would not be an ordinary errand. The man asked that the whole town be struck from the records, and when the clerk asked the natural question—had there … Read more
In November 1923, a traveling Methodist minister camping on the isolated Grayson property in Grayson County, Texas, heard digging sounds near the house that stopped whenever he approached and…
The October 1923 letter Dr. Phineas Whitmore wrote to a colleague was not the kind of correspondence a country physician normally sent. Whitmore had served the scattered communities of eastern Grayson County for years, and his medical records were meticulous, but the letter described a series of consultations that had left him deeply unsettled. Between … Read more
In 1949, a tiny glow engine sold for $4.95 from a factory in Herkimer, New York, and it helped launch an entirely new class of American model flying. The OK Cub .049 was among the first American…
In the fall of 1949, a small engine left a factory in Herkimer, New York, and changed the shape of an entire hobby. It sold for $4. 95, about $70 in today’s money, and it ran on something most modelers had barely heard of: a glow plug. For anyone who flew model airplanes in those … Read more
In September 1918, Eleanor Roosevelt knelt on a bedroom floor unpacking her sick husband’s suitcase and found a packet of letters tied together, written in the familiar handwriting of Lucy…
Down on her knees on the bedroom floor, September 1918, Elellanena Roosevelt unpacked her husband’s suitcase while he lay upstairs, sick with the illness he had carried home from the war in Europe. At the bottom of the case, tied together, were letters in a handwriting she knew, because it belonged to the young woman … Read more
On August 19, 1945, two whitewashed Japanese bombers lifted off from Kisarazu Naval Air Station, painted with green crosses and carrying sixteen men t…
By the summer of 1945, turning a flat piece of ground into an American airfield was a process governed by paperwork at every stage. Ground was photographed from the air, graded on paper for drainage, its underlying coral measured, written into a base development plan, given a phase and priority, and handed to engineer battalions … Read more
In 1930, Eleanor Post Close, the 20-year-old daughter of the wealthiest woman in America, slipped away to Bedford Hills, New York, and married the playwright Preston Sturges against her parents’…
The third husband’s name was the thing Eleanor never forgave. She had eloped with him on the night of the twelfth of April, 1930, twenty years old and already the second daughter of the wealthiest woman in America. He was a playwright named Preston Sturges, thirty-one, funny, charming, fluent in French, and the author of … Read more