On November 4, 1955, a quiet Phoenix suburb was shattered by an explosion so powerful that neighbors initially believed a plane had crashed. Windows blew out blocks away, and a pickup truck was scattered across the neighborhood like debris. At the center of the devastation, in a cratered driveway, was the man his community knew … Read more

On an October afternoon in 1996, a woman named Mary Lassiter was washing her car in the driveway of a rental house in Arroyo Grande, California. The house belonged to Susan Flores, the mother of a young man named Paul Flores, and Mary had only recently moved in with her husband, Joseph. As she worked, … Read more

Rose Kennedy was at St. Francis Xavier in Hyannis for Friday morning mass, as she was almost every day. Faith had carried her through losing Joe Jr. and Kick, and she believed it would carry her through whatever came next. She did not yet know that something had come. The phone call reached her after … Read more

In the summer of 2018, Dr. Rebecca Torres sat in the dimly lit archive of Harvard University’s Widener Library, surrounded by boxes of deteriorating photographs from the turn of the century. An expert on American immigration and labor movements, she had spent countless hours studying images of working families, hoping to recover the forgotten stories … Read more

In the late summer of 1934, in the bottom of Canyon de Chelly, a surveyor named Wendell Strout woke in the dark to the sound of footsteps moving through dry sand just outside his bedroll. He was forty-six years old, a careful man who had spent twenty years measuring the world in feet and degrees, … Read more

On December 15, 1938, Max Warburg stood on the deck of a transatlantic liner as Hamburg Harbor receded behind him. Officially, he was a refugee fleeing Nazi Germany, carrying little more than personal possessions and the small amount of foreign currency the state permitted a departing Jew. Unofficially, he was completing the final phase of … Read more

In the autumn of 1908, an unusual silence settled over the remote valleys of Webster County, West Virginia. In the hollows where the Tug Fork River carved its path through limestone and shale, something had disturbed the natural order of things. Among the scattered homesteads clinging to the mountainsides, one property stood apart—a natural basin … Read more

For nearly four hundred years, the body of an English queen lay unburied in Westminster Abbey, exposed to the curious gaze of visitors who came to see her mummified remains. Her coffin, damaged and open, sat above ground beside the grand chantry chapel built for her dead husband, and generation after generation of onlookers peered … Read more

He stepped onto the stage looking less like a comedian and more like a disgruntled dock worker, a portly figure in a beret and trench coat. He started quietly, almost mumbling, letting the audience settle in. Then he launched. His first target was the sanctimonious charity anthem of the mid-eighties, “We Are the World. ” … Read more