The telegram reached the hospital in Juilly with a gap in it, the censors having blocked the name. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney read it, set it down, and went back to work. The casualty lists had been arriving at her 225-bed hospital for three years by then, and the summer of 1918 was producing them at … Read more

Niki Lauda lay trapped inside his burning Ferrari at the Nürburgring for nearly a minute, his face and lungs scorched so badly that a priest was summoned to administer last rites. He was 27 years old, locked in a bitter championship fight with British rival James Hunt, and the world assumed his career, and possibly … Read more

The sheriff’s horse stopped a hundred yards from the Miller gate, and William Dougherty knew the animal would go no closer. He dismounted, tied the reins to a fence post that sagged under his hand, and walked the rest of the way on foot. It was the twenty-ninth of April, 1904, and for three weeks … Read more

The pop was soft, a sound that barely registered beyond the walls of the basement kitchen. A . 22 caliber bullet from a silencer struck the back of Sam Giancana’s head, and the man who had controlled the Chicago Outfit for nearly two decades collapsed onto the floor. The shooter stood over him and fired … Read more

The image is as fixed in the American mind as any picture from the nineteenth century: two men facing each other in a dusty street, hands hovering near the pistols at their hips, waiting for the other to move. Victory, so the story goes, belonged to the man whose reflexes were quicker. It is one … Read more

Joe Hazen had been sheriff of Converse County for nearly a decade when the telegram arrived. It was June 1899, and the Wild Bunch had just robbed a Union Pacific train near Wilcox, Wyoming. The outlaws had escaped into the rugged country north of Casper, and the law meant to bring them in. Hazen, a … Read more

The room in the Château Frontenac had gone quiet. On the table before President Franklin D. Roosevelt lay a map of Rabaul, one of the most heavily fortified bases Japan possessed anywhere in the Pacific. One hundred thousand soldiers were dug into the mountainsides of New Britain, their bunkers reinforced with artillery and machine guns, … Read more

On the first day of December 1978, a nurse walking the halls of a psychiatric hospital in southeastern Ohio realized that a patient was missing. The patient’s name was Margaret Schilling. She had wandered off before, as some patients did, drawn by curiosity or confusion into corners of a building far too large for anyone … Read more

On August 8, 1944, in a wheat field beside the Caen road in Normandy, seventeen minutes before one in the afternoon, SS tank commander Michael Wittmann stood in his Tiger tank, number 007, leading seven Tigers across open ground toward Allied lines. He was thirty years old and the most famous tank commander in the … Read more