Johnny Stompanato lay dead on a bedroom floor in a Beverly Hills mansion, killed by a single stab wound on the evening of April 4, 1958. There had been no mob hit team and no gunfire. The man who died was an enforcer for Mickey Cohen, the Los Angeles underworld king, and the woman at … Read more

In 2006, a polling firm asked American internet users a deceptively simple question: which search engine satisfied them the most, not which one they used most often. The answer was not Google, which already handled more than half the country’s searches. It was not Yahoo, still the second largest. The winner, rated highest in customer … Read more

On the 16th of August, 1888, every druggist in Atlanta locked the doors of their shop and walked together through the summer heat to bury one of their own. The man in the coffin had invented something, a dark carbonated syrup that he sold from a pharmacy counter for five cents a glass. He died … Read more

In April 1944, Lieutenant Colonel James Cushing, a mining engineer turned guerrilla commander on the Philippine island of Cebu, was a hunted man. With several thousand guerrillas nominally under his command but only about twenty-five men at his side, he was being pursued across the island by a Japanese force in the hundreds. Under constant … Read more

In the autumn of 1927, a Knoxville land surveyor named Ashon Kettering was sent northeast into Perry County, Kentucky, to map the boundaries of a tract of hardwood forest recently acquired by the Colfield Lumber Company. He was thirty-eight years old, a tall, careful man with two decades of experience walking hills, a habit of … Read more

The voice on the recording is calm, low, deliberate. Two words, spoken by a man on an abandoned railroad bridge in northern Indiana, captured on a cell phone by a fourteen-year-old girl in the last minutes of her life. Nobody knows exactly what made Libby German reach into her pocket and press record as she … Read more

Hermann Göring’s last hours were spent in a cell at Nuremberg, waiting for the rope. He had been condemned to death by the tribunal that had spent nearly a year laying out the crimes of the Third Reich before the world. On the night of October 15, 1946, with hours left before his execution, he … Read more

At 5:30 on the morning of November 20, 1968, an explosion ripped through the Consolidation Coal mine at Farmington, in Marion County, West Virginia. Smoke rose from the shafts in a column visible twelve miles away. There were 99 men underground. Only 21 came out. Fires and gas kept rescue teams from reaching the work … Read more

The glittering estuary stretched calm and silver under the late afternoon sun, and on its western shore, hidden among the coastal scrub, stood seventeen acres of land that had been waiting for decades to become something extraordinary. On January 9th, 1878, the Spanish brig *Providencia*, bound from Havana to Barcelona with a hold packed tight … Read more