In 1877, Cornelius Vanderbilt died in his sleep, leaving an estate worth $100 million—the equivalent of roughly $340 billion today. No private individual in American history had ever controlled such wealth. Adjusted to the scale of the economy of his time, his fortune represented about 1. 15 percent of the entire United States gross domestic … Read more

Edmund McIlhenny was dying, and the thing that would make his name immortal was the last thing on his mind. In 1890, as the 75-year-old former banker composed an autobiographical sketch of his life, he wrote about his banking career, his family, his standing in the community. He did not write one word about the … Read more

The left wing of the Zero struck the USS Missouri bare inches below the main deck. The impact sprayed the battleship’s hull with fragments of the aircraft, while the starboard wing was thrown forward to the first superstructure level, frame 102, inboard of the number three five-inch mount. Gasoline ignited, and flames erupted at the … Read more

The red and white can sits on nearly every grocery shelf in America, a gold medallion pressed into the center of the label, placed there after the Paris Exposition of 1900 and never removed. Andy Warhol turned it into fine art. Thanksgiving tables across the country depend on its cream of mushroom for the casserole. … Read more

By the late summer of 1715, the most powerful man in Europe was rotting from the feet up. For twenty-two days, Louis XIV of France, the Sun King who had ruled for seventy-two years, watched his legs turn black, liquefy, and fall apart. He could smell his own decay. His surgeons would later report that … Read more

On the night of 28 January 1547, Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, hurried across London as fast as he could. He had been summoned to the bedside of a dying king. When he finally reached the chamber at the Palace of Westminster, Henry VIII was unconscious. The king could no longer speak; he could only … Read more

The construction foreman stood in the basement of 721 Fifth Avenue, staring at the opening his crew had just broken through. Behind the false wall in the east wing, where the mansion’s plans showed nothing but solid foundation, lay a room no one knew existed. Inside were ledgers, wigs on wooden stands, identification papers bearing … Read more

In February 1905, a traveling peddler named Jeremiah Powell made his routine rounds through the remote hollows of McDow County, West Virginia, and found something that would unravel into one of the most disturbing investigations in Appalachian history. The Blackburn family homestead, three miles from the nearest neighbor, sat silent in the winter cold. The … Read more

In the first week of June 1865, an unnamed laborer stood at the edge of a thirty-nine-acre swamp, four miles southwest of Chicago’s central business district, and drove the first of thirteen thousand oak piles into ground that was not, in any structural sense, ground at all. It was black mud, standing water, and decaying … Read more