On May 23, 1934, Bonnie Parker was shot 26 times in the passenger seat beside Clyde Barrow on a Louisiana road. When Baby Face Nelson heard the news, he was already the most hunted man in America,…
On a road near Barrington, Illinois, on November 27, 1934, federal agents Samuel Cowley and Herman Hollis pulled up behind a stolen Ford. Inside sat Lester Gillis—known to the country as Baby Face Nelson—and he knew the agents were closing in. Within minutes, gunfire erupted on the highway. Before the night was over, Cowley and … Read more
In 1887, coal miners near Kickapoo, Illinois, were following a routine coal seam two hundred feet underground when a pickaxe struck something that was not coal, not rock, and not earth. It was…
In the autumn of 1887, a crew of coal miners descended into the earth of southern Illinois, near the small town of Kickapoo. They were not archaeologists or geologists; they were laborers, mostly immigrants, with no particular interest in the history of the ground beneath their feet. They were there to extract fuel, nothing more. … Read more
On June 10, 1944, four days after D-Day, Violette Szabo rode in a Citroën through German-occupied France, armed with a Sten gun and dressed in a light suit. The 23-year-old British SOE agent, born…
The shot came from behind, a single crack that cut through the cold air of Ravensbrück. Violette Szabo, twenty-three years old, knelt in the alley between the crematorium and the punishment block, facing her death as she had faced the war that had brought her here. The SS-Rottenführer Schult pulled the trigger, and the woman … Read more
On June 25, 1876, Lieutenant Colonel George Custer split his Seventh Cavalry into separate battalions and rode toward the Little Bighorn Valley, convi…
On the afternoon of June 25, 1876, the men of the Seventh Cavalry under Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer were dying in swarms on the grassy ridges above the Little Bighorn River. The attack they had launched hours earlier had not been a surprise. The village they struck was far larger than anything Custer had … Read more
In 1873 London, a middle-class bride was laced into her wedding corset from the bottom up, tightened in stages until she could barely breathe. Fainting at the altar was so common that churches…
She had been awake since five in the morning. Not because she was nervous, though she was, but because the corset required it. Getting a Victorian bride into her wedding corset was not a solitary act. It took a mother, possibly a sister, and a level of physical effort that left marks on the skin … Read more
On June 11, 1938, a mechanic named Hugh Lord set fire to his own home in St. Thomas, Nevada, stepped into a rowboat, and paddled away as the rising water of Lake Mead swallowed the flames. He was…
On a June morning in 1938, Hugh Lord struck a match and set fire to his own home. The flames had barely taken hold before the rising water of Lake Mead reached his front door and extinguished them. Lord, the last resident of St. Thomas, Nevada, stepped into a rowboat and paddled away as his … Read more
In 1943, the Gestapo called her the White Mouse and put five million francs on her head, yet Nancy Wake kept slipping through their checkpoints. She was a French Resistance courier who carried…
The pistol shot came from behind the tree line, and the SS officer’s head snapped back before he could turn. Nancy Wake stepped out of the shadows with smoke curling from her Sten gun, the lipstick on her mouth still perfect, and the ambush she had been planning for three days became the slaughter the … Read more
In 1884, four sailors drifted in a 13-foot punt in the South Atlantic after their yacht sank. After nineteen days without food, skipper Tom Dudley tol…
In April 1884, an Australian lawyer named John Henry Want paid £400 for a 52-ton yacht called the Mignonette, intending to sail her as a pleasure craft in Australian coastal waters. To get the vessel from Southampton to Sydney, a voyage of some 15,000 miles, he hired Tom Dudley, a 31-year-old mariner of good character. … Read more
In 1897, on a remote ridge in Tennessee’s Appalachian Mountains, a solitary lumberjack named Elias Whitaker noticed a sweet, metallic smell drifting from the treeline. Then the forest went silent….
Elias Whitaker heard the knocking first on the fourth night, though the smell had come earlier. He sat in the corner of his one-room cabin with his axe across his knees, every lamp he owned burning in the corners, the fire stoked so hot the room was nearly unbearable. The knocking began around nine o’clock, … Read more
On December 9, 1945, George Patton’s bags were already packed, holding a ticket for a flight leaving the next morning on Eisenhower’s personal plane, the first leg of a journey home he would never…
On the morning of December 9, 1945, George Patton woke in his quarters at Bad Nauheim, Germany, to the last full day he would spend on his feet. In his personal luggage, already packed and waiting, lay a ticket for a flight scheduled to depart the following morning—a seat aboard Dwight Eisenhower’s personal plane, bound … Read more