It is summer 1654. Somewhere south of a great lake the French have started calling Eerie, thousands of people are standing on wooden platforms behind a palisade of sharpened stakes, listening to the forest. The stakes are twelve feet high. The town inside them is called Rique. Four thousand warriors are inside those walls. Their … Read more

In the dense smoke of a thirty-second gunfight behind the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona Territory, a tubercular gambler from Georgia squeezed the trigger of a shotgun and fired a blast into the chest of Tom McLaury. Holliday had only been in town a short while, but Wyatt Earp had deputized him on the spot, … Read more

In 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt signed a law that gave American sailors a secret fourth meal while the rest of the nation slept. They called it midrats, midnight rations, and for the men standing the midwatch from midnight until four in the morning, it was the only thing keeping them upright. Some meals were so … Read more

In the autumn of 1932, a carpenter named Refugio Méndez stood on a wooden platform 160 feet above the floor of Carrizo Gorge. He looked out through the open framework of a bridge that had not yet been built and would not be completed for another four months, and he felt the canyon winds rising … Read more

The winter of 1933 pressed against Harlem with a cold that was not merely uncomfortable but insistent, the kind that reminded people of their own smallness against the scale of natural forces. Snow had been pushed into gray banks along the curbs of 132nd Street, and the few people moving along the sidewalk walked with … Read more

The servants at Winfield Hall had grown accustomed to the sight by 1917, though none of them ever quite got used to it. Their employer, one of the wealthiest men in America, wandering the marble corridors in a military uniform that had once belonged to Napoleon Bonaparte. A bicorn hat on his head, gold epaulets … Read more

The phone on the principal’s desk rang unanswered. Harry Goodman had already tried twice. It was 9:00 in the morning on a cold Monday, four days before Christmas in 1992, and the sixth graders at Rohrerstown Elementary School in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, sat waiting at their desks. Their teacher had not arrived. This was not … Read more

On the evening of July 6, 1553, a fifteen-year-old boy lay in a bed at Greenwich Palace, fighting for each breath. His body was covered in scabs. His hair had fallen out in clumps. His fingernails were loosening from their beds. The smell of decay hung in the air around him, and the physicians at … Read more

On the morning of April 23, 1964, a man stood at a high window overlooking Portman Square and was quietly asked to finally tell the truth. The officer opposite him gave him five minutes to wrestle with his conscience. Sir Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of the King’s Pictures and holder of the Queen’s personal honor, left … Read more