In the summer of 1591, a man named Aldobrando di Piero de Medici stopped appearing in the records of Florence. There was no death notice, no burial entry, no will entered into probate. His properties in Tuscany passed to other Medici hands, but the transfer documents were strange: they referenced obligations to parties who were … Read more

Inside the back seat of a car rolling through Dallas traffic, Tina Turner raised her hands against a man who had controlled every hour of her life for sixteen years. The fight had started over something small, the way most of them did—a comment, a mood, a match struck against dry wood. Ike had gone … Read more

On the night of October 26th, 1844, Moses Green ran for the river with Sarah beside him, the new moon dark above the north woods. He had planned the route for weeks, skirting the old storage barn where he knew men were held in cages, following a path he had traced in his mind from … Read more

On a Sunday evening in March 1964, twelve-year-old Mary Teresa Simpson left her father’s apartment in Elmira, New York, to visit a cousin. She stopped first at her mother’s house, spent part of the afternoon there, and then set out for home. A witness saw her alone at the corner of East Market and Harriet … Read more

In the early eighteenth century, the French colony of Louisiana ran on a brutal calculus. The Mississippi carried ships, supplies, soldiers, and enslaved Africans forced into labor. French officials governed with rigid authority, and cruelty was not an exception but policy. Public punishments were staged in open squares, designed to remind every inhabitant of the … Read more

In the spring of 1942, the United States Navy was losing the war in the Pacific. Pearl Harbor lay in ruins, the Philippines were falling, and the Japanese carrier force had roamed from Hawaii to the Indian Ocean without losing a single flight deck. When Japanese planners searched the American leadership for a commander who … Read more

The scarred face appeared at the top of every Allied arrest list in the spring of 1945. Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the chief of the Reich Security Main Office, had controlled the Gestapo, the SD, and the entire apparatus of Nazi surveillance, arrest, torture, and extermination since stepping into the shoes of the assassinated Reinhard Heydrich in … Read more

In May 1775, John McCrea prepared to leave his home in Saratoga, New York, with a newly formed Continental army on its first major mission: the invasion of Canada. He left behind his younger sister, Jane, known as Jenny, who was then about twenty-three years old, and his small family. While John had joined the … Read more

On September 12, 1945, seven Japanese commanders walked down St. Andrew’s Road in Singapore toward a building they had once controlled. At the front was Lieutenant General Seishiro Itagaki, commander of the Seventh Area Army, followed by four other generals and two admirals. Their uniforms were immaculate. Their faces revealed almost nothing. But the crowd … Read more