On October 3, 1984, nine-year-old Christine Jessup stepped off her school bus in Queensville, Ontario, a rural community of a few hundred people about sixty kilometers north of Toronto. She walked home, picked up the mail, hung up her jacket, fished a nickel from the change dish, and went to the country store to buy … Read more

On an ordinary Friday evening in October 1988, Carol Dempsey came home from the grocery store in Harlow, Montana. She put the milk in the refrigerator, left the macaroni and a bag of Halloween candy her eight-year-old daughter Lily had circled in the store flyer on the kitchen table, and made herself a cup of … Read more

A photograph taken during the American Civil War shows a Union soldier posing beside a young boy, identified at the time as contraband. The word was a grim label for escaped enslaved people, and the image captures a moment when the war was pulling the institution of slavery apart. Across the South, the same scene … Read more

On a Saturday night in March 2024, a 71-year-old man sat at the end of a bar in Winnemucca, Nevada, and laughed. Not a nervous laugh. Not the kind that betrays guilt or breaks under pressure. A loose, satisfied laugh, the kind a man produces when he is telling a story he has told before, … Read more

On April 7, 1945, the Imperial Japanese Navy’s super battleship Yamato, the heaviest and most powerfully armed battleship ever constructed, slipped beneath the waves of the Pacific Ocean. The ship that had been designed to be effectively unsinkable was destroyed by American carrier-based aircraft, taking nearly all of her crew with her. The sinking marked … Read more

In October 1882, a family of seven gathered inside a photography studio in the American South. The father stood at the center, tall and composed in a dark suit. The mother sat beside him in a wooden chair, hands folded. Five children were arranged around them with care. At the bottom of the thick cardboard … Read more

Tony Sirico walked onto the set of The Sopranos in February 1999 wearing a tracksuit and gold chains, ready to play Paulie Walnuts. But he wasn’t acting. He had lived this life. Twenty-eight arrests, seven years in prison, bullet wounds, armed robbery, extortion. This wasn’t a character he studied. This was a character he survived. … Read more

The worn cardboard box had been sitting on Rebecca Collins’s desk for most of the morning, one of those anonymous donations that arrive at Boston’s historical institutions by the dozen. The estate of a deceased collector had yielded seventeen items, mostly faded tintypes and deteriorating cabinet cards, the kind of material that gets catalogued, filed, … Read more

Forty-seven years before her case was solved, a woman named Evelyn Cross drove into the foothills of the Cascade Mountains and never came back. She was not on a hiking trip. She was not lost. She was thirty-six years old, an accountant from the small Washington town of Cle Elum, and on the morning of … Read more