On May 6, 1945, Japanese troops climbed down beside two German U-boats at Singapore’s Seletar depot and raised Japanese battle flags over the boats. G…
On the afternoon of 6 May 1945, a line of trucks pulled up between the storage sheds of the Japanese Navy’s repair depot at Seletar, on the north shore of Singapore Island. Armed troops climbed down beside two of Admiral Dönitz’s submarines. The boats were U-181 and U-862, both long-range Type IX submarines, both in … Read more
In April 1872, before sunrise, a Philadelphia anatomy professor knelt in a freshly plowed cornfield outside Gettysburg and dug with his bare fingers where a worker’s shovel had just struck…
The ground was cold beneath his knees. It was late April 1872, and the sun had not yet risen over Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. A man knelt at the edge of a plowed field outside the town. His name was Rufus Weaver. He was just past thirty. In Philadelphia, he taught anatomy to medical students. His hands … Read more
In 1964, six-year-old Lisa Loring became the youngest actress to play Wednesday Addams in the first television adaptation of Charles Addams’s comic st…
Jenna Ortega stepped onto the set of the Netflix series Wednesday carrying more than just the show’s lead role. She was inheriting a character who had haunted popular culture for nearly a century, a pale-faced girl with jet-black pigtails and a stare that could freeze a room. Wednesday Addams first appeared in Charles Addams’s comic … Read more
In March 1898, a dock worker stumbled over the body of a woman in a courtyard at 27 Monroe Street, a spot locals called the hole in the wall. She had …
On March 15, 1898, a dock worker stumbled over a woman’s body in the courtyard of a tenement at 27 Monroe Street on New York’s Lower East Side. He thought she was sleeping. She was not sleeping. The woman had been strangled, her body dragged to the courtyard and left there, with a handkerchief and … Read more
In 1937, a sixteen-year-old Prince Philip walked in a funeral procession through Darmstadt, flanked by men giving the Hitler salute. His sister Cecili…
Prince Philip stood beside the British throne for more than seventy years, presented to the public as a decorated war hero, a man of duty, and the Queen’s loyal husband. But the story the monarchy built around him was carefully edited. Before Buckingham Palace turned him into the perfect royal consort, Philip was a displaced … Read more
In June 1865, an unnamed worker drove the first of 13,000 oak pilings into a 39-acre swamp four miles southwest of downtown Chicago. The ground was black mud, standing water, and rotting organic…
In the first week of June 1865, an unnamed laborer stood at the edge of a 39-acre swamp four miles southwest of Chicago’s central business district and drove the first of 13,000 oak piles into ground that was not, in any structural sense, ground at all. It was black mud and standing water and decomposing … Read more
In November 1358, a funeral procession carried the body of Isabella of France through London, and on her chest, by her own instruction, lay a silver casket holding her husband’s embalmed heart….
She kept it for thirty-one years. The heart had been sealed in a silver casket, embalmed, and carried from castle to castle among the plate and jewels of one of the richest women in England. Now it rode on her chest inside her coffin, placed there by her own instruction. King Edward III had sent … Read more
In 1870, William Steinway bought an 80-acre estate on the shore of Bowery Bay, Queens, for $127,500, including a stone mansion built by instrument maker Benjamin Pike Jr. The mansion’s architect…
William Steinway did not build pianos. Not with his own hands, at least, not in the way his father and brothers did. What he built was a machine far more intricate than any keyboard action, a machine of reputation and desire that would carry the family name past every competitor of his age. He understood … Read more
On October 26, 1881, Wyatt Earp stood in a Tombstone courtroom facing Ike Clanton, who had just threatened to kill him and his brothers. Hours earlier, Virgil Earp had pistol-whipped Clanton and…
On the morning of October 26, 1881, Wyatt Earp rose from his bed around noon. Before he could even get up, Ned Boyle came to him with word that Ike Clanton had been seen near the telegraph office on Allen Street, armed and talking. Clanton had declared that as soon as the Earps appeared on … Read more
In February 1940, Christine Granville skied across the Tatra Mountains into occupied Poland in temperatures near thirty below zero, carrying microfilmed documents past German patrols. She was a…
The Gestapo officer opened the file and read the name aloud. Christine Granville. He looked up, waiting to see what she would do. Silence before the first question—that was the technique, a way to measure the person sitting across the desk. The room was small, with a lamp shining down so that only he could … Read more