In 1866, twelve armed men entered a canyon where sound seemed to vanish, sent to arrest a family called Austal. Only four came back, and for three days they refused to speak. When one finally did,…
The elders would say of the place that its name had long outlived the memory of its beginning, and what remained was only the fact of it. In the fall of 1866, twelve men entered Coldwater Gorge to seize one family. Only four of them came back out. In the days that followed, those four … Read more
On December 19th, 1983, FBI agent Michael Wax stood inside the Tropicana’s counting room in Las Vegas, watching technicians tear out a hidden microphone system that had secretly recorded every…
The FBI special agent Michael Wax stood in the casino counting room of the Tropicana in Las Vegas on the morning of December 19th, 1983, at 6:47 a. m. , watching technicians dismantle a hidden microphone system that had been recording every word spoken in that room for three years. In front of him, spreadsheets … Read more
In August 1862, near the Three Notch road in Virginia, Private John Overton Casler was ordered to sit on the ground with about thirty other men of the Stonewall Brigade. Their wrists were bound,…
The ground was already hot when they sat him down on it. The first week of August 1862, a stand of Virginia woods on high, dry ground about nineteen miles east of Charlottesville, near a road the local people called the Three Notch. The men had named the place Camp Garnett, after a general their … Read more
On September 23, 1779, hundreds of civilians crowded the chalk cliffs of Yorkshire, watching two warships tear each other apart at point-blank range in the moonlight. The American ship Bonhomme…
On the night of September 23, 1779, hundreds of people gathered on the chalk cliffs along the Yorkshire coast of England. Below them, in the moonlit waters off Flamborough Head, two warships lay locked together, hull against hull, firing cannon into each other at point-blank range. Flames spread across both decks. Men screamed, and timbers … Read more
In 1928, a woman born above a hardware shop in Streatham secretly married the heir to an earldom, and London woke to the scandal on its front pages. DNaN
The scandal that would define a decade began on a quiet evening in May 1928, when a brief notice appeared on the board of a Hammersmith registry office. By the next morning, Doris Delevingne was the Lady Castlerosse, and London had its most improbable marriage of the season. She was a shopkeeper’s daughter from Streatham … Read more
In November 1941, doctors at a Washington hospital drilled two holes into the top of a 23-year-old woman’s head while she was awake. As one surgeon swung a blade through her brain tissue, the…
On the morning of May 11, 1938, a nineteen-year-old girl in white tulle stepped forward into the presence of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace. She had been given two weeks to learn the curtsy. In front of the king and queen, she stumbled. She did not fall; she caught herself and … Read more
In 1888 Whitechapel, four of Jack the Ripper’s victims died in the open air, in the stolen minutes between one passerby and the next. The fifth, Mary NaN
Of the five women history agrees were killed by Jack the Ripper, four died in the open air, in the brief stolen minutes between one passerby and the next. The fifth died behind a locked door in her own bed, with a curtain drawn across the window. That single difference gave her killer something he … Read more
In November 1954, Parliament commissioned a portrait of Winston Churchill for his 80th birthday, paying Graham Sutherland a thousand guineas to paint the wartime leader in his ceremonial robes….
The cloth was drawn back, and the silence that fell over Westminster Hall was not reverent. It was the quiet of a room holding its breath. Members of Parliament, dignitaries, and family had gathered on November 30, 1954, to honor Sir Winston Churchill on his eightieth birthday, and the gift they had commissioned stood revealed … Read more
On July 30, 1975, Jimmy Hoffa stood alone in a suburban Detroit parking lot, checking his watch for the third time in five minutes. The 62-year-old former Teamsters president had told his wife,…
It is 2:15 in the afternoon on July 30th, 1975, and a short, stocky man in a white, short-sleeve shirt is standing alone in a parking lot in Bloomfield Township, Michigan. He is 62 years old, five-foot-five, with thick glasses and a face flushed red. He checks his watch for the third time in five … Read more
In 1995, the U.S. Mint released a silver dollar bearing the face of a living woman for the first time—a 73-year-old named Eunice Kennedy Shriver, stamped with a single word: Founder. Decades…
She stood before the microphone at Soldiers Field in Chicago, looking out at nearly a thousand athletes gathered from twenty-six states and Canada. It was July 20, 1968, seven weeks after her brother had been shot dead in Los Angeles, and her husband was stationed across the ocean in Paris as ambassador to France. Beside … Read more