The most thoroughly imaged royal skull in Egypt came back round. Broad, short, ordinary, with a cephalic index of 83. 9—the measurement anthropologists use to describe a head wider than it is long. It is the exact opposite of the head that made this family famous. That skull belongs to Tutankhamun. The head you are … Read more

Elizabeth Brownrigg was hanged on the 14th of September, 1767, before a crowd that had gathered to shout their anger at her. Just one week earlier, she had been found guilty of the willful murder of a fourteen-year-old apprentice girl named Mary Clifford. The sentence carried an additional punishment: her corpse was to be publicly … Read more

The blood was still wet on Bobby Washington’s gray wool driver’s cap when Bumpy Johnson knelt on the sidewalk outside Wells restaurant and promised seven men would die. That was Saturday, April 15th, back when the promise was still a threat, still a countdown waiting to begin. But the promise had been born on Sunday … Read more

The shot came from inside the Rock Creek saloon, and when the smoke cleared, Powell Pike Landusky lay dead on the floor. Kid Curry stood over him, the pistol still in his hand. Landusky had been a lawman, a miner, the local authority in this corner of Montana, and Curry had just put a bullet … Read more

In the spring of 1916, General John “Blackjack” Pershing gave the Apache Scouts of the 10th and 11th Cavalry a mission that would reignite their warrior spirit. For nearly three decades, these men had lived in relative peace along the border, a quiet existence compared to the fierce Apache campaigns of the 1880s when countless … Read more

October 15, 1948. Grace Episcopal Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, was full, the ceremony ready to begin, and the bride, a former professional dancer named Betty, stood watching the door for a groom who had not arrived. There was no traffic jam, no case of cold feet. Gerald Ford arrived late to his own wedding … Read more

The iron beak slammed through the Carthaginian deck with a sound that carried across the water—a deep, flat, violent crack, repeated down the Roman line like a drumbeat of the end of the world. Splinters flew. The two hulls, a Carthaginian warship and a Roman one, were no longer separate vessels sliding through a fluid … Read more

On the fourth of July in 1870, a man named Joseph Etienne pushed a bateau off the bank and into the flooded Penobscot above a stretch of white water the river drivers called the Heater. It was the last thing he ever did. The boat caught the pitch wrong and rolled, and Etienne went into … Read more

At 10:03 on the morning of 13 December 1945, a young woman walked into the execution chamber of Hameln prison in Westphalia. She was twenty-two years old, blonde, blue-eyed, and holding herself with an ease that the witnesses would remember for decades. The hangman, Albert Pierrepoint, had drawn a chalk mark on the trapdoor, and … Read more