In the late 1930s, a striking Russian woman began appearing in the same elite circles that Albert Einstein frequented—at concerts, in salons, at summer houses near Princeton. Her name was Margarita Konenkova, elegant and highly educated, and she was married to the renowned sculptor Sergei Konenkoff, who had been commissioned to sculpt a bust of … Read more

There was a moment, early in the twenty-first century, when a group of men who had never cut a roast or stocked a shelf decided that the perfect American grocery store was worth more in pieces than it was alive. They did not live in your town, and most had never been inside the kind … Read more

On August 21st, 1916, about a thousand people climbed into the San Juan Mountains of Colorado to celebrate a new road over Wolf Creek Pass, 10,857 feet above the sea. What they had come to see was a dirt shelf twelve feet wide. Work crews had blasted it out of the mountainside with dynamite and … Read more

The morning of May 27th, 1942, began like most others for Reinhard Heydrich. The acting Reich protector of Bohemia and Moravia climbed into his open-topped Mercedes-Benz staff car and set out from the Panenské Břežany estate north of Prague, where his family lived, toward Prague Castle, where he kept his offices. He traveled this route … Read more

The woman on the train platform in Gordonsville, Virginia, moved with practiced speed. Around her, steam hissed from the locomotives, and passengers leaned out of windows, calling orders. She lifted a basket of fried chicken, biscuits, and pies toward them, and hands reached down to take the food, coins exchanged in the half-minute the train … Read more

On the 6th of June, 1945, in a prison in The Hague, the 51-year-old former president of the Dutch Central Bank fell from a balcony and died. The Dutch authorities would conclude that Meinoud Rost van Tonningen had taken his own life, but the circumstances of his death would remain controversial for decades. His widow, … Read more

Dr. Sarah Mitchell pressed the photograph closer to the lamp on her desk, the dim Cambridge light catching the faces of the Ashford family through the glass of the frame. A stern father in a three-piece suit, a mother in a dark dress with a cameo brooch, and between them a girl of eight or … Read more

On a raw September morning in 1847, on the east bank of the Ohio River at Wheeling, Virginia, a thirty-seven-year-old engineer named Charles Ellet Jr. stood watching a six-hundred-foot iron rope being pulled across the current on a flatboat. For fifteen years he had been telling anyone who would listen that a suspension bridge of … Read more

On April 30, 1952, demolition teams packed the ruins of Hitler’s mountain home with explosives and blew what remained of the Berghof apart. It was the seventh anniversary of the day Hitler took his own life in Berlin. The ground was cleared, replanted with trees, and reforested so that nothing recognizable would remain for anyone … Read more