In 1929, Cornelius Blake stood on a Fifth Avenue balcony, champagne in hand, certain his railroad fortune would outlast him. He had never worked a job…
Born in 1894 into a mansion with forty bedrooms, three hundred servants, and a trust fund worth millions before he could walk, Cornelius Blake never needed to learn the price of bread. He never applied for a job, never feared a bill, never questioned the source of the endless money that flowed his way. His … Read more
In May 1906, eighteen-year-old Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg married King Alfonso XIII of Spain in Madrid, a union intended to bridge two royal houses. As the bridal procession wound through the…
The royal carriage had barely rolled out of the church of San Jerónimo el Real when the crowd’s cheers turned to screams. Mateo Morral, a young anarchist hidden among the onlookers, hurled a bomb wrapped in flowers from a balcony on the Calle Mayor, straight into the path of Spain’s new king and queen. The … Read more
On November 4, 1877, twin brothers Wystan and Talmadge Pickrel walked out of their cabin in Whitten Hollow, Arkansas, to check their trap line, telling a neighbor they’d be gone three or four…
The cabin sat at the bottom of a hollow in northwest Arkansas, and the two men sat across the table from me eating a bowl of beans like they had never seen beans before. I want to tell you that story all the way through, the way I lived it, because I am the only … Read more
On September 2nd, 1945, as Japanese officials signed the surrender aboard the USS Missouri, the battleship Nagato sat alone in Yokosuka Harbor, her hull streaked with rust and hidden beneath…
Tokyo Bay, September 2nd, 1945. On the deck of the battleship USS Missouri, Japanese officials signed the instrument of surrender while representatives of nine Allied nations watched in silence. Anchored nearby in Yokosuka Harbor, the battleship Nagato sat alone, her guns silent, her hull streaked with rust and the remains of camouflage paint. Potted pine … Read more
In 1968, a Monogram model kit cost $1.98 and asked a twelve-year-old to build a working machine from clear polystyrene, solvent cement, and patience. …
At a certain point, the game had to be playable the moment the box was opened. No instructions, no patience, no mistakes. That decision came on so gradually that most people never noticed it happening. But Monogram noticed. They had built their entire company on the opposite idea. These were toys you had to earn. … Read more
In October 1908, two timbermen above Cutters Hollow found a barefoot girl sitting beneath a dead chestnut tree. She wore a gray dress stitched in a pattern no local woman recognized, and her feet…
In October of 1908, two men cutting timber above Cutters Hollow found a girl sitting alone at the base of a dead chestnut tree. She was maybe 10 years old. She wore a gray dress nobody in that county recognized, stitched in a pattern the local women swore they had never seen in their lives. … Read more
In January 1883, a fur-covered stranger walked into a Montana saloon and introduced himself as Matthias Blackwood, an exceptional trapper. Every ten days he emerged from the woods with pelts of…
The door to The Lodge swung open on a gust of frigid air, and the men huddled around the iron stove looked up to see a figure so completely wrapped in furs that for a moment they could not tell whether it was a man or a bear. The temperature outside had dropped well below … Read more
In 1970, one in every four new Fords sold across Europe was a Capri. The factories built 238,000 in a single year, and the car Britain called its own …
In December 1986, at the Ford factory in Cologne, a car came to the end of a production line, and a legend quietly stopped. There was no ceremony, no hooter sounding across a silent plant. The next week, the same factory carried on building the very cars that had made it obsolete. The Ford Capri, … Read more
On December 21, 1989, Nicolae Ceaușescu stepped onto a balcony before roughly 100,000 people in Bucharest, expecting the usual cheers. He had ruled Romania for 24 years with a secret police force…
On Christmas Day 1989, Romania and the Romanians received the greatest gift in their history. The dreaded dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu was executed along with his especially hated wife, Elena. Ceaușescu had been known as the Conducător, the Leader. Not an original title for a dictator, for sure, but another Romanian dictator, Ion Antonescu, who had … Read more
In 1936, a 22-year-old with almost no money sold his car for about $300, borrowed $50 from his father, and bought a tired ten-stool lunch counter in G…
In 1936, a twenty-two-year-old Californian named Bob Wian sold his roadster for roughly three hundred dollars, borrowed fifty more from his father, and bought a tired ten-stool lunch counter in Glendale called The Pantry. He scrubbed the place until it shone and put his own name over the door. For six months it was just … Read more