The last Horn and Hardart Automat in New York City closed in April 1991, on East 42nd Street in Midtown Manhattan. For its final years, it operated less as a working lunch counter than as a tourist curiosity. People came to see what it was. Some remembered it from forty years earlier. Many had never … Read more

The sound that once announced the holiday season across the American heartland has vanished. It was not a church bell or the crackle of a fire. It was a heavy, dull thud echoing from a metal mailbox at the end of a snow-covered driveway. In the gray light of a November afternoon in 1965, that … Read more

The flat rock beside the wagon trace was cold under her, but Zona Renfro did not seem to mind. She was nine years old, and she had walked out of the mouth of the hollow by herself a little before sunup, and now she sat waiting to be found. When the neighbor woman, Vie Callison, … Read more

In 1999, a New Orleans attorney named John Cummings stood in an empty warehouse on a Louisiana plantation he had purchased as a real estate investment. Flipping through dusty inventory records, he found something that stopped him cold. Listed between barrels of sugar and bales of cotton were names—human names—each with a dollar amount attached. … Read more

It is late afternoon on the first of October, 1789, at a creek in the far southwestern corner of Virginia. Jenny Wiley stands in the doorway of a log cabin, a baby on her hip, four other children behind her inside the single room. She is pregnant with her fifth. In the ninety seconds it … Read more

On July 14, 1881, a man who had spent years as one of the most wanted outlaws in the American West found himself in a dark bedroom in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, talking with an old acquaintance named Pete Maxwell. Across the room, in the shadows, stood a lawman who had once traveled in the … Read more

In the winter of 1778, crews of workmen in Orange County, New York, dragged enormous iron rings through the snow on ox-drawn sledges. Each ring was two feet long and weighed more than a hundred pounds. They hauled them ten at a time through the frozen forests to the banks of the Hudson River, and … Read more

On the morning of October 5, 1892, four brothers rode into Coffeyville, Kansas, wearing wigs and fake mustaches. The disguises fooled nobody. The Daltons had grown up in this town, and the neighbors who watched them pass on horseback knew every face beneath the costume. Bob, Grat, Dick, and Bill Dalton had come to rob … Read more

She was a princess, and she had done everything that was asked of her. But at just twenty-two years old, her own husband had taken from her the one thing she could never get back. Crown Prince Rudolf infected Stephanie of Belgium with syphilis and gonorrhea, destroying her chance of ever bearing another child. The … Read more