Barbara Stanwyck spent her life building walls. Born Ruby Catherine Stevens in Brooklyn on July 16, 1907, she was the youngest of five children in a family that would shatter before she turned five. In 1911, a drunken stranger shoved her pregnant mother off a moving streetcar. Katherine Stevens died from the fall. Two weeks … Read more

The scream came at around ten that night, and the man who heard it would carry it with him for decades. It rose out of the cold Sunderland darkness, sharp and brief, then disappeared. Nobody traced it to its source at the time. The following morning, two volunteers who had joined the overnight search for … Read more

In the autumn of 1896, an early frost settled over the high ridges of western Virginia, and the residents of Grayson County began to notice an unsettling silence from Corbins Ridge, an isolated spur of mountain land where Silas Corbin had lived alone for more than two decades. Born in eastern Kentucky around 1834, Corbin … Read more

In January 1939, just weeks before German troops marched into Prague, Montagu Norman, the governor of the Bank of England, traveled to Berlin. The purpose of the journey was personal: the christening of a grandson of Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler’s chief financier. The child had been named Norman in his honor. It was a striking gesture … Read more

In July 1916, a flood tore through the Catawba Valley in western North Carolina and destroyed every rail line in it. That mattered because, three years earlier, the United States government had officially explained the lights on Brown Mountain as train lights. The trains stopped for months. The lights did not. The Appalachians contain thirteen … Read more

Brittany Murphy’s laugh was the thing people remembered first. It was not a delicate, polite sound. It was a big, throaty, full-bodied expression of joy that could erupt without warning and fill an entire room. For a time in the late 1990s and early 2000s, she seemed to be everywhere, a quirky, raw, incandescent presence … Read more

She was at a tea party at the Sulgrave Club in Washington, D. C. , when the phone call came. Eleanor Roosevelt was told that Franklin had collapsed at Warm Springs, Georgia. She was told to come immediately. She was not told who had been in the room with him. She flew to Georgia. At … Read more

On the morning of October 9th, 1856, beneath the wrought iron balconies of the Montgomery Cotton Exchange, a woman was sold for the equivalent of $412,000 in today’s currency. The auctioneer’s hammer struck twenty-three times before silence finally claimed the crowd. When the sale concluded, the winning bidder vomited into a brass spittoon before signing … Read more

On the morning of October 14, 1944, two senior SS generals arrived at the Rommel family home in Herrlingen, a village in southern Germany where Erwin Rommel was recovering from injuries sustained three months earlier, when his car had been attacked by Allied aircraft in Normandy. Manfred was home. His mother, Lucie, was home. The … Read more