In March 2019, sixty-year-old Thomas Kokoraleis walked out of an Illinois prison, a free man. For the families of eighteen missing and murdered women, he was the last living link to the Ripper…
March 2019. Aurora, Illinois. The sky is flat and heavy, a dirty gray canopy that has parked itself over the region for days. A thin layer of slush covers the pavement, the kind of North Midwest afternoon where winter feels not like a season but a condition. Outside the gates of a correctional facility, a … Read more
In 530 AD, a Roman commander so crippled he had to be carried into battle on a litter sent 1,000 cavalrymen charging into a Persian army of 30,000. Sittas, the general defending Byzantine Armenia,…
The summer sun beat down on the Armenian highlands in 530 AD, and a thousand Roman cavalrymen charged straight into an army of thirty thousand Persians. The senior Roman commander led the attack himself, a suicidal thrust against odds of thirty to one. By sunset, the largest Persian invasion force in a generation was fleeing … Read more
In the winter of 1777, George Washington’s army was dying at Valley Forge, freezing and starving while the British slept in warm beds just eighteen miles away. The soldiers barely knew how to…
Winter of 1777. The Continental Army was collapsing. Roughly twelve thousand men had marched into Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, just weeks earlier. Now they were starving and freezing. Hundreds died each month from typhus, dysentery, and exposure to the brutal Pennsylvania cold. The soldiers who could still stand did not know how to march in regular … Read more
In 1974, Gary Fisher took a heavy 1937 Schwinn cruiser into the mountains of Marin County, added gears and knobby tires, and rode it down fire trails NaN
On October 4, 1991, the last worker at the Schwinn factory in Greenville, Mississippi, clocked out after building the final bicycle. He shut off his station, turned off the lights, and locked the door. After 96 years of continuous American manufacturing, Schwinn no longer produced bicycles in the United States. The building still stands today, … Read more
On May 6, 1944, Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy walked into a London register office and married the man she loved in a ten-minute civil ceremony. No Mass, no priest, no blessing. For a devout Catholic…
She smiled for the photographers as she walked up the steps of the Chelsea register office on the sixth of May, 1944, her brother’s arm steadying her. America would remember the picture as a love story. Her church called what she was about to do a mortal sin. So did her mother, who stayed home … Read more
In 1866, a church appeared on a Mississippi Delta ridge that no one remembered building. It had a bell with no hammer and a pulpit with no Bible. Then a preacher called Brother Ela arrived, and…
In the summer of 1866, in a region of the Mississippi Delta so flooded that the maps of that era could not render it, a crowd gathered inside a wooden church whose name no one had ever written above its door. They came by wagon and they came on foot, from three neighboring counties, and … Read more
In 1883, livestock buyer Thomas Ellery Vance rode into a hollow in southeastern Kentucky where at least nineteen travelers had vanished over twelve years. A storekeeper warned him not to lodge at…
Ellery Vance was standing at the window of the east room in the dark with his hand on the frame when somebody in the yard said his name. A woman’s voice, not loud. Conversational. The volume you would use for somebody about fifteen feet away. She said, “Ellery. ” She hummed off key, and never … Read more
In 1931, loggers in southern Louisiana cut down a bald cypress that had been alive for roughly 1,300 years, its trunk more than seven feet thick. It was not unusual. For about forty years, crews…
The year was 1931, and in the black water of a southern Louisiana swamp, men cut down a bald cypress tree that had been alive for roughly thirteen hundred years. Its trunk measured more than seven feet thick at the base, and when the rings were counted, that tree had been standing in the water … Read more
In 1873, a Reno tailor named Jacob Davis kept hearing the same complaint: work pants tore at the pockets within a week. A lumberjack’s wife asked him to build a pair that could survive the job, so…
The whiskey did nothing. The man in the leather-stained apron gripped the tooth with a pair of pliers, leaned his weight into it, and twisted. The patient’s jaw gave way with a crack that was more bone than tooth, and the screams that followed were drowned out, deliberately, by a traveling band striking up a … Read more
In 1868, Elizabeth Keckley published a memoir about her four years inside the White House as Mary Todd Lincoln’s dressmaker and confidante—and the backlash was so swift that most copies were…
The man in the well-tailored coat lowered his voice, though the only other person in the room was the first lady of the United States, and she stood close enough to touch him. Elizabeth Keckley, hidden behind a folding screen with a needle suspended midair, held her breath. She had been finishing a gown in … Read more