History

At nine-fifteen in the evening of May 29, 1857, a two-year-old girl died between her parents’ arms in the city of Buda. She was Archduchess Sophie of Austria, the first child of Emperor Franz Joseph and Empress Elisabeth, named for the grandmother who had taken her from her mother’s care within days of her birth. … Read more

In June 1755, General Edward Braddock was preparing to march into Indian country near what is now Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, following the orderly European fashion of war. The sixty-year-old general was warned that the French and their Indian allies did not fight the way they did in Europe. He was advised to let a group known … Read more

William Kelso had been a Texas Ranger, and he should have known better. That was the thought that would hang over the disaster near Kerrville for years afterward—that a former Ranger, of all men, ought to have been more cautious, and that with a little caution the whole terrible affair might have been averted. But … Read more

Absalom Vail sat at a long wooden table in a three-room inn above a cookhouse, his hands resting flat on the boards. The widow who ran the place, Rua Colburn, had set pork and cornbread before him and waited until he had eaten most of it before asking where he meant to ride in the … Read more

The lobby of the Majestic Apartments was quiet at 10:55 on the night of May 2nd, 1957. Frank Costello walked through it the way he always did. Tailored suit. Felt hat. Calm eyes. He nodded at the doorman. He stepped toward the elevator. He never made it. A heavy-set man in a dark overcoat stepped … Read more

On May 2, 1945, Soviet soldiers stood inside a building that had not served its purpose for more than a decade. The German parliament, the Reichstag, had not housed a single session of government since 1933, and yet more than two thousand men had just killed or been killed to capture it. The smoke had … Read more

The hush that settled over a Roman battlefield was a dangerous sound for the defeated. When the fighting stopped and the dust cleared, the survivors who had not been killed outright felt a fragile wave of relief. They had lived through the slaughter. But for the legions, the battle was only the first phase of … Read more

On May 23, 1934, law officers closed a trap near the Louisiana-Texas border and ended the lives of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow in a hail of gunfire. Within hours, news of the ambush swept across the country, and the two outlaws were transformed into legends. But the people who actually knew them—family members, former … Read more

In February 1941, a 43-year-old policeman named Albert Alexander lay dying in Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. The cause was infection, though accounts differ on how it began. The common story holds that he scratched himself on a rose thorn in his garden, though his family later said the wound came from an air raid. What … Read more