History

In the spring of 1943, a Japanese naval flight instructor at the Kasumigaura airbase north of Tokyo stood before a classroom of newly qualified Zero pilots and removed a diagram from the curriculum he had been teaching for four years. The diagram showed the maneuver that had made Japanese naval aviation the most feared air … Read more

The signing happened in a bank, but it did not much feel like a purchase. A man in good standing with a steady job would put down half the value of the house in cash before the conversation could even begin. If he qualified for a loan at all, the money came with a term … Read more

In 1966, two brothers from Switzerland, Art and Ernie Brunner, settled in Los Angeles with a problem. They wanted a tennis shoe that would hold firm when a player lunged hard to one side, an upper that would not give way under strain. They found their answer in an unexpected place: the leather ski boot, … Read more

The Cheyenne chief Black Kettle had come to make peace. Instead, he had walked into the planning of his own destruction. When Colonel John Chivington refused his plea, claiming he lacked the authority to end the fighting, the chief had no way of knowing that the man across from him had already decided what would … Read more

Late morning, August 20, 1862. The sun hangs high over a stretch of tall prairie grass at a place that will not yet carry its terrible name. Four hours from now, at this small cluster of homesteads on the edge of Lake Shetek, fifteen settlers will be dead. Eleven will be marched away as captives. … Read more

In the autumn of 1909, Sheriff Josiah McIntyre of Shannon County, Missouri, led a routine welfare check on the Warren homestead, roughly seven miles east of the logging town of Eminence. The family had stopped appearing in town, and the sheriff wanted to know why. What he found in that remote valley would occupy the … Read more

The verdict rang through Westminster Hall, and Elizabeth Chudleigh, the woman who had clawed her way to the top of British society, crumpled to the ground, lifeless. She had been convicted of bigamy. The Duchess Countess, as the gossips now called her, lay in a heap of black silk and despair before the assembled peers … Read more

The surgeons opened his body on a November morning in 1700 and stopped. What they found inside the most powerful king in the Western world—the man who ruled Spain, Spanish America, the Philippines, and half of Italy—did not belong on a throne. A heart described as the size of a peppercorn. A skull filled with … Read more

The year was 1968, and eight machines had arrived in New York from the other side of the world. They were Australian-built tower cranes, designed to do something no American crane had ever done. They would sit inside the two tallest buildings ever attempted and climb them as the steel rose beneath them. America had … Read more