History

The Gemini Lounge sat at 4021 Flatlands Avenue in the Canarsie section of East Brooklyn, an unremarkable neighborhood bar on the surface, a place where locals drank and watched sports. But behind it, through a back entrance, was an apartment rented by crew member Joseph Guglielmo, known as Dracula. The men who used that apartment … Read more

In 1965, a young architecture student in Paris received his diploma and made an unusual decision. He would not design modern buildings. He would not work in private practice. Instead, he joined the National Center for Scientific Research to dedicate his life to a single question that had haunted him since he first saw photographs … Read more

On March 18, 2005, a 27-year-old tourist from Spain named Núria Fernández Colada crossed the water from São Luís to Alcântara, an old colonial city of stone streets and ruined buildings on the northern coast of Brazil. She was with a long-haired Brazilian wanderer who sold handmade crafts and called himself Kurumba. He seemed like … Read more

In October 1947, Dalton Trumbo sat before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and chose silence. He refused to answer whether he was a communist. He refused to name colleagues who shared his political sympathies. The committee wanted names, and Trumbo would not give them. Within weeks, Hollywood’s major studios blacklisted him. He was one … Read more

In the mansions of Gilded Age New York, a chambermaid who changed the sheets in a bedroom where the master’s wife did not sleep held enough knowledge to destroy the woman of the house. She earned twenty-five dollars a month while her employer spent three hundred thousand a year to convince New York that she … Read more

The fuse sputtered and caught, and the smoke came first: sharp, chemical, with a faint sulfur edge. Nothing else in the neighborhood smelled like that. Then the hiss. The string snapped taut, and the little car leaned hard into its circle, a jet engine burning two feet from your face. For eight seconds, you had … Read more

On a September morning in 1907, a land agent named Emmett Hirsch sat on a rented mule at a fork in a mountain trail in Letcher County, Kentucky, and listened to a man named Isham Vardie tell him how to survive the week ahead. Vardie, a lean man in his fifties with a black beard … Read more

The young attorney stood at the locked window, peering through iron mesh at a sight that seemed to belong to another century. On the other side of the glass, patients pressed their faces directly against the pane, straining toward the daylight and open air they could see but not reach, desperate simply to get out. … Read more

In the last week of August 1970, somewhere between six and seven hundred thousand people gathered on a hillside on the Isle of Wight. By the Guinness estimate, it was one of the largest gatherings in the history of the British Isles, a city the size of Glasgow assembled on farmland before a single wooden … Read more