History

In 1998, at Sotheby’s auction house in New York, a small collection of letters sold for $74,000. They were not signed Albert Einstein. They were signed Almar, a private nickname, a secret name used only in correspondence between the most famous scientist alive and a woman almost nobody had ever heard of. Her name was … Read more

In 1600, Queen Elizabeth I signed a royal charter creating a small English trading venture with just 125 investors and roughly seventy-two thousand dollars in startup capital. Its purpose was modest: to break into the Asian spice trade. By 1858, that same enterprise, the East India Company, ruled territories inhabited by more than 200 million … Read more

He had only meant to slip out of bed for a glass of water, but the sound stopped him cold. Tap, tap, tap. There it was again, coming from the staircase. He turned, and there came the tomcat, padding down the steps with something absurd clamped in his jaws—one of Selina’s stuffed animals, and not … Read more

On the morning of April 11, 1945, ten days into the bloodiest naval campaign of the Pacific War, a nineteen-year-old former railroad worker climbed into the cockpit of a Mitsubishi Zero at Koya Air Base on the southern tip of Japan. He carried a five-hundred-kilogram bomb and enough fuel for one direction, not two. By … Read more

Seven o’clock on a June morning in 1875. The dress is laid out on the bed, white silk, lace at the cuffs, a bodice that has been altered three times to reach this exact fit. The veil hangs from the wardrobe. The corset has been laced for an hour. Three miles away, the church is … Read more

In June of 1912, an old man lay dying in a hospital bed in Tucson, Arizona. He was sixty-seven years old. The sisters at St. Mary’s knew him as a respectable retired public servant, a man whose last working years had come with a government commission folded in his coat. There was a clean bed, … Read more

In February 1916, the whistle at the Consolidated Coal mine in Black Rock Hollow, West Virginia, sounded at five in the morning as usual, but Edgar Whitmore did not join the line of men heading into the shaft. The mine supervisor, James Bellwether, noticed his absence immediately. In a company town of fewer than two … Read more

John Candy was forty-three years old when he died alone in a rented room in Durango, Mexico, in the early hours of March 4, 1994. The night before, he had finished a long day of filming and, with his characteristic generosity, cooked a large spaghetti dinner for his assistants to thank them. He called his … Read more

It began with laughter. In 1943, German pilots took to their cockpits and saw, for the first time, the American Republic P-47 Thunderbolt. They studied its bulk, listened to reports of its tremendous engine, and came to a simple conclusion: it was a lumbering beast, too heavy, too slow, too clumsy to ever pose a … Read more