History

Joan Kennedy stood beside her husband at a funeral in Pennsylvania in July 1969, composed and visibly pregnant, her hand resting on his arm for the cameras. The message was deliberate: if the wife of the last surviving Kennedy brother could stand there loyal, then there could be nothing monstrous about what had happened on … Read more

The number she spoke aloud was twenty pounds. She stood in the middle of a circle of native leaders in a camp somewhere in the forests of central Massachusetts, in the spring of 1676. They had called her before them. She sat down on the ground, the way she had learned to sit among them. … Read more

On the evening of 5 July 1919, a young woman named Annie Bella Wright left her uncle’s cottage in the Leicestershire village of Gaulby and pedaled off into the gathering dusk. She was twenty-one, engaged to a stoker in the Royal Navy, and anxious to reach her home in Stoughton before dark. Riding alongside her … Read more

The night air over the Queens docks carried the smell of salt and diesel, and inside the warehouse it was worse—gasoline, sawdust, and the animal reek of fear. Twelve men stood around a table covered in maps and diagrams, some in robes, some in work clothes. In the corner, stacked like firewood, stood crates of … Read more

At the close of the nineteenth century, the valley of the Nashua River in central Massachusetts held four towns living on borrowed time. The houses, churches, mills, and graveyards still stood, but everyone in that valley understood that the water was coming for them. Thirty-five miles to the east, Boston was growing faster than its … Read more

She stood on the ledge fourteen floors above a New York City street, the wind moving around her in the silence of a late night she would never fully be able to recall. She was tired, lost, and numb, but unafraid. She was not at all certain she wanted to take her own life, and … Read more

In the autumn of 1882, a mineral prospector working a lead claim in the Ozark Highlands of what is now Shannon County, Missouri, followed a game trail down into a narrow sinkhole hollow. He was looking for exposed galena outcrops. Instead he found a homestead that by every outward sign had never once let daylight … Read more

On the morning of August 9th, 1969, the housekeeper at 10050 Cielo Drive arrived for work and called the police. Inside the house, Sharon Tate lay dead. She had been stabbed sixteen times. She was twenty-six years old, eight and a half months pregnant, and two weeks from her due date. Her unborn son died … Read more

The photograph was taken on a wooden pier in Maryland, a study in sunlight and shadow. Two young women sat close together, their cloche hats tilted at fashionable angles, their faces turned toward the camera with the casual confidence of the 1920s. They were both smiling. One was Wallace Warfield. The other was Mary Kirk. … Read more