History

The call came from the Federal Housing Administration, and it changed the shape of the country. Beginning in the 1930s, federal appraisers literally drew red lines on maps around neighborhoods they deemed too risky for mortgage lending, and the primary factor that made a neighborhood risky in their eyes was the presence of Black residents. … Read more

Emmett Hirsch was thirty-eight years old in the autumn of 1907, a tall man, six feet one, thin the way a man gets thin who eats his supper wherever he finds it, with hair gone the color of cold coffee at the temples and a face the wind had made older than his years. He … Read more

In the spring of 1911, in a stretch of Cumberland hills since drowned beneath the waters of two reservoirs, a survey was ordered of government assessment records to settle a discrepancy that had been quietly growing over the previous eleven years. The county was called Beauregard. The parish, if that word could be used for … Read more

On a May evening in 1996, a woman fell twenty-five feet from the third-floor window of her room at Farm Place, an exclusive addiction treatment center in Surrey. She survived, but the landing shattered her spine and fractured her skull, leaving her paralyzed from the waist down for the remaining eighteen months of her life. … Read more

The spring air carried the smell of wet earth and new growth as Creswell Purnell rode into the western edge of what is now Greenbrier County, West Virginia. He was thirty-six years old, a tall, lean man with a hawk’s nose and a habit of writing in his field journal with a pencil so short … Read more

John Wetzel felt the cold bite of the Ohio River water against his back, but the pain in his lungs burned hotter. A ball had torn clean through him, and he knew what that meant. Still, he kept his grip on the paddle, kept driving the canoe toward the bank, because the friend beside him … Read more

The false wall in the tool shed at Schloss Fischhorn gave way easily. Behind it, in the dim light of the Austrian spring of May 1945, an American counterintelligence agent named José Antonio Robert A. Gutierrez found what the Third Reich had tried to hide. There were photo albums, reels of home movies, monogrammed silverware, … Read more

By the late winter of 1870, Robert E. Lee had only months to live, and he knew it. When he spoke of Gettysburg now, he spoke feelingly, and the man writing down his words was William Allan, a professor at Washington College who had once served on the staffs of Stonewall Jackson and Jubal Early. … Read more

The knock came before dawn on the fifteenth of August, and Dr. Alistair Finch knew, even before he opened the door, that the morning would change everything. Sheriff Brody stood on the porch, his fist still raised, his face carrying the particular weariness of a man who wanted a problem to disappear as quickly as … Read more