History

In the spring of 1972, an archivist named Dorothy Brennan was working through the Cincinnati Historical Society’s vast collection of nineteenth-century photographs when she found something that did not belong among the family portraits. The photograph had been misfiled, tucked behind images of wedding parties and anniversary celebrations. The woman in it sat rigid in … Read more

The rain had stopped, but the memory of it stayed in the ground, in the cold weight of the mud that filled Elias Thorne’s mouth and the blood that ran down his chin. He crawled on his belly through the thorny undergrowth of the Appalachian night, his fingernails torn into bloody crescents from clawing at … Read more

The drumming was in the ground under her bare feet before she heard it with her ears. Five sets of hooves moving at the fast, steady trot of men who had a specific errand and intended to complete it before full dark. Naomi Carter stood very still in the tall wet grass at the edge … Read more

In the autumn of 1941, the German high command looked at the Soviet Union and saw a nation that simply had not yet been told it was dead. And the evidence seemed to support them. Only three years earlier, Stalin had turned on his own army in the purges of 1937 and 1938, executing, imprisoning, … Read more

In January 1990, a stolen Chevrolet sat parked at the corner of L Street and East Fourth Street in Brooklyn. Slumped over the steering wheel was a twenty-five-year-old man named Louis Tuzzio. He had been shot in the head so many times that the men who found him could not immediately count the wounds. Tuzzio … Read more

In November of the previous year, a jury in California found a man in his seventies guilty of second-degree murder for a crime committed in 1980. The conviction closed the oldest cold case in San Bernardino County history to ever reach that point, and the man, Leonard Nash, began serving a sentence of fifteen years … Read more

In August 1943, Dwight Eisenhower had to decide what to do about George Patton. Word had reached his headquarters within days that Patton, during the Sicily campaign, had visited field hospitals and struck two soldiers suffering from combat fatigue, calling them cowards in front of witnesses who reported what they saw. By autumn the story … Read more

At ten-fifteen on the night of April 14, 1865, Mary Todd Lincoln sat in the presidential box at Ford’s Theatre and felt her fragile world shatter. John Wilkes Booth’s shot had found her husband, and for nine agonizing hours she waited for Abraham Lincoln to die. Once every hour she left the front parlor of … Read more

In the spring of 1649, a party of Huron warriors surprised roughly twenty-five or thirty Iroquois fishermen on the shore of Lake Ontario, which the Iroquois called the Lake of the Iroquois. Eight of the fishermen were taken captive; the rest fled. Of the eight prisoners brought back toward Huronia, only seven survived the journey. … Read more