History

The two men had vanished sometime in the night, and the morning had not yet broken over the valley floor when the survivors realized it. Their blankets lay where they had slept, their boots placed neatly beside them as a man sets his shoes before lying down. Their rifles were there. There was no blood, … Read more

Three brothers from Manchester, two of them twins, built one of the most durable and successful careers in popular music, a career that stretched from the late 1950s to the early 2000s and across radically different musical eras. Barry Gibb, born September 1, 1946, and his fraternal twins Robin and Maurice Gibb, born December 22, … Read more

In April 2002, Robert Urick was fighting for his life in a hospital room in Thousand Oaks, California, his wife Heather at his side. Just a week earlier, he had been admitted with breathing complications, a grim turn in a six-year battle against a rare cancer that had already taken everything from him but his … Read more

By the summer of 1839, Nathaniel Roads had become a familiar, if puzzling, figure in the archives of Charleston, and it was there, hunched over documents he was not supposed to have seen, that the course of his life—and that of Clara Bowmont—turned toward its end. On a night in early September, the two of … Read more

The order had gone out in the spring of 1864, and now the Army of the Potomac was moving again, heading into the Virginia wilderness it knew so well. This campaign was different from all the others. Ulysses S. Grant, the man who had taken Vicksburg and fought at Chattanooga, had come east to make … Read more

On the afternoon of June 25th, 1876, along a winding river the Lakota called the Greasy Grass, 210 men under Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer rode down from a ridge and vanished into history. Within less than an hour, every single one of them was dead. Not one man from Custer’s immediate command survived to … Read more

The rubber boats hit the river and the current took them at once. It was February 1945, the ground still hard with winter, and the water ran fast and cold between the banks. Lieutenant Henry Jones Jr. , twenty years old and on his first combat patrol, watched one of the boats capsize. It went … Read more

In February of 1950, a wrecking crew began tearing apart the largest private home ever built in Chicago. Three stories of Canadian limestone, 42 rooms, a spiral staircase that climbed 80 feet without a single center support. All of it coming down. But here is what no one could explain. The woman who built this … Read more

On the twenty-second of February 1943, Sophie Scholl walked toward the execution chamber of Stadelheim Prison in Munich, and those who watched her would never forget the way she carried herself. She moved with composure, her steps steady, her face calm, even as she approached the German guillotine that would take her life within seconds. … Read more