History

In February 1978, a federal grand jury indicted the woman who had brought the Barbie doll to the American market. The charges against her included conspiracy, mail fraud, and making false statements in writing to the agency that regulates all American public companies. She was 61 years old, and she had spent 30 of those … Read more

The last person to see the Hurst sisters alive remembered only one thing clearly. They were laughing. Standing on the shoulder of Highway 19 in Pasco County, Florida, on the afternoon of a Saturday in August 1973, Denise, seventeen, and Sharon, fifteen, were holding out their thumbs and setting their sandals on the gravel edge … Read more

In the summer of 1749, the inhabitants of Savannah, Georgia, looked out to see a terrifying sight approaching their town. A large body of Creek warriors, several hundred strong, marched toward the settlement, led not by an Indian chief, but by a woman calling herself an empress. Flanking her was her husband, an Anglican clergyman … Read more

On the twenty-ninth of July, 1981, the officer commanding the cavalry escort to St. Paul’s Cathedral was Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Parker Bowles. His wife sat inside, by the bride’s own account, in a pale gray veiled pillbox hat. But the bride was looking for her. “I knew she was in there, of course,” Diana would … Read more

On the morning of December 9th, 1889, Sheriff William Tate climbed down a wooden ladder into the darkness beneath the altar of the Ezekiel Chapel and stopped counting the men at fourteen. They lay chained along the north and south walls of a limestone chamber, iron collars around their necks, each man secured to the … Read more

In 1976, in a small apartment in Hyde Park on the south side of Chicago, a 23-year-old economics graduate named Casey Cowell sat at a kitchen table pouring liquid resin into mahogany molds. He was building acoustic couplers, the rubber-cradled devices that let a computer whisper to a telephone line. The parts for each unit … Read more

Morgan adjusted her magnifying lamp over the Victorian wedding portrait she had purchased three days earlier at a South End estate auction. The photograph, dated 1889 according to the seller’s notes, showed a young bride in an elaborate white gown standing rigidly before an ornate mirror, her expression unreadable in that distinctive way of nineteenth-century … Read more

At eight o’clock on the morning of Monday, the thirtieth of November 1885, James Berry pulled the lever. The trapdoors opened beneath Robert Goodale’s feet, and the rope jerked upward. The watching officials and reporters in the pit of Norwich Castle’s scaffold thought at first that the noose had slipped, or that the rope itself … Read more

In the attic of her grandfather’s house, among cardboard boxes and stacks of old newspapers, Briana Pelletier found a small gray lockbox pushed to the back of a high shelf. Beside it hung a brass key on a twist of copper wire. Inside, wrapped in flannel, were three things: an ID badge from the Ferris … Read more