History

At 1:33 in the morning on October 14, 1942, the Japanese battlecruisers Kongo and Haruna arrived off the coast of Guadalcanal, well beyond the range of most Allied shore batteries. The men at Henderson Field had almost no warning. In an instant, white and orange flashes erupted over the airfield as shells screamed in from … Read more

On May 26, 2026, Mexican federal forces raided a house in the Casablanca neighborhood of Nogales, Sonora, a border city just steps from the United States, and pulled out a man who had spent decades inside the Sinaloa Cartel. He was not a low-level soldier. He was family, blood family to Joaquin Guzman Loera, the … Read more

In August 1700, two young boys were murdered in open countryside less than half a mile from Edinburgh Castle, killed in broad daylight by the man entrusted with their education. The killer was Thomas Hunter, a theology graduate who had once been expected to have a promising future in the church. When he was captured … Read more

Budapest, November 1956. The sixteen-year-old girl stands in the middle of a revolution, a firearm in her hands. Her name is Erika Szeles. Around her, Hungary has risen against the Soviet-backed regime that rules the country. For a few days, it looks as though the uprising might succeed. Then the Soviet forces return with tanks, … Read more

Dr. James Mitchell had spent fifteen years studying photographic archives at the New York Historical Society, but nothing had prepared him for what he found in a donation box from a Brooklyn estate sale. Dozens of glass plate negatives wrapped in yellowed 1923 newspaper captured familiar late nineteenth-century scenes: stern-faced merchants, wedding parties, children in … Read more

PATTERN OF HEINRICH FOUND. When the Reichsbahn railway car DB-1947-W was shunted onto a dead-end siding on the morning of April 6, 1945, the switch was not thrown by accident. Standard-gauge cattle car aside from the main line at a junction twelve kilometers east of Feldkirchen, Bavaria, onto a spur that ran behind the freight … Read more

On October 11, 1962, a twelve-year-old girl named Carol Pulaski kissed her mother goodbye at 7:45 in the morning and left her family’s white aluminum-sided ranch home on Walnut Street in Dunellen, New Jersey, to walk six blocks to Immaculate Heart Grammar School. She never arrived. Her absence was noted at first attendance at 8:15. … Read more

In March 2024, Eduardo Martinelli, 52 years old, was sorting through the belongings of his recently deceased great-aunt Esperanza, the last survivor of her family generation, when his hands closed around a photograph album wrapped in yellow tissue paper. The house stood in the San Telmo neighborhood of Buenos Aires, built in 1895 by Italian … Read more

On the night of April 14, 1902, a young man locked the door of a single-room shop in a Wyoming coal town and counted the register. The day’s take came to thirty-three dollars and forty-one cents. He was twenty-six years old, he had borrowed the money just to be there, and a doctor had told … Read more