History

On April 20, 1945, Hermann Göring prepared to leave Carinhall for the last time. The occasion was Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday, and Göring was traveling to Berlin to pay his respects in the Führerbunker beneath the ruined capital, but he knew he would never return to the estate he had spent twelve years building. The Soviet … Read more

The night Call Wllo walked out of the bunk house, Orville Ashmore was lying awake in the black, listening to the boards under his cot move with a slow, heavy breathing that came up from deep below the floor of the world. The old rancher sat up in the dark on his cot and said, … Read more

On a cold October morning in 2018, news flashed across America that Sears, the company woven into the fabric of national life for 125 years, had filed for bankruptcy. Seventy thousand workers faced an uncertain future. Seven hundred stores faced closure. The empire that had changed how Americans lived, shopped, and dreamed had fallen. To … Read more

In November 2011, a family that had controlled the world’s diamond trade for nearly a century made a quiet decision that ended their reign. Nicholas Oppenheimer, grandson of the man who built the cartel, sold the family’s remaining 40 percent stake in De Beers to Anglo American for $5. 1 billion in cash. There were … Read more

Anne Boleyn was going to die. She knew it, and in the Tower of London, in her final days, she answered the dread with something that unsettled everyone around her: an eerie calm, even a kind of happiness. The woman who had once set the English court ablaze with her dancing and her wit now … Read more

The old man walked down through the mud and grass toward the water, and the crowd on the bank knew his name before the preacher ever spoke it. They had come by the thousands, two thousand of them by the count that came down, gathering on the creek at Fairview, Virginia, on the 24th of … Read more

The night of the fire, the house on Pine Hollow Road was gone before anyone could do a thing about it. The blaze was spotted just after midnight on June 12, 1917, and by the time the neighbors and the volunteer fire brigade reached the Blackwell place, the flames had already taken the entire structure. … Read more

On Christmas Eve 1926, in New York City, sixty people were carried into hospitals after drinking over the holiday. Eight of them were dead within hours. Two days later, thirty-one more died. By the end of that year, the toll in the city had reached four hundred. The men and women who died that week … Read more

In the summer of 1920, a crew of engineers in Steven, Minnesota, bolted a twelve-horsepower tractor onto a road grader frame, started the engine, and watched the world’s first self-propelled motor grader crawl forward at a mile and a half per hour. It had no cab, no hydraulics, and no rollover protection. The operator sat … Read more