On April 20, 1933, just months after Hitler became Chancellor, a little blonde girl caught the Führer’s eye at his Bavarian residence. Her mother told him it was her daughter’s sixth birthday, and…
On the twentieth of April 1933, Adolf Hitler, chancellor of Germany for only four months and a few days from his forty-fourth birthday, came out from his Bavarian residence, the Haus Wachenfeld near Berchtesgaden, to greet the well-wishers and curious onlookers who had gathered by the security gates. It was a custom for him on … Read more
In 1965, Truman Capote stood at a Kansas gallows and watched the man he had spent five years befriending, betraying, and studying prepare to hang. PerNaN
The rain was falling in sheets over the Kansas plains when Truman Capote stood weeping at the scaffold, watching his friend Perry Smith die. Their eyes met for the last time, a glance weighed down by five years of intimacy, manipulation, and a terrible secret never spoken aloud. Truman had been waiting for this death. … Read more
In 1670, Henrietta of England drank a glass of chicory water at her summer house above the Seine, clutched her side, and cried out that she had been pNaN
In the summer of 1670, Henrietta of England, known at the French court simply as Madame, sat down to dinner at her country house above the Seine. On the following afternoon, the twenty-six-year-old drank a glass of chicory water, clutched her side, and cried out that she had been poisoned. By two the next morning, … Read more
In 1968, a booby trap exploded beneath Lieutenant Lewis Puller Jr.’s command group in Quang Nam province, killing several Marines and leaving the 22-yNaN
Lewis Burwell Puller Jr. was twenty-two years old when a booby trap detonated under his command group in Quang Nam province, Vietnam. The explosion killed several Marines around him, tore away both of his legs, and severely damaged his left hand. He survived, but the name he carried, the name of the most decorated Marine … Read more
In the summer of 1976, a grinning Brian Wilson appeared on magazine covers and posters under a two-word headline: Brian’s back. Weeks before the BeachNaN
In the summer of 1976, a photograph circulated through magazines and the trade press: a grinning, trimmer Brian Wilson, out of the house, out of the robe, back behind a microphone with his brothers. The headline was the same everywhere: Brian’s back. The picture was sold quite literally as a comeback. What the frame cut … Read more
In 1978, Congress buried a small provision in the tax code—Section 401, paragraph K—meant only to let high earners shelter a little extra income. It was never intended to replace the pension. Yet…
The son has done everything he was told to do. He earned a degree his father never needed, worked for five companies in twenty years—not because he is disloyal, but because that is how it works now. He has a 401k that lost forty percent in the crash, a mortgage that takes two incomes to … Read more
In 1970, Pan Am flew to 86 countries and was the first airline in the world to launch the Boeing 747. Boeing designed the jumbo jet with Pan Am in the room, and the airline bet roughly a billion…
On December 4th, 1991, a Pan American World Airways flight was halfway from Barbados to Miami. It was a routine afternoon flight, nothing special on paper. Then the captain, a man named Mark Pyle, received a message over the radio. Pan Am was done. Operations would cease when the flight landed. Pyle came on the … Read more
In 1920s Newport, Rhode Island, whiskey millionaire Edson Bradley did something almost impossible: he moved an entire French Renaissance-style mansion from Washington, D.C. to Newport,…
The iron gates of Seaview Terrace rose behind a wrought-iron fence, the mansion looming like something out of a medieval French countryside transplanted onto the coast of Rhode Island. For anyone who had watched the gothic soap opera Dark Shadows, the sight was instantly familiar: this was Collinwood, the fictional estate where vampires and tormented … Read more
In 1871, five adults named Holloway arrived in an Oregon valley the Kalapuya called the place where sound goes to die, hauling an iron-bound box that took four men to lift and that spooked their…
In the late autumn of 1890, Sheriff Rufus Penhallow opened a small card and wrote four words on it: “The man does not age. ” He placed the card in the bottom drawer of his desk, beneath his service revolver, in case anything should happen to him before he could finish what he had started. … Read more
In the summer of 1665, London’s weekly death toll crossed a thousand, and the men trained to save the city did something unexpected: they left. King CNaN
The image is one of the most enduring in the history of medicine: a figure in a black leather coat that reaches the ankles, gloves up to the elbows, and that mask. A long, curved beak stuffed with dried flowers and camphor, dark glass eyes staring out from beneath a wide-brimmed hat. The plague doctor. … Read more