History

The old woman was laughing at him. Arthur Lyle had come to the almshouse on the edge of the Lincolnshire fens that summer of 1927 to ask what a 101-year-old woman thought of the newest idea in all the newspapers, a calendar with thirteen months. Hannah Pell stopped laughing long enough to say the words … Read more

He was a man who rarely showed his feelings, and this moment was no different. He grew quiet, and Julia, expecting him to share her excitement, saw instead a flicker of distress cross his face. When she asked what was wrong, Ulysses looked at her and said, “Did I not see you and fall in … Read more

The dime novel lay in the dirt of the Apache camp, and Kit Carson stared at it as if it were a ghost. He had come here to find a woman named Ann White, taken by Jicarilla Apaches and Utes during an attack near Point of Rocks, New Mexico. Now she was dead, shot through … Read more

Imagine lying sick in a forest 50,000 years ago. Your stomach is cramping, your body burns with fever, and you haven’t eaten in two days because nothing stays down. There are no doctors, no pharmacies, and no concept of medicine as a science. You are likely dying. Unless someone from your group walks into the … Read more

On a humid afternoon in the spring of 1864, in the Confederate White House in Richmond, a five-year-old boy slipped through the railing of a second-floor veranda and fell onto the brick pavement below. The household rushed to his side, but the injuries were fatal. Despite the best efforts of the doctors, the child died … Read more

The Mighty Dump came out in 1965, and it became the best-selling toy truck of the twentieth century. It was nineteen inches long, with rubber tires nearly five inches across, a steel cab with a windshield, and a dump bed that tilted back on a heavy hinge. It was made of 20-gauge cold-rolled automotive steel, … Read more

In the fall of 1892, a fur trapper named Émile Fontenot lost his compass during a storm in the dark waters of Louisiana’s Atchafalaya Basin. Paddling blindly, he drifted into a swamp that appeared on no parish map. There he found a cabin, and inside that cabin, a family that had lived undisturbed for what … Read more

August 3rd, 1876. Deadwood, Black Hills. A man stands in a makeshift courtroom inside McDaniels Theater, and everyone in the room knows he killed Wild Bill Hickok. There is no mystery about the shooter. The day before, Jack McCall walked into a saloon, came up behind Hickok while he sat playing poker, raised a pistol, … Read more

In the autumn of 1914, as the first frost settled over the Blue Ridge Mountains of West Virginia, a silence fell over the isolated home of Dr. Cornelius Whitmore—a silence that would last for decades. The property, located roughly twelve miles southeast of the small mining town of Beckley, sat in a valley so remote … Read more