History

The peace treaty signed at the Palace of Versailles on June 28, 1919, did not end the catastrophe of the Great War. It planted the financial fuse for an even greater one. The victorious powers, led by France’s Georges Clemenceau and Britain’s David Lloyd George, demanded that Germany pay 132 billion gold marks in reparations, … Read more

Bob Marley was thirty-six years old when he died on May 11, 1981, leaving behind a musical legacy that reached across the world and a family that would spend the next four decades trying to define what that legacy meant. He had thirteen children with eight different women, some born into his household in Kingston, … Read more

The midwives had barely wrapped the newborn before the silence in the chamber turned to something worse. The baby’s head was grotesquely large, his breathing labored, his skin pale. Queen Mariana, who had just endured the birth, looked once at the child and reportedly shuddered. She refused to nurse him. It was not cruelty, the … Read more

The afternoon light slipped through the tall windows of the Atlanta Historical Archive as Dr. Rebecca Morrison reviewed a collection of early twentieth-century photographs, donated by an anonymous estate and mixed among faded portraits and formal group images. One picture made her stop cold. A wedding photograph from 1903: a white man in a dark … Read more

On December 11, 1970, in the Bamboo Lounge in Cani, Brooklyn, Tommy DeSimone beat Billy Bats to death with a tire iron. Blood sprayed across the bar. Bones cracked. Jimmy Burke helped stuff the body into a trunk while Billy was still breathing. They buried him upstate in New York, then dug him up six … Read more

On the night of September 5, 1920, in a quiet room at the Hotel Ritz in Paris, Olive Thomas raised a glass that would end her life. The young American actress, just twenty-five years old, had come to France with her husband, Jack Pickford, seeking escape from the relentless scrutiny of Hollywood gossip. Instead, she … Read more

On Christmas Eve 1895, snow covered the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina. The approach road wound for three miles through planned forest before the chateau rose into view, its steep roofs and chimneys silhouetted against the winter sky. Inside, electric lights illuminated rooms filled with art collected across Europe. A fire burned in … Read more

Before the outlaws and the gunfights, there was wheat. For the thousands of families who pushed onto the American frontier between the 1840s and the 1880s, wheat was not a crop bound for some distant market. It was the arithmetic of survival—the single calculation standing between a family and the slow, grinding death of starvation … Read more

In February 1945, on a small island five hundred miles south of Tokyo, a Japanese officer sat in a tunnel network carved into volcanic rock, writing by lamplight in air thick with sulfur. What he was trying to describe had begun to frighten him more than the naval bombardment. His division had spent months preparing … Read more