History

The mortar round screamed in from nowhere. June 1942, the final defense of Sevastopol, and the city was already a graveyard of broken stone and charred steel. Ludmila Pavlichenko had been lying in her position for hours, watching the enemy lines through the scope of her Mosin-Nagant, when the world turned white and then black. … Read more

In Peoria, Illinois, there is a factory that Caterpillar drives past every single day. Inside that factory, workers build the best-selling mining truck on the planet. It weighs 320 tons. It runs on electric wheel motors. Every one of them rolls off the same factory floor that a sixth-grade dropout built in 1935. The factory … Read more

Andrew Carnegie called it the most modest, plainest, and most roomy house in New York. He was lying. The residence that opened in 1902 at Fifth Avenue and 91st Street had sixty-four rooms, covered more than fifty-six thousand square feet, and sat on an entire city block with one of the only enclosed private gardens … Read more

In late August of 1871, a young White Mountain Apache scout watched a strange figure ride through the gates of Camp Apache, a half-built army post in the Arizona Territory. He had been told a great soldier chief was coming, a man who could turn the wind and see thoughts before they reached a man’s … Read more

The phone rang, and David Armstrong-Jones answered it into a nightmare. The voice on the other end was polite at first, insinuating, then it hardened into a threat. Two strangers had something they said belonged to him: a mobile phone video, a digital grenade with his name on it. They claimed it showed the Queen’s … Read more

On the morning of November 6th, 1982, a woman collapsed in the lobby of the Beverly Sunset Hotel in Los Angeles. Her legs were bruised, her speech slurred, and she was barely conscious. Hotel staff called paramedics, who rushed her to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Three days later, on November 9th, she was dead. The coroner … Read more

The aftermath of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, where General George Armstrong Custer made his final stand against the combined forces of Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne warriors, reveals much about the era’s perspectives on life, death, and battlefield respect. The battle occurred in Montana’s Big Horn County in 1876 during the American Indian Wars, … Read more

In early 1855, a photograph of a seven-year-old girl with fair skin and light features began circulating across America. She looked unmistakably white. Her name was Mary Mildred Williams, and she had just been freed from slavery in Virginia. The image had been distributed by Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, a leading abolitionist, who hoped … Read more

In the winter of 1891, a man worked inside a pressurized air chamber beneath the western caisson of the Memphis railroad bridge, clearing sand from the bottom of the Mississippi River nearly forty feet below the river’s surface. He used a shovel. The sand he removed went into buckets, which were lifted through an airlock … Read more