History

The teal-blue roofs first appeared in the 1930s, a promise of rest and sweetness along the long, hot roads of the American South. At its peak in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Stuckies operated roughly 368 stores across more than thirty states. For a generation of families packed into station wagons, heading south toward … Read more

The phone rang in the early autumn of 2007, and the careful life David Armstrong Jones had spent forty-six years constructing began to crack. Two strangers on the other end of the line delivered an ultimatum that was chilling in its simplicity. Pay £50,000, they said, or watch everything burn. They claimed to have a … Read more

By mid-1942, the Pacific war had settled into a grim rhythm, and American submarine commanders were returning from patrol with a story that made no sense. They were setting up perfect attacks, firing torpedoes at stationary or slow-moving targets, and watching nothing happen. The torpedoes ran beneath ships, exploded early, or struck the hull with … Read more

A pair of Earth Origins shoes sits on a shelf at Dillard’s, a name stitched across the box that millions of Americans once recognized. The company that built that name into a nationwide phenomenon has been dead for almost fifty years. In 1970, a young couple named Raymond and Eleanor Jacobs opened a single store … Read more

The woman climbed the stairs of the three-story brick house on a Boston West End block, past the smell of pot roast drifting up from the kitchen, and opened the door to a modest room. A small bed, a washbasin, a desk, a window facing the street. For roughly three dollars a week, it was … Read more

On the morning of August 14, 1925, a riveter standing on a wooden platform eighty feet above the Niagara River in Buffalo, New York, caught a hot rivet that had been tossed from a coal-fired forge anchored to the decking above him. He caught it in a tin can, turned it with his tongs, and … Read more

The stone was cold in his hands before he understood what he had done. Ransom Vane stood on the far side of the fallen wall, a flat fieldstone in his grip, the one he had carried a few rods across the line to set as his corner monument. The survey was nearly closed. The upper … Read more

In May 1945, in a small interrogation room at Glücksburg Castle on the coast of northern Germany, Albert Speer sat across a table from two American economists. Speer had been Hitler’s Minister of Armaments and War Production, the man responsible for keeping German industry fighting while Allied bombers pounded the cities around him. His interrogators, … Read more

On the morning of November 29th, 1892, Thanksgiving Day, a housemaid at the Hotel del Coronado made her way down the exterior staircase that led from the hotel grounds to the beach. At the bottom, lying on the sand and the steps, she found the body of a young woman. The woman was well-dressed, composed … Read more