History

The question has followed the Gunfight at the O. K. Corral for more than a century, refusing to settle into the simple story of lawmen against armed outlaws. Did Tom McLaury actually have a gun? Witnesses gave conflicting accounts. Weapons were said to have been found after the shooting. The testimony that followed only deepened … Read more

On the afternoon of July 3, 1863, approximately 12,000 Confederate soldiers stepped out of a tree line, formed ranks in an open field, and began walking in broad daylight across a mile of naked ground directly into the muzzles of massed Union artillery and infantry. They did this on purpose. These were not raw recruits … Read more

The March 15th, 1845 morning began like any other on the Blackwood estate, with the air heavy from approaching rain and workers already in the cotton fields before dawn. Inside the Greek Revival main house, Eleanor Blackwood—thirty years old, tall, with auburn hair worn in a severe style—sat at her father’s mahogany desk reviewing ledgers … Read more

On the night of October 10, 1974, in a Parisian mansion called the Hotel des Roses, a woman was found dead in her own bedroom. She was unresponsive, the apparent result of a barbiturate overdose. In the room next to hers, close enough to have heard almost anything except silence, her husband lay asleep. He … Read more

In the winter of 1899, sixty-one people entered a stone convent in the Ozark hills. Nuns, orphans, two visiting priests, and a country doctor from Springfield who had come to treat a fever and never returned home. By the time the snow melted that March, every door of the building had been chained shut from … Read more

At three in the morning in the winter of 1867, with wind roaring through the Sierra Nevada like a freight train that did not yet exist, a foreman named Hung Wah climbed out of his bunk and walked down a corridor cut entirely through ice. Above his head, the snow lay forty feet deep. He … Read more

On December 29th, 1890, on Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota, the gun went off. Just after dawn, about 350 Lakota from Big Foot’s band were camped beside the frozen water, ringed on three sides by the 7th Cavalry and four Hotchkiss guns set on the ridge above them. Soldiers came into camp to search … Read more

In the summer of 1852, at a wharf in New Orleans stacked six tiers high with cotton bales, with sugar barrels rolling across the wooden planks, a steamboat named the Eclipse came alongside. A river pilot who had been working this stretch since before the Mexican War took his sounding line and dropped it over … Read more

When the ambulance doors swung open outside the Skadutsky Funeral Home on November 28, 1934, the men waiting inside had no idea what was about to roll out at them. Wrapped in a cheap, mud-stained Native American patterned blanket was the body of Lester Gillis. The world knew him by another name: Baby Face Nelson. … Read more