In November 1892, two traveling salesmen vanished after visiting the isolated Ohio farmhouse of Cordelia Ashworth, a 43-year-old widow who lived alonNaN
In the autumn of 1892, an early frost settled over the rolling hills of Meigs County, Ohio, and the isolation of the approaching winter closed in around the scattered homesteads. The harvest had been poor, and the farms along Township Road 7 sat quiet and remote. It was here, on a modest 87-acre property owned … Read more
In 1789, the very first substantive law signed by President Washington placed a 5% duty on most imports, and for the next 124 years customs duties colNaN
From the founding of the Republic through the eve of the First World War, the United States government ran on a single source of money. There was no income tax, no payroll tax, no corporate levy. From 1789, when the Constitution took effect, until 1913, customs duties collected at American ports supplied roughly 80 to … Read more
In October 1958, a massive steel section dangled 700 feet above the Colorado River, suspended from a cable thinner than a man’s forearm. Workers at Glen Canyon were building an arch bridge from…
The work began in October 1958, with a segment of steel swinging out over the rim of Glen Canyon, seven hundred feet above the Colorado River. Below, the water was a thin ribbon. The segment hung from a wire stretched across the gorge, a temporary track that, from this distance, looked no thicker than a … Read more
On September 6, 1916, Clarence Saunders opened a grocery store in Memphis where customers served themselves, a radical idea that clerks and competitorNaN
In the summer of 1930, Michael Cullen walked away from a career in the grocery business and bet everything on an idea his employers had rejected as too reckless to even consider. Cullen had spent nearly two decades inside the industry, first at the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company and then at Kroger, where … Read more
In 1902, Frederick Bourne, a boy who left school at fourteen to support his widowed mother, bought a rocky island in the St. Lawrence River. He had risen from poverty to become president of the…
The trap door lay hidden in the floor of Frederick Bourne’s tower office, a dark rectangle set into the stone that most visitors would never notice. It opened onto a dungeon, an actual dungeon built into the foundation of the castle, cold and silent and unmistakably medieval. Why it was built, no one knows for … Read more
In 1858, tanner Elden Furth struck a natural cavern beneath his land in Braden County, Tennessee, and filled it with rubble the same day. Within a month he sold the forty acres for a fraction of…
Ruth Arden sat in her 1987 Toyota Camry in the gravel lot at the top of the bluff and did not get out for eleven minutes. She was forty-two years old, a freelance archives and records preservationist, and she had driven up State Route 73 out of Lacy, Tennessee, past the point where the yellow … Read more
In July 1921, state auditor Emmett Carden arrived at a Louisiana institution built in 1798 as a convent, where the old nuns’ cells now held patients and the doors had simply been given new locks….
A Louisiana road in Vermilion Parish ends at a gate, a gate that is never opened. The parish map still shows a building behind it that has not existed for more than a hundred years. There is a reason the state kept that address in its records long after the roof collapsed and sugarcane grew … Read more
In 1881, an electrician at a New York printing press fused a small strip of lead wire into Thomas Edison’s new lighting circuit. If the current surgeNaN
In 1881, a electrician working in the Hinds & Ketcham printing shop in New York City spliced a small piece of lead wire into the main line feeding Thomas Edison’s new lighting system. If the current spiked too high, the lead would melt and break the circuit before the entire building caught fire. That small … Read more
On December 29, 1863, a seventeen-year-old boy led a mule down a frozen road west of Little Rock, carrying a leather notebook that would decide whether he lived or died. Union soldier Daniel…
The sentry saw him from a long way off. A figure on the wagon road, coming out of the cold, moving west from Little Rock toward a place the men called Ten Mile House—ten miles from the arsenal where the Union army kept its powder dry. The road was hard as iron on December 29, … Read more
In November 1966, 540 guests arrived at New York’s Plaza Hotel in black-and-white masks, and among them was the hotel’s own doorman. The host, Truman Capote, had spent months carrying a…
On the night of November 28, 1966, 540 people arrived at the Plaza Hotel in New York City dressed in black and white and wearing masks. They came from Hollywood and Washington, from London and Rome. They were politicians and movie stars, novelists and socialites, and in at least one case, the Plaza’s own doorman. … Read more