History

During the Second World War, the United States discovered a national security problem that had nothing to do with enemies abroad. As the military screened millions of draftees, doctors found that a shocking share—by some estimates as many as 40 percent of those rejected for service—were turned away for health problems rooted in poor childhood … Read more

He held the coat. Four words, delivered by a 93-year-old widow into a television camera, and the empire Frank Lucas had spent forty years building on a foundation of lies crumbled to dust. Maim Johnson did not shout. She did not weep. She simply told the truth about what Frank Lucas really was to her … Read more

More than two years after Oliver Cromwell died, something extraordinary happened to his body. Cromwell had passed away peacefully in September 1658, and he was given a magnificent funeral before being buried with great honor inside Westminster Abbey. Yet in January 1661, men entered the abbey, opened his grave, and removed his coffin. Cromwell’s remains … Read more

In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed. It did not fall in a nuclear blaze or succumb to invasion; it simply came apart. One day a superpower possessed tens of thousands of nuclear warheads, a vast army, and an ideology that had shaped the twentieth century. The next day, it was gone. Maps had to be … Read more

On April 28, 1945, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel stood on a dusty road north of Berlin, screaming at a small, unassuming man who looked more like an exhausted rural schoolteacher than a German general. Keitel, who had spent most of the war safely at high command, demanded to know why the German army was retreating. … Read more

By the early 1980s, Long John Silver’s was the largest fast-food seafood chain in the United States, with more than a thousand restaurants and no serious rival in its corner of the industry. In a country built on burgers, fried chicken, and pizza, it had made cheap battered fish a national habit, planting little wooden … Read more

Foot Locker stopped belonging to itself at eight o’clock on the morning of September 8th, 2025. A press release from Pittsburgh, only a few hundred words long, announced that the company behind the striped shirts had been acquired. Fifty-one years after the first store opened in a California mall, the chain that once defined sneaker … Read more

The cook came awake in the dark, before the ship’s bell, before the first light of a North Atlantic morning. He had been asleep for barely four hours. By midnight he would still be on his feet, feeding three or four hundred men from a galley the size of a small kitchen, on a deck … Read more

On the night of April 26, 2005, Raven Abaroa called 911 in a state of panic. His wife, Janet, had been shot, he told the dispatcher—at least that was what he believed when he walked into their home in Durham, North Carolina, and found her lying dead in a pool of blood. But when police … Read more