History

The screams were not a sound any of them had ever heard a human being make. They rose from the basement of the brick building on Elm Street after midnight, a woman’s voice that pleaded, then wept, then dissolved into words that were barely words at all—fragments of confusion that suggested the speaker no longer … Read more

Just before noon on December 22, 1944, Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe was asleep in a stone barracks in Bastogne, a frozen Belgian town on a high plateau in the Ardennes forest. He had been awake for most of the previous four days. His division was fighting without enough ammunition, without winter clothing, without adequate food, … Read more

On a January evening in South Phoenix, a 911 dispatcher answered a call from a woman whose voice was breaking apart with sobs. Perla Rebolledo Velasco struggled to form coherent sentences, but she managed to convey the essential, horrifying fact: the children inside her trailer would not wake up. Officers and paramedics were dispatched immediately, … Read more

In the predawn darkness, workers on the Paluxy River in Texas began uncovering something that did not belong. The riverbed was famous for its dinosaur tracks, hundreds of them preserved in stone. But as the crew cleared away debris from the exposed rock, they noticed that some of the impressions did not match the massive … Read more

In the spring of 1867, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer joined Major General Winfield Scott Hancock’s campaign into the western plains. The objective was to subdue the Cheyenne and Sioux, tribes that had carried out raids and killings against settlers along the Kansas frontier. Women such as Mrs. Marlin and Mrs. Ward had been taken … Read more

In February 2024, Dr. James Crawford adjusted his reading glasses and froze. He was examining a daguerreotype in the Library of Congress in Washington, eight months into the work of cataloging pre-Civil War photograph collections. Most of the images blurred together in his memory—stiff poses, formal clothing, faces frozen in time by the limitations of … Read more

The photograph lay on the table in front of her, the woman still looking to the left with that terrible frozen expression, the three young girls still staring straight ahead. For a moment, Alera Vasquez could not move. She had been sitting in the climate-controlled basement of the University of Minnesota’s Anderson Library for six … Read more

On the night of the raid, Captain Howerin stood at the window of his office above the precinct floor, watching the wagons being loaded two blocks distant. Close enough to see the staging yard, far enough that no curious eye on the street below would connect it to the man overseeing it from behind the … Read more

On Saturday, June 14, 1975, a seven-year-old boy named Joel Marsh left his front yard in Nickerson, Kansas and vanished. His bicycle was still in the driveway. His baseball glove rested on the porch railing. The screen door had been left unlatched and swayed in the warm prairie wind. His mother, Darlene Marsh, had last … Read more