History

In April 1981, engineer Lee Felsenstein carried two suitcase-sized computers four blocks through the streets of San Francisco toward the West Coast Computer Fair in Brooks Hall. Each machine weighed twenty-four and a half pounds, and by the time he reached the exhibition floor, the weight had nearly pulled his arms from their sockets. The … Read more

By the spring of 1945, German officers were discovering that the oldest rule of war had been turned against them. For centuries, the defender had enjoyed an advantage no invader could buy: he knew his own ground. The roads, the rivers, the folds of terrain passed down through generations—all of it belonged to him. Napoleon … Read more

On the morning of Tuesday, 22 May 1934, Lawrence Major watched from the window of the family home in Kirkby on Bain as his father stepped outside to attend to his bicycle. The boy, still young, noticed something wrong at once. Arthur Major was unsteady on his feet, trembling as he moved. Lawrence called for … Read more

On the morning of February 19, 1945, Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi watched from a command bunker buried under forty feet of volcanic rock as the first American landing craft touched the black sand of Iwo Jima. Eight square miles of volcanic rock with no fresh water, no cover, and no beach worth the name. Twenty-two … Read more

In May 2001, a man named Eugene Gligor walked into a red brick home on Drummond Avenue in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and killed Leslie Prior, a woman who had treated him like family. It would take twenty-three years, a DNA match found through an ocean-crossing family tree, and a water bottle tossed into an airport … Read more

In the late summer of 1941, as German armies drove deep into Soviet territory, a small and unusual unit arrived at the front lines: thirty dogs and forty trainers. This unit was not meant to scout, deliver messages, or guard positions. Each dog carried an explosive charge strapped to its back, designed to detonate when … Read more

Ismael Zambada Garcia, known as El Mayo, confessed to a lifetime of crime after decades of evading capture, but long before that confession, he had already built something far more enduring than a trafficking network. He had built a fortune so vast and so carefully hidden that it survived the collapse of every organization he … Read more

On Sunday evening, June 29, 1986, a security guard on the top level of the Johns Hopkins Hospital parking garage in Baltimore caught a smell that stopped him cold. It was not exhaust or hot concrete. It was death. He walked toward a blue 1977 Toyota Corolla sitting alone in a remote corner of the … Read more

On the evening of January 7, 1937, Pamela Werner left an ice rink in Beijing, promising to be home for dinner. The nineteen-year-old climbed onto her bicycle and headed toward her father’s house. She never arrived. When she failed to come home, her father grew alarmed. Edward Theodore Chalmers Werner was a retired British diplomat … Read more