History

In August 2012, a team from the University of Leicester cut a trench through the tarmac of a municipal parking lot and struck human bone on the very first day. The remains belonged to a man in his early thirties who had been buried in a grave dug too short for his body, his head … Read more

On the crisp winter afternoon of December 12, 1910, Dorothy Arnold, a twenty-five-year-old socialite from one of New York’s wealthiest families, stepped out of her mansion on East 79th Street wearing a tailored blue velvet suit and a hat trimmed with silk roses. She told her mother she was walking down Fifth Avenue to look … Read more

Anne had already buried more children than most mothers ever hold, and now she stood in the presence of another death. The year was 1700, and her only living child, eleven-year-old Prince William, Duke of Gloucester, lay in bed at Windsor, his small body wracked with fever. Just a week earlier he had danced for … Read more

The water was tinted red, and it was leaking through the ceiling into the apartment below. The resident who spotted it, in the Horn Towers, a tall building on Pillsbury Avenue in South Minneapolis, called the building superintendent immediately. When the superintendent and a security guard reached the apartment above, nobody answered their knock, so … Read more

On a November morning in 1985, a hunter walking through woods outside Allenstown, New Hampshire, found an oil drum sealed shut and buried beneath the leaves. Inside were the remains of a woman with brown hair, between 30 and 40 years old, and a young girl between 6 and 11. They had been placed inside … Read more

In the spring of 1912, in the cutover country of northern Wisconsin, a farmer knelt in the dirt beside the largest stump on his property. He packed a single yellow cartridge into a hole bored beneath it. He was about to blow it out of the ground. For thirty years, loggers had stripped the great … Read more

In January 1981, a ninety-seven-year-old woman fell asleep in a bedroom at Kensington Palace and never opened her eyes again. Her name was Alice, and on the morning she first cried out in the world, in February 1883, her grandmother governed the largest empire the planet had ever assembled—roughly a quarter of the globe shaded … Read more

In April 1931, in the depths of the Great Depression, a plain two-ton lorry rolled out of a factory in Luton, Bedfordshire, wearing a name that would become as familiar on British roads as the tarmac beneath them: Bedford. The company that built it was Vauxhall Motors, which had been bought six years earlier by … Read more

In October 1984, five hundred people gathered beside a highway in Arizona to watch a helicopter land. The man stepping out had written “Get Your Kicks on Route 66. ” Bobby Troup was there to sing it one last time as the final stretch of the old road was formally decommissioned, replaced by Interstate 40. … Read more