In November 2011, Sonic Youth played a full set at the SWU Festival in São Paulo, Brazil, to a crowd that had no idea it was watching the band’s finalNaN
By November 2011, Sonic Youth had been a band for thirty years. No one in the São Paulo crowd at the SWU Music and Arts Festival that night knew they were watching the end of it. The five members—Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon, Lee Ranaldo, Steve Shelley, and Mark Ibold—played a full set to an audience … Read more
In 1856, a French-born doctor in New Orleans patented a revolver so strange that soldiers nicknamed it the “grapeshot gun.” The LeMat carried nine .42-caliber rounds around a central axis—but that…
Late in 1872, a Wall Street financier named James “Jubilee Jim” Fisk lay dying in a New York hotel, shot by a rival named Edward Stokes in a dispute that had nothing to do with the frontier. The weapon Stokes used was a small, four-shot pocket revolver made by Colt, a compact gun with a … Read more
On May 6, 1942, as Japanese infantry stormed Corregidor in the dark, Colonel Paul Bunker ordered the American flag lowered and burned at noon. He stooNaN
On the morning of May 6, 1942, Japanese war correspondents sat idle in a press tent on the Bataan Peninsula, annoyed that they had missed the night landing on Corregidor, the rocky island fortress guarding the mouth of Manila Bay. Kazumaro Uno, a reporter attached to the Japanese Army’s press bureau, grumbled that he might … Read more
In 1868, Princess Victoria of Wales was born into the world’s most powerful empire, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria destined for a glittering royal marriage. Instead, she became her mother’s…
On the night of January 14, 1892, a hush fell over Sandringham House in Norfolk. Inside a sickroom, the heir to the British throne lay dying. Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale—Eddy, as his family called him—had been a healthy young man just days before, engaged to be married, on the verge of … Read more
In February 1818, a celebrated London doctor was found dead beside an open book of Shakespeare, its page asking, “Where is the princess?” Three months earlier, Sir Richard Croft had overseen…
The doctor lay dead on the floor of a London bedroom, a Shakespeare comedy open on the table beside him. The line on the page asked a question: “Where is the princess? ” The date was February 1818, and three months earlier this same man had delivered the most anticipated baby in Britain. The baby … Read more
On February 14, 1943, Field Marshal Rommel struck Kasserine Pass, shattering the American assumption that they knew what to expect from German troops. Propaganda films had painted the enemy as…
The order went out within hours of the news reaching the 328th Infantry Regiment: no SS troops or paratroopers would be taken prisoner. They would be shot on sight. Other American units in the Ardennes received similar guidance in the days that followed. The rules that had governed American conduct toward prisoners since North Africa … Read more
In August 1942, a wartime flying accident in Scotland killed 14 of the 15 people on board, including Princess Alexandra’s father, the Duke of Kent. She was only five years old. Her baby brother…
On Christmas Day 1936, in London, a princess was born. She was the second child and only daughter of Prince George, Duke of Kent, and his wife, Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark. As a grandchild of King George V, she was a first cousin of the future Queen Elizabeth II, and at the time … Read more
In 1973, Aurora sold 14 snap-together model kits at the same 1-to-13 scale, and every base interlocked with every other base. A cave, a tar pit, a forest swamp — you could buy the empty ground…
Seventeen interlocking bases. A caveman, a tar pit, and a dinosaur nearly three feet long. The bases clicked together. Your bedroom floor became a lost world, and mothers learned to walk around it. This is the story of why that world could not survive when the Aurora company fell apart. The Aurora catalog for 1973 … Read more
In 1870, an estimated 30 million buffalo roamed the American plains; by 1890, fewer than a thousand remained. The hunters driving this near extinction were not primarily after hides. They were…
The Longbranch Saloon in Dodge City, 1876. A plate of food set down on a scarred wooden bar. W. Wyatt Earp lifted a piece of it to his mouth, and by every account that survives, the man who would become the most famous lawman of the frontier chewed something that food historians say tasted like … Read more
In November 1954, Clementine Churchill stood before Graham Sutherland’s finished portrait of her husband, tears in her eyes, and told the artist she could not thank him enough. Ten days later,…
She stood in front of it with tears in her eyes and thanked the artist to his face. Ten days before the whole of Parliament gathered to give Winston Churchill his eightieth birthday present, Clementine Churchill had been shown the finished portrait of her husband, and she had wept over it. But in 1955 or … Read more