History

The backward-facing third-row seat of the American station wagon, known as the wayback, was the greatest place a child could be in the 1960s and 1970s. A seven-year-old sat with knees pressed against the tailgate, watching the road unroll behind like a gray ribbon. Cars behind got smaller. Parents in the front seat seemed impossibly … Read more

The photograph arrived at the Atlanta History Center on a humid Tuesday morning in September 2019. It was tucked inside a water-stained cardboard box along with dozens of other items donated by the estate of Mrs. Dorothy Williams, who had passed away at 97. The box sat unopened for three weeks in the archives until … Read more

In March 1965, while hospital staff at the West Virginia State Hospital in Weston were transferring historical records, a psychiatric social worker named Delilah Crenshaw discovered a misfiled paper folder that had been lost for more than three decades. It contained treatment records for a patient identified only as Case 47 B, along with the … Read more

The camera was rolling when Lisa Lopes lost control of the SUV. She was driving along a winding country road in Honduras, her friend beside her filming for a documentary she had hoped would show the world her transformation. The footage showed her smiling, talking, at peace. Then she moved to pass a slow truck, … Read more

At six in the morning on March 6th, 1943, General George Smith Patton’s staff car roared into the Second Corps headquarters compound at Jabel Kif like a wrecking ball arriving at a condemned building. Before the vehicle had fully stopped, he was out the door, pearl-handled pistols gleaming on his hips, his jaw set in … Read more

On the night of December 16th, 1835, the fire companies of New York City stood in seventeen degrees of frost with their hoses turning to solid ice in their hands. Behind them, the commercial heart of lower Manhattan was going up in flame, block after block, and there was nothing on the island that could … Read more

December 1944, somewhere in Belgium, ten thousand American soldiers were surrounded. The roads were frozen. The skies were closed. Reinforcements could not reach the pocket by air, and the German army was tightening its grip division by division, hour by hour. In a conference room in Verdun, France, the Supreme Allied Commander, Dwight D. Eisenhower, … Read more

In February 1995, a bank that had once been called the sixth great power of Europe simply ceased to exist. Barings Bank, the oldest merchant bank in Britain, had financed the wars of the British Empire, bankrolled Napoleon’s enemies, and arranged the Louisiana Purchase that doubled the size of the United States. It died not … Read more

In the royal palace in Vienna, late in the winter of 1673, an empress lay dying. Margaretha Theresa of Austria was twenty-one years old, pregnant for what would have been her fifth time in six years of marriage, and struggling to breathe. The swelling in her throat that had troubled her since childhood had been … Read more