History

In October of 2004, a construction crew working at Coenties Slip in Lower Manhattan hit something four feet down. It was a log—yellow pine, more than thirteen feet long, thirty inches through, with the bark still on it. Running straight down the middle of that log was a hole six inches wide. It had been … Read more

On the 2nd of December 1941, a small number of German light vehicles and motorcycle combinations rolled into the township of Khimki, close to the Moscow Ring Road. The men of the Panzer Pioneer battalion of the 250th Infantry Division believed they had discovered a gap in the Soviet lines. They pushed through it and … Read more

It is late afternoon in the early spring of 1851, outside the Mexican town of Janos in Chihuahua. A young Apache man, about twenty-one years old, is walking back from town with the other men of his band after a day of trading. There is peace between his people and this town; that is why … Read more

The shot came from no more than fifteen paces off, and the ball whistled past Christopher Gist and young Major George Washington before burying itself harmlessly in the frozen woods. The Indian guide who had been leading them through the Pennsylvania wilderness had suddenly wheeled, raised his gun, and fired. Washington, then twenty-two years old … Read more

The rifle ball took David McCandless square in the heart, and the big man toppled backward off the doorstep onto the Nebraska dirt. His twelve-year-old son Monroe, standing at his side, watched him raise himself to an almost sitting position, take one last look as though he wanted to speak, and then fall back dead. … Read more

In this photograph, she is twenty-nine years old, wearing the uniform of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. There is something in her expression that does not quite fit. She looks like the sort of person who would be kind to you on a bad day, not someone three months away from being the only Allied … Read more

In 1821, after more than a decade of careful work, a Cherokee man named Sequoyah completed a writing system for his people’s language. It was not an alphabet but an 86-character syllabary, with each symbol representing a syllable rather than a single sound. Within a few years, thousands of Cherokee people had learned to read … Read more

The Comanche arrived at the gates of San Sabá as dawn broke on March 16, 1758, their war cries echoing across the Texas plains. More than sixty Spanish horses had vanished during the night, and a reconnaissance party of fifteen soldiers had barely made it back inside the presidio walls, reporting that the hills were … Read more

At dawn on October 14, 2009, FBI agents swept across a twelve-acre estate in Greenwich, Connecticut. The man they were looking for was not a mob boss or a drug kingpin. He was Carter Vanderbilt, a fourth-generation Wall Street heir, married to one of Manhattan’s most connected women, a trustee of three Ivy League endowments, … Read more