History

On the night of April 7, 1868, Thomas D’Arcy McGee left the Parliament building in Ottawa after a debate that had stretched past midnight. He walked slowly toward the boarding house where he stayed on Sparks Street, smoking a cigar as he approached the door. The landlady, Marianne Trotter, was still awake, waiting for her … Read more

In 1958, after fourteen months of searching a broken shoreline along the eastern edge of Lake Superior, Selwyn Dewdney finally stood on a narrow sloping ledge with the deep water at his feet and looked up. There, painted in faded red ochre on the gray cliff face of Agawa Rock, was Mishipeshu, the great lynx … Read more

October 12, 1870. A gray, rain-soaked morning in Lexington, Virginia—the kind of day that turns dirt roads into rivers and keeps most folks indoors. At the president’s house on the campus of Washington College, a tall, white-haired man lay in his bed upstairs. Robert E. Lee, 63 years old, once the commanding general of the … Read more

The knocking started in number eleven, the deepest cut in the Penn Hollow Coal and Coke Company’s mine at Cold Haven, and it started the way most bad things do, small and easy to explain away. A man’s carbide lamp guttering out, then another’s, then three and four at a time, the way candles die … Read more

The storm came in off the Chesapeake that night, driving rain against the windows of Blackwood Grove with a force that seemed almost personal. Inside the great house, Silas Blackwood descended into the wine cellar, his mind fixed on the task at hand: selecting the vintage that would carry his family into eternity. He had … Read more

In the gray dawn of December 9, 1775, roughly 120 British soldiers marched out of a wooden fort near Great Bridge, Virginia, and onto a road that would lead them into one of the worst decisions of the entire American Revolution. Their target was a line of Patriot fortifications on the far side of a … Read more

The bell came across the fields just as Charles Dennison lifted his horse’s hoof to check for a stone. It was the signal for the enslaved workers to begin their day, a sound he had heard a thousand times on plantations across Georgia. Nothing unusual about it. But when he looked up, he froze. The … Read more

The year was 1862, and the humid air of central Georgia hung heavy with the scent of pine needles and the distant, unspoken dread of a war that had already claimed a year of blood. At Magnolia Creek Plantation, the conflict felt both miles away and suffocatingly close, echoing in the absence of the men … Read more

The black Lancia Voyager had barely pulled away from the hospital curb when the figure sprinted from behind the concrete barriers. A shotgun rose toward the tinted glass. The first blast shattered the passenger window, and more than fifty pellets tore into Elen Pastor’s jaw, neck, chest, and abdomen. The gunman leaned through the destroyed … Read more