History

The hammer came down at 11:56 on the morning of Saturday, the 5th of July, 1856, and the number that followed it—six thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars—hung over the lawn of the Colbert County Courthouse in Tuscumbia, Alabama, for a long moment before the crowd began to murmur. It was the highest price ever … Read more

The lock clicked into place, and Thomas Brennan stood frozen on the porch of the Ashford estate, his heart hammering against his ribs. He had come up the mountain on a chilly October morning in 1924 to collect an old debt, money still owed for a sale of tools that had never been settled in … Read more

For two thousand years, no army had crossed the Rhine against prepared Germans on the far bank. Not Julius Caesar, not Napoleon, not the American Expeditionary Force in 1918. On the night of March 22, 1945, the men of the U. S. 5th Infantry Division crossed in wooden assault boats under cover of darkness, losing … Read more

On the afternoon of September 5, 1921, in a locked bedroom on the twelfth floor of the Saint Francis Hotel in San Francisco, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, the highest-paid comedian in Hollywood, found himself alone with Virginia Rappe. The door was bolted from the inside. Outside, her friend Bambina Maude Delmont heard a scream, then silence, … Read more

In 1913, a wholesale grain merchant named Archabald Brennan inserted a strange clause into the deed of his Victorian house on North Broadway in Saratoga Springs, New York. The master bedroom on the second floor was never to be occupied. No explanation was given, and no expiration date was attached. The restriction would survive every … Read more

On the morning of April 17, 1865, soldiers arrived at 604 H Street in Washington to arrest the woman who ran the boarding house there. They searched the rooms one by one, turned out the drawers, and lifted the crucifix and the framed picture of the Sacred Heart from the parlor wall to look behind … Read more

The phone at San Quentin rang with the governor’s stay of execution while the gas pellets were already dropping. The call reached the warden too late. Hours earlier, Burton Abbott had eaten his last meal—French fried butterfly prawns with cocktail sauce, a single order of ravioli, a tossed green salad dressed with oil and vinegar, … Read more

In February 1863, a young Union soldier made a grave misjudgment. He was stationed near H. Hearnden, Virginia, in country crawling with Confederate sympathizers, and he had just been entrusted with the details of an elaborate plan to capture the notorious partisan ranger Colonel John S. Mosby. The trap was set. The pines were packed … Read more

The morning started like any other for the father who would soon find his daughter dead. He was at home when the phone rang, and on the other end was the manager of the local sandpaper factory where his daughter worked. The manager told him that she had not shown up for work in two … Read more