History

The fried brain sandwich cost fifty cents in 1960, and the line outside the tavern started before noon. South St. Louis knew the routine by heart: thinly sliced calf brains, battered and deep-fried until golden, served on a hamburger bun with pickles, onion, and mustard. Steelworkers ate them standing at the bar, one in each … Read more

The warden handed him the toy train, and Joe Arridy’s face lit up. He ran it along the floor of his cell, back and forth, the way a small child might, because in every way that mattered, Joe Arridy was a small child. He had the mental capacity of a boy, a fact that had … Read more

In the summer of 1906, a laborer on the concrete foundation crew in Moodna Creek valley, Orange County, New York, was laying the footing for one of the towers of an overhead bridge that would cross the valley at 193 feet above the floor when completed. Moodna Creek at the crossing point was not a … Read more

On the night of November 7th, 1974, a Ford Corsair linked to Lord Lucan was found abandoned on Norman Road in New Haven, with blood stains inside and a lead pipe in the boot. It belonged to Richard John Bingham, the seventh Earl of Lucan, a man who had just walked out of a scene … Read more

The dredge sat in its pond at the end of the 1977 season, and the crew shut it down and walked away. Tools and supplies stayed inside for years afterward, as if the operators had simply gone home after a shift. It still sits there today, a steel ship in a muddy pond inside Yukon-Charley … Read more

In 1913, the Singer Manufacturing Company’s complex in Elizabeth, New Jersey, stood as the largest factory for a single product in the world. Sprawling across 113 acres and housing 48 buildings, it was the industrial heart of an empire that controlled 90 percent of the American home sewing machine market. Five thousand workers moved through … Read more

Athena Mary Levanos stood on the deck of the Creole, the wind pulling strands of dark hair across her face as the yacht cut through the Mediterranean. Behind her, the gilt and teak of Stavros Niarchos’s floating palace gleamed under the sun. Ahead lay the island of Spetsopoula. It was autumn 1974, and she was … Read more

Herbert Maxis brought his Messerschmitt down hard into the snow and dirt, and in the seconds that followed, the young German pilot was still firing. The aircraft hit the ground, slid, and came to a stop in a field that sat right beside the American artillery position he had just been strafing. Maxis was likely … Read more

On the 22nd of June 1941, as German armies surged across the Soviet border and the invasion gathered unstoppable momentum, Russian emigres who had fled after the revolution followed the news with burning anticipation. For years they had watched and waited, convinced that the war against Bolshevism would one day return on a scale they … Read more