History

The men who ran the British establishment in the autumn of 1936 did not think of themselves as conspirators. They were courtiers and prime ministers and archbishops and permanent secretaries, men who had spent their entire careers inside the machinery of the most powerful institution on earth, and they shared a fundamental, unsentimental understanding of … Read more

On December 11, 2008, at seven in the morning, FBI Special Agent Theodore Cacioppi rang the doorbell of a penthouse at 133 East 64th Street in Manhattan. When Bernard Madoff opened the door, the agent asked if there was an innocent explanation for what investigators suspected. Madoff answered calmly: there was none. Within hours, the … Read more

In January 1915, Stephen Tyng Mather arrived in Washington, D. C. as special assistant to the Secretary of the Interior for national park concerns. He came with one mission: to save America’s wilderness from destruction. Two years earlier, in 1914, the wealthy businessman from Chicago had stepped off a train in Yosemite Valley and found … Read more

The men who worked the Amethyst Mine knew a particular kind of silence. It was not the silence of a quiet room or a still night. It was the silence of two thousand feet of continental rock held in suspension above a man’s head, a silence that pressed in from every direction and told him … Read more

The gunfire had barely fallen silent when a man approached the car, pulled out his pocketknife, and reached in to cut off Clyde Barrow’s ear. He did not want the pistol or the money in that car. He wanted the ear as a souvenir. And he was not the only one carrying a knife that … Read more

On October 10th, 1974, in a velvet-draped suite at the Hotel de Chanel in Paris, Tina Onassis was found dead. The official report cited pulmonary edema, a fluid buildup in the lungs, but the rumor mill spun a darker tale: a barbiturate overdose, eerily mirroring the fate of her sister Eugenia four years earlier. She … Read more

The rusted iron cages stood empty in the Los Angeles sunlight, their stone walls cracked and dark, a grim reminder of the animals that had once paced behind them. The families who had gathered here for picnics and education were long gone, replaced by the silence of abandonment. This was the fate of the Old … Read more

Sarah Mitchell had spent twenty years looking at the faces of the dead and the forgotten, thousands of images pulled from boxes in the basement archives of the National Museum of African-American History. Faded tintypes, cracked daguerreotypes, portraits of people whose names had been lost to time. On a humid Tuesday morning in August, one … Read more

On a night in October 1957, a man lay unconscious on the forest floor of northern Arkansas, restrained with rope, while around him a group of laborers stood in agitated confusion. They had just broken open an iron banded trunk buried in the earth and found inside something none of them could explain, and the … Read more