History

On November 4, 1970, a nearly blind woman walked into a social services office in Temple City, California, and asked to apply for disability benefits for herself. She brought her daughter with her because there was no one else to leave the child with. A social worker glanced at the girl and stopped. She looked … Read more

The spring of 1867 came late to the mountains, and the mud on the wagon road off the old slate pike was deep enough to take a horse to the fetlock. Fenomore Hollow did not mean to be found. It sat at the end of that road, three crooked miles of it, crossing the west … Read more

The stranger had come to the forge under the guise of admiring craftsmanship, but Jeremiah had seen through him at once. The boots were too clean, the eyes too searching. He asked casual questions about metal sources and tool repairs, his tone friendly, his gaze probing deeper. Jeremiah answered simply, offering nothing more than required. … Read more

The wind moved strangely through the narrow valley on the eastern edge of the Wichita Mountains that winter of 1840, carrying sounds that sometimes swelled beyond all reason and sometimes vanished into a silence that seemed to press against the ears. Jedidiah Atwater, a trader who had come west from Arkansas to build commercial relations … Read more

On June 22nd, 1536, at Hunsdon, a twenty-year-old woman set her name to three articles. She acknowledged her father as supreme head of the Church of England. She renounced the Pope. And she declared that the marriage between her father and her mother had been incestuous and unlawful, which made her, by her own signature, … Read more

The laugh came from inside the coal. That was the part Cassian Hildfeld could never make sense of, not in all the years that followed. It was faint, gentle, the laugh of a young man who had just heard a good joke, and it came from a wall of solid black anthracite where no tunnel … Read more

In the autumn of 1534, the sister of the Queen of England entered the royal court visibly pregnant by a husband no one knew existed. Within weeks she was banished, stripped of her inheritance, and crossed out of her family’s records as if she had never existed. History remembers Mary Boleyn as the foolish sister … Read more

In the winter of 1141, England had a crowned king, and he was chained in a dungeon in Bristol. Stephen of Blois had been captured on the battlefield at Lincoln in February, his army shattered by the forces of his cousin, the woman who claimed his throne. She had him put in irons. That spring, … Read more

The blue light flashed somewhere near the back of the store, and before the announcement had even finished echoing over the loudspeakers, a small crowd was already moving. Kmart paging blue light special in aisle seven. Shoppers abandoned their carts, mothers grabbed their children’s hands, and teenagers who had been lingering by the music section … Read more