History

At the height of the Great Depression, when one in four American workers could not find a job, a man whose name had become a national punchline still insisted that help was not coming. President Herbert Hoover had built his reputation on the belief that the federal government should not interfere with the lives of … Read more

The button sits on the desk in front of me as I write this, a small brass thing about the size of a nickel, dull with age, the shank on the back bent the way a shank gets bent when a button has been pulled off a coat in a hurry. I have kept it … Read more

When she died in room 1801 of the Drake Hotel, the wealthiest woman in America had less than $9,000 left to her name. She was a Rockefeller. Her father owned the world. Her husband owned the machines that fed America, and she had buried two of her children before either of them turned five. Her … Read more

In September 1944, nine American flyers went into the water off the Japanese island of Chichijima. One was pulled from the sea by a United States submarine and lived to become president. The other eight were taken ashore, beaten, and beheaded, and parts of four of them were eaten by the officers who ordered their … Read more

On the evening of August 16, 1943, the air in Algiers was hot and still. Inside the Hotel St. George, the headquarters of every Allied force in the Mediterranean, General Dwight David Eisenhower held four typewritten pages in his hands. What he decided in the next ten minutes would save the most dangerous general in … Read more

Julie Patterson left her house on the morning of April 17, 1998, and simply vanished. For nearly a month, police found nothing—no witnesses, no sign of struggle, no clue where she had gone. Then the investigation took a turn no one could have anticipated, and the case exploded across the national headlines, because what the … Read more

The call came on the afternoon of December 31, 1997, from Aspen Valley Hospital. Victoria Gifford Kennedy stood with her three children, Michael Jr. , Kyle, and Rory, as the doctors delivered the news. Her estranged husband, the man she had filed for divorce from just months earlier, was dead. He had slammed head-first into … Read more

The woman standing half-undressed in the ground-floor office of the Vichy French embassy on Kalorama Road in Washington, D. C. , had positioned herself with exacting care. The night watchman could see her through the glass panel of the office door if he chose to look, and that was precisely the point. Her dress had … Read more

Mary Elizabeth Pennington Dunning spent the evening of August 10, 1898, on the front porch of her father’s house in Dover, Delaware, sharing a box of chocolates with her family. The summer heat had broken, and the evening air carried the familiar smell of cut grass and river mud. Mary was a congressman’s daughter, the … Read more