History

On the evening of May 19th, 1994, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis passed away peacefully in her sleep at her Manhattan apartment, surrounded by the familiar comforts of home. She was 64 years old. The lymphoma that had been diagnosed a year earlier had spread relentlessly to her spinal cord, brain, and liver, but she had chosen … Read more

The young woman stood on the darkened airfield, a light breeze moving across the grass, and Vera Atkins took one last look at her. She checked the seams of the jacket, the inside of the collar, the pockets, searching for anything that might betray an English origin. There was nothing. No labels, no railway tickets, … Read more

On a clear night, far from city lights, roughly four thousand stars are visible to the naked eye. They appear as scattered points of light, random and nameless, with nothing connecting them and no guide to explain their meaning. Yet about thirty thousand years ago, a human being looked at that chaos and did something … Read more

The cabin door stood open, and snow had already drifted inside. It was the winter of 1911, in the hill country where maps turned vague and roads simply faded. A man named Amos Teague lived alone at the end of a trail only he still used. He was a trapper, the last of a family … Read more

On September 10, 1898, Empress Elizabeth of Austria was walking toward a boat on Lake Geneva, traveling under an assumed name to preserve her privacy. A young Italian anarchist named Luigi Lucheni approached her and stabbed her with a sharpened file. She stood up and continued toward the boat, believing she had merely been struck, … Read more

The bread had been baked that morning for the guards, and it was still sitting in the camp bakery when the gates finally opened. Jacob Reinholdt broke from the line of survivors being processed by American soldiers and ran toward it. He was not trying to escape the camp. He was trying to eat. He … Read more

In 1945, a twenty-seven-year-old from Oklahoma walked into a Ben Franklin store in Newport, Arkansas. He was fresh out of the army, eager to learn the retail trade, and completely unaware that he was about to set in motion the destruction of the very institution that was training him. His name was Sam Walton, and … Read more

The morning of April 12, 1945, broke cold and gray over the Ohrdruf subcamp of Buchenwald, a cluster of wooden barracks and stone buildings set into the forested hills of Thuringia in central Germany, roughly five kilometers south of the town of Gotha. The United States Army’s 4th Armored Division had reached the outer wire … Read more

Truus Oversteigen kept her hand inside her coat, her fingers resting on the cold metal of the pistol, as the man beside her talked on about his connections and his importance. They had walked deep into the woods outside Haarlem, far from the cafe where she had smiled and laughed and touched his arm. He … Read more