History

The photograph from the Oregon woods in 1921 shows a man named Axel Halgrren walking up the side of a tree. Not climbing hand over hand, but walking upright, leaned back against a rope looped around the trunk, steel spurs biting into the bark, an axe in one hand and two hundred feet of open … Read more

She lay motionless in the rubble, the Mosin-Nagant pressed against her cheek, and watched the German officer through the PU scope. He was forty-three meters away, exposed for just a moment, and he would never know what killed him. She squeezed the trigger. The rifle cracked. The officer dropped. Two days she had waited for … Read more

In the freezing dawn of 29 November 1941, an eighteen-year-old girl was dragged barefoot through the snow of the village of Petrishchevo. A board hung around her neck, bearing the words “house burner. ” German soldiers surrounded her, some holding cameras to record her final moments, while the villagers were forced to watch. She had … Read more

By the summer of 1945, American fighter pilots had claimed more than five thousand Japanese aircraft shot down while losing only two hundred seventy Zeros in air combat. Nearly nineteen kills for every loss. No fighter in the history of aerial warfare had ever come close. But by the summer of 1943, no one in … Read more

He stood at the window of the villa, looking out over the garden, when the room fell silent behind him. He had been summoned here, to his Abwehr controller’s house in Lisbon, and now he sensed rather than heard the other man enter the room. A voice came from behind him, low and deliberate. Don’t … Read more

In the winter of 1929, a Baltimore attorney named Jasper Whitmore purchased the Greylock estate, a sprawling 200-acre property in Rapahhanic County, Virginia, that had stood vacant for nearly three years. Whitmore, 43 and unmarried, had taken extended leave from his legal practice following what his associates delicately called professional exhaustion. He was accompanied by … Read more

The cold on the ridge crest was a physical presence, and Arvid Lunds stood in it, breathing hard. His hands were scraped from the upper rock section, his legs shaking slightly from the final pitch. He had spent the day in the valley beyond the second ridge, a valley of old-growth timber and silent streams, … Read more

In August of 1977, an American shopper could walk into any of thousands of small neighborhood stores and buy a fully assembled personal computer for $599. The machine, called the TRS-80, had a keyboard, a monitor, and a cassette recorder for storing programs. A salesperson on the floor would demonstrate how it worked, answer questions, … Read more

In a Tacoma restaurant on a summer afternoon in 2018, a detective sat a few tables away from a stranger, waiting for him to finish his meal. When the man wiped his mouth, crumpled his napkin, and left, the detective rose, walked to the now-empty table, and picked it up. It was sent straight to … Read more