History

Four men stood on springboards driven into the trunk of a coast redwood on the Eel River in Northern California, and for three days they worked at the same tree. The trunk measured fourteen feet across at the base. It ran two hundred and ninety-three feet from stump to top. When the tree finally came … Read more

On the night of August 30th, 1979, Ahmed Hazny, the Algerian actor who had been with Jean Seberg in the final months of her life, told reporters what he knew of that last evening. They had gone to the movies. They came home. She seemed fine. In the morning, she was gone. She had taken … Read more

The gown held six thousand diamonds, so heavy that the bride could not carry it. A lady-in-waiting had to kneel in the hours before the ceremony and cut yards of silver lamé and feathers from the petticoat and train, trimming the Christian Dior masterpiece down simply so the girl inside it could walk. The bride … Read more

For most of American history, the moment the sun sank below the horizon, the world as people knew it ended. Not figuratively, but in a very literal sense. The work stopped. The streets emptied. The doors were barred. And everything that could not be done by firelight simply did not get done until dawn returned. … Read more

At a little past midnight on the 6th of November, 1817, Princess Charlotte caught the hand of the man standing beside her bed and told him they had made her tipsy. Her mind was already going. The room was slipping away from her. She used the pet name she had for the family doctor, his … Read more

When the first European settlers set foot in the Americas in 1620, many of them were not ready for what they found. They starved. They fell to disease. They froze and drowned and lost their way in forests that seemed to have no end. And yet the Native American peoples living in the very same … Read more

In the spring of 1898 they came for her and took her from her bed. She was not sick. She was not old. She was forty years old, entirely in her right mind, and she was the daughter of the richest king in Europe. They carried her to an asylum for the insane and locked … Read more

For sixty years, in a castle north of Brussels, an old woman slept each night beside a doll. She called it by a man’s name. She spoke to it. She had once been an empress. She had worn a crown on the far side of an ocean. And now this was all that was left … Read more

The order had gone out months earlier, and now the great gun sat at the end of its long special spur line, sixteen kilometres north of the target. It was the largest artillery piece ever built, and the men of Heavy Artillery Unit E-672 were about to use it in combat for the first time. … Read more