History

In 1909, a 23-year-old bookkeeper in Kansas City, Missouri named George Pepperdine watched the early automobiles moving through the streets and saw more than a machine. He saw a market. Every car needed parts, and outside major cities the supply chain for those parts barely existed. With five dollars, roughly the equivalent of $150 today, … Read more

The spinster Holman is minute, and does not allow anyone to be very proud of her yet. I have produced such a small size infant that I shall have to feed it for months. The thought is too depressing. Vivien Leigh wrote those words in a private letter to a friend shortly after giving birth … Read more

In 1927, the heirs of the Brown dynasty made a decision that would define the next century of forensic history. Faced with the escalating brutality of the tobacco wars, they did not choose to fight. They chose to cash out, selling Brown and Williamson to British American Tobacco, a London-based commercial empire with no sentimental … Read more

The Spanish moss hangs thick over the Louisiana bayou, and a white colonial house glows softly through the ancient oaks. The Myrtles Plantation has earned a grim title: the most haunted house in America. Ghost hunters and television specials speak of spirits in the hallways, but the real horror of this place is not supernatural. … Read more

There was no single moment when the Edsel died. There were thousands of them, spread across showrooms and dealerships from coast to coast, and each one was a small, quiet catastrophe. By the time Ford executives finally understood what they had built, the damage was measured not in the hundreds of thousands of cars they … Read more

Spring had finally come to the Ozarks in 1901. After a brutal winter, the hills around Shannon County, Missouri, were beginning to green, and the small town of Eminence, seat of the county with just five hundred residents, was preparing for what promised to be a prosperous season. Reverend Thomas Whitley, who had kept the … Read more

On September 14, 1982, a gray Rover 350 descended the winding mountain road from Roc Agel toward Monaco. Behind the wheel sat Grace Kelly, the former Hollywood star who had become Princess Grace of Monaco, and beside her was her youngest daughter, Princess Stephanie. The car was heavy with luggage. Witnesses later reported seeing the … Read more

The sheriff was a man who wrote everything down. That was the first thing anyone learned about Jonas Culver, and in the autumn of 1923 it was the thing that mattered most. For nineteen years he had kept a ledger on the corner of his desk in the courthouse at Merrill’s Field, Kentucky, and in … Read more

The file contained the anatomy, the experiments, the lie told to a mother, and the mechanism of a death that would not come for more than fifty years. And yet, on the 3rd of January, 1950, in a maternity hospital in Moscow, none of that was known. What was known was this: a woman named … Read more