In 1880s Tombstone, Arizona, a man with thick curly hair and a violent temper earned the name Curly Bill Brocius. He led a gang of cattle rustlers and killers, and after Morgan Earp was gunned…
On the morning of March 24, 1882, Wyatt Earp rode with his posse through the Whetstone Mountains of Arizona Territory, hunting the men he blamed for his brother’s murder. They had been tracking the Clanton gang for days, moving through rough country, when they came upon a water stop. There, according to Earp, stood Curly … Read more
In 1914, twenty-three-year-old Martha Pike left her family’s remote Appalachian farm carrying a wicker basket and wearing a blue shawl, telling her mother she was walking two hours to town for…
The morning of May 22nd, 1915, dawned over the county jail with a fog that refused to lift. A small group had gathered in the jailyard by six o’clock: Sheriff Walter Briggs, Judge Harold Peton, District Attorney Thomas Whitfield, Father Michael O’Connor, the Charleston executioner, two deputies, and three appointed official witnesses. Martha Pike’s father … Read more
In 1880, a Baghdad clerk named Elly Kadoorie was fired by the powerful Sassoon family because his ambitions were deemed too large for a subordinate. RNaN
The Kaduri family controls 35 percent of Hong Kong’s electricity supply, owns some of the city’s most iconic hotels, and presides over a business empire valued at more than twelve billion dollars. They have survived the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Japanese occupation, British colonial rule, and the return of Hong Kong to Chinese … Read more
On September 22nd, 1944, the death sentence was carried out on Petri Caruso, the chief of the Roman police, a man who thrived under the Nazi occupation of Italy. As a fervent admirer of Mussolini,…
On September 22, 1944, the sentence was carried out. The man tied to the chair, facing its back, his hands bound with rope, had until recently been the most feared policeman in Rome. A firing squad took aim. The volley came, and then a priest stepped forward to read a prayer over the body. Only … Read more
In 1885, Wells Fargo’s chief detective James B. Hume finished a report he’d spent 14 years compiling, tallying every holdup, injury, and death from 1870 to 1884. The numbers were staggering: 313…
On a November morning in 1883, James B. Hume stood in a San Francisco laundry and turned over a plain white linen handkerchief. The ink mark in the corner read FX07, a laundry code that had sent the company’s chief detective through nearly ninety establishments across the city. Hume had spent fourteen years building the … Read more
On October 20, 1968, Jacqueline Kennedy married Aristotle Onassis in a candlelit chapel on his private Greek island, while reporters watched from boats offshore. The Vatican called her a public…
In October 1968, a candlelit chapel stood on a private Greek island, rain spilling off its whitewashed walls, while two children held ceremonial candles and watched their mother marry the richest man alive. America was told to call it a fairytale. Within days, aboard the groom’s yacht, the bride sat down and wrote a private … Read more
In March 1932, Adele Astaire walked off a Chicago stage for the last time. She was the brighter half of the most famous dance act in the English-speaking world, the one critics said heaven did not…
On a March night in 1932, in a theater in Chicago, the most gifted dancer in America took her final bow. Adele Astaire was in her mid-thirties, adored on two continents, the brighter half of the most famous dance act in the English-speaking world, and she was walking away for good. She was leaving the … Read more
On September 9, 1876, soldiers in the Slim Buttes region of South Dakota searched a captured Lakota village and found a bloodstained guidon, a pocket watch, and letters still bearing the marks of…
The soldiers moved quietly through the captured tents, their eyes scanning the debris of a village that had been alive an hour before. Near a scattered pile of belongings, one of them stopped. A leather glove lay in the dirt. Stitched into it, still legible, was a mark belonging to the Seventh Cavalry Regiment. Beside … Read more
In December 1847, Charleston’s elite gathered at the Thornhill mansion for a Christmas ball, expecting a feast from Esther, the enslaved cook whose talents had made her master famous. For…
The first light of dawn crept through the cracks of the slave quarters as Esther awoke, her body still aching from yesterday’s labor. At 42, she had spent nearly three decades in the Thornhill mansion, her hands crafting elaborate meals that had made Master William Thornhill one of Charleston’s most celebrated hosts. Her reputation as … Read more
In mid-1800s Mississippi, an enslaved woman named Maria moved through the shadows of a plantation carrying a cauldron of oil heated to its scalding limit. To the family that enslaved her, she had…
The humid Mississippi air clung to every surface, dripping from the walls of sprawling plantations, hanging heavy in long shadowed hallways. Among these estates moved Maria, an enslaved woman who appeared ordinary, quiet, obedient, a figure who melted into the background. But behind her calm exterior simmered a fury forged from years of suffering, humiliation, … Read more