History

At dawn on July 26, 1892, a crew of ten men stood around a tree so vast that it had been alive when Rome fell. For thirteen days they had sawed into its trunk from four different angles, driving wedges deeper with every pass, working until their hands blistered and their backs gave out. Now … Read more

Brigitte Bardot was born on September 28, 1934, in Paris’s privileged 16th arrondissement, raised by a conservative Catholic mother and an industrialist father. She trained diligently at the Conservatoire de Paris, dreaming of a career in ballet. Everything changed in 1950 when, at just fifteen, her face appeared on the cover of Le magazine. That … Read more

The glint came first—a single flash of sunlight off aluminum far below, near the surface of the Mediterranean. It was a warm spring afternoon in 1943, and the pilots of the 57th Fighter Group had spent the day on patrol, seeing nothing. Their fuel gauges were near empty, and the mission looked like another dull … Read more

In November 1274, the narrow straits around the island of Tsushima turned into a graveyard before a single formal battle was fought. From the decks of the approaching Mongol war fleet, dozens of Korean and Japanese captives hung from the bows, their wrists bound with coarse rope and lashed to the hulls. Women, monks, and … Read more

On the night of July 17, 1918, Alexandra Feodorovna Romanova, the last Empress of Russia, was led with her family into the basement of a house in Ekaterinburg. She had been told they were to have a photograph taken before being moved to a safer refuge. She asked for two chairs, one for herself and … Read more

On the morning of October 21st, 1879, in a silver mine beneath the hills of Tombstone, Arizona, a Cornish miner named Elias Penrose felt the point of his drill steel strike iron. Penrose was not normally the man who held the steel that morning. He was the man who swung the hammer. But his shoulder … Read more

Column of children, no; it was a queue of death, and it moved through the late Ukrainian afternoon with obscene quiet. A truck tractor had carried them here, to the edge of a freshly dug pit, and now they were being unloaded into the arms of the waiting auxiliaries. The men holding them were not … Read more

On September 14, 1944, in a requisitioned schoolhouse in Lorraine, about thirty kilometers east of Nancy, Captain Wilhelm Steidel sat staring at two pieces of paper. He was not a tank officer. He had not fired a single shot in this war. He was a supply officer, a staff member of an armored brigade, and … Read more

In October 1875, Clay Allison walked into the St. James Hotel in Cimarron, New Mexico Territory, and sat down to dinner across from a man named Chunk Colbert. Colbert was a known killer who had murdered several men himself. The two ate together, talked, and then Allison shot him dead across the table. Allison claimed … Read more