History

On June 25, 1876, near the Little Bighorn River, General George Armstrong Custer and his troops met a catastrophic end that would become one of the most examined and mythologized episodes in American military history. The accounts of the soldiers who survived that day describe chaos, confusion, and a desperate struggle against a formidable force … Read more

Chief Running Rabbit, known among his people as Aistahan, was a distinguished leader of the Siksika First Nation, born into a prominent family on the northern plains. He was the son of Akkamakai, also called Many Swans, the chief of the Biters band. When his father died in 1871, Running Rabbit assumed leadership of the … Read more

In July 1889, a man known as J. Wild Collins climbed onto a hollowed-out pine log, settled himself into the crude notch, and let the water take him. The King’s River Flume caught him at once, and within seconds he was hurtling down the mountain at an estimated thirty miles an hour, careening through a … Read more

Charles Dickens stood in the cell block and looked into the faces of the men. He had come to Philadelphia in 1842 with two destinations on his list: Niagara Falls and this prison. He had spent his career documenting the worst machinery of industrial poverty, the workhouses, the debtors’ prisons, the factories where children labored … Read more

The pain began as a buzzing in his ear, a strange and unwelcome hum that had never troubled him before. King Francis II of France had barely returned from a hunting trip in Orléans in mid-November of 1560 when the dizziness set in, a familiar companion to a young man who had known sickness all … Read more

Fanny Adams was born on the thirtieth of April 1859 in the small market town of Alton in Hampshire, one of six children in a family that, like many in the area, depended on the land. Hops grew on the farms around Alton, and the town was home to numerous breweries. That industry had expanded … Read more

In February 2018, a Ventura County sheriff’s deputy’s body camera recorded Heather Locklear in her own driveway, barefoot, disheveled, and barely coherent. The tabloids ran the footage for weeks. Every outlet that had once celebrated her now documented what they called a spectacular fall from grace. But the woman captured on that camera was not … Read more

On the 1st of October 1949, Mao Zedong stepped onto the parapet at the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing and told the world that a new China was born. A million people stood beneath him; twenty-one guns fired in salute. Just one hundred miles away, across the Taiwan Strait, the man he had defeated … Read more

In the frozen Norfolk dawn of January 18, 1919, behind the drawn velvet curtains of a remote farmhouse, a thirteen-year-old boy fought for his final breaths. His name was Prince John, sixth and youngest son of King George V and Queen Mary. To the British public reading their morning newspapers, the news of his sudden … Read more