History

On a June morning in 1865, a laborer whose name appears in no surviving record stood at the edge of a thirty-nine-acre swamp, four miles southwest of Chicago’s central business district, and drove the first of thirteen thousand oak piles into ground that was not, in any structural sense, ground at all. It was black … Read more

The city counted 13,468 residents in 1960, and by some counts held nearly 2,000 private swimming pools that same year, one for every six people who lived there, the highest concentration anywhere in the country. The postcards of that decade show turquoise water, palm trees, and movie stars stepping out of convertibles in sunglasses. They … Read more

At a quarter past three on the afternoon of the 30th of March 2002, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother died at Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park. She was 101 years old, and her daughter, the Queen, was at her bedside. For the public, what followed was a national farewell: around 200,000 people filed past … Read more

The two deputies pulled their horses up at the edge of the clearing and sat for a long moment without speaking. The Harper homestead stood silent before them, the log walls gray with weather, the door hanging open. The report Sheriff Robert Garland would file on April 18th, 1896, described the property as apparently abandoned, … Read more

On March 7, 1945, scouts from the 89th Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron reached a ridge above the German town of Remagen and looked down at the Rhine River. What they radioed back stopped Lieutenant Colonel Leonard Engeman cold. The Ludendorff Railroad Bridge, a double-tracked steel structure built during the First World War, still stood intact across … Read more

The heat hit him in waves, even up here. Gary Andrews stood on the very top of the gantry, 21 stories above the floor of the pit, and watched the crane below try to reach him. It reached and reached and could not get close. The machine under his feet was burning, fed by 8,000 … Read more

There are roads in this country that appear on the map, and there are roads the map chose to forget. The road I want to take you down tonight is the second kind. It is the kind of road a county surveyor once traveled, looked at, and decided, deep in himself, without ever telling anyone, … Read more

On the evening of August 17, 1964, the caretaker locked up the Forestry Building in Portland, Oregon, at about five o’clock and went home. Within forty-five minutes, neighbors could see that something was wrong. By the time the first fire crews arrived at roughly a quarter to six, the whole building was burning, and there … Read more

In the middle of the Civil War, between 1863 and 1864, a Black woman walked into the heart of the Confederate capital. The men around her were discussing military plans, Confederate secrets, the war tearing America apart. They took her for a servant. It never occurred to them that this educated woman, standing quietly in … Read more