History

In the summer of 1848, with the Mexican-American War over and the United States newly in possession of vast lands west of Texas, eighteen-year-old Samuel Chamberlain of Boston found himself at a crossroads. He had served as a dragoon in Mexico, and while he felt sorry to part with the comrades who had become his … Read more

The men who sat in judgment of her believed they had won. Before them lay the evidence, the secret military documents discovered among her possessions, and the case they presented seemed irrefutable. To the Confederate officers of General Braxton Bragg’s court, her fate appeared sealed: a swift conviction, followed by the gallows. Yet as the … Read more

It was the image that would haunt Zenouska Moat before she was even born. Her mother, Marina—heavily pregnant, furious, and beyond caring what anyone thought—posed for the cameras not in maternity wear, but in a black rubber catsuit. She wore a cheap plastic crown on her head, a punk mockery of the real thing, and … Read more

Ninety minutes. That was the thin, terrible margin between a quiet afternoon tea and a global media meltdown. In the scorching July of 1995, behind the heavy oak door of room 3311 at the Carlyle Hotel, one of the twentieth century’s most explosive secret meetings was taking place. While photographers chased them across two continents, … Read more

She is sixteen in the photograph, dark hair and dark eyes, and she is not smiling. Someone has set a soldier’s feathered hat on her head, a joke the men thought fine, and she wears it without giving the joke an inch. The plate was made in the summer of 1862. A few days later, … Read more

The rowboat overturned in the dark churn of the Cape Fear River, and Rose O’Neal Greenhow, weighted down by two thousand dollars in gold sewn into her clothing, slipped beneath the surface. She had survived a year of imprisonment, a diplomatic mission across the Atlantic, and a desperate flight from a grounded blockade-runner, only to … Read more

On the morning of October 22, 1997, Clyde Hutchins, a retired postal worker in the small river town of Delphos, Ohio, was cutting through the narrow alley behind the grain elevator on Walnut Street during his usual walk. Four blocks from a video store parking lot, behind the loading dock, he found the body of … Read more

She was not identified by her face or her fingerprints. She was identified by a small metal bracelet bearing two readable words: Dark Angel. Nineteen-year-old Pam Pitts vanished from a forest clearing outside Prescott, Arizona, in 1988. Thirteen days later, investigators made a devastating discovery in those same woods. This is the case of the … Read more

For a moment, the old man thought he was seeing things. It was Ozone Park, his own neighborhood, a place where faces were remembered and movements were watched, and here was a face he knew from the card table, a face that had looked up at him from the wrong end of a submachine gun. … Read more