History

In 1850, the United States adopted a package of laws that was celebrated as the salvation of the Union. Within a decade, those same laws helped tear the nation apart. The Compromise of 1850 was designed to quiet the conflict over slavery, but hidden within it was a provision that radicalized the North, enraged the … Read more

The photograph arrived at the Georgia Historical Archive inside a donation box from a recently closed antique shop in downtown Atlanta. Among dusty picture frames and forgotten trinkets, archivist Lauren Mitchell found it tucked inside a cracked leather portfolio—a studio portrait from 1895, surprisingly well preserved despite its age. She carefully removed it and placed … Read more

The courtroom fell silent as the presiding judge pressed the man in the dock to answer a single question: had he been born in Luxembourg? Twice, Robert Alesch refused to respond. The third time, he raised his head and declared, “I was a Luxembourger. I became a German. Constrained and forced, I did my duty … Read more

On the night of April 15, 1912, just after one in the morning, a lifeboat hung level with the deck of the largest ship in the world and would not move. It had been waiting, loaded and ready, for more than an hour. A woman climbed over the rail into it. Her husband held her … Read more

In the spring of 1979, in a rented suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, a woman lay dying with sixty cents on the nightstand and less than four thousand dollars left to her name. She weighed under ninety pounds, her body ravaged by decades of starvation, drink, and pills. Nurses who cared for her in … Read more

In the winter of 1861, a woman stood for the twelfth time in her life on a Virginia auction block, shivering in the biting December wind. She stood nearly six feet four, with shoulders as broad as a man’s and hands that were large, calloused, and strong enough to break a grown man’s neck. But … Read more

The four men had been drifting for twenty days when Tom Dudley and Edwin Stevens exchanged a look that needed no words. The small mahogany punt rose and fell on the long Atlantic swells, the sun scorching their cracked skin, their bodies wasted by nearly two weeks without food. Edmund Brooks had moved to the … Read more

In September 1678, an eighteen-year-old girl was beheaded in Copenhagen, paying the ultimate price for a crime she had been manipulated into committing. The real architect of the plot was Rigitze Grubbe, a former royal daughter-in-law whose poisonous obsession with status had turned her into a monster. Furious over a social humiliation, this formidable widow … Read more

The plain towns keep their weather, their gossip, and their small unpaid debts to themselves, and they air all of it over the fence, across the kitchen table, and in the long Saturday line at the post office. But there is another kind of town. These are the ones that fold a thing up small, … Read more