History

On the morning of February 7, 1893, Martha Place heard her husband leave for work after a quarrel that had ended with him striking her in the face. He had confronted her about stories his daughter had told him, stories Martha insisted were false, but William Place did not believe her. The atmosphere in the … Read more

In 2013, workers digging the foundations for a new parking garage in the German city of Erfurt struck something they were never supposed to find. Bones. Human bones. Dozens of them, packed into the cold soil beneath a medieval building that for centuries had disguised itself as an ordinary grain storehouse. What those workers stumbled … Read more

On the ground lay a nineteen-year-old, unarmed. Two police officers stood over him, then opened fire. He survived, but the bullets severed his spine from the waist down. Then the officers did something worse than shoot him. They planted a rifle beside his paralyzed body, swore he had threatened them with it, and sent him … Read more

Some heiresses are born into unimaginable wealth, yet their fortunes bring them anything but happiness. Gloria Vanderbilt, born in Manhattan on February 20, 1924, was the inheritor of one of America’s greatest dynasties. Her father, Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt, was a great-grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the railroad and shipping titan who had been the richest man … Read more

On a Tuesday in July 1991, in the middle of a heat wave, a highway maintenance worker was on the Henry Hudson Parkway at the northern tip of Manhattan. On a wooded embankment near the Dyckman Toll Plaza sat a blue and white cooler. Coolers get left in places like that; people set them down … Read more

In the spring of 1888, in a shipyard on the Superior waterfront in Wisconsin, where half the work floor was still open to the sky, a crew of riveters was assembling a hull that no one in Great Lakes shipbuilding had ever attempted before. There were no flat sides to her. There were no right … Read more

The idea of the Wild West as a place where a man’s grit and gun determined his worth is a story Americans have told themselves for generations. But the story the numbers tell is far less romantic. In the boomtowns of the gold rush, a single pound of cheese could cost twenty-five dollars, more than … Read more

The grizzly came out of the river brush with no warning, a massive sow with cubs somewhere behind her. Hugh Glass saw her too late to raise his rifle properly, and by the time he brought the weapon up, the bear was already on him, her paws tearing into his flesh with a force that … Read more

She crouched in the cellar as the shells screamed overhead, a hill like the one above her town now the gateway for an advancing army. The war had come to Westbeke, and with it the French soldiers who had held this ground were pulling back, leaving behind their wounded and their dying. The Germans would … Read more