History

In the autumn of 1932, a carpenter named Refugio Méndez stood on a wooden platform 160 feet above the floor of Carrizo Gorge. Through the open framework of a bridge that was not yet finished and would not be for another four months, he felt the valley winds rising from the desert bottom below, strong … Read more

The dying Grand Duke Nicholas Alexandrovich of Russia, known to his family as Nixa, lay in a villa in Nice in the spring of 1865, his once-handsome frame wasted by cerebrospinal meningitis. His betrothed, the Danish Princess Dagmar, had raced south to join the Imperial family at his bedside, and in those final hours, according … Read more

The telegram reached the Livanos household in late 1960, and while the exact words have faded from the record, its meaning did not need elaboration: Aristotle Onassis wanted a divorce. For Tina Livanos, the wife who had stood beside him for fourteen years, the message confirmed what she had long suspected and what the world … Read more

The night sky over central France split open, and Nancy Wake fell through it. For a few eternal seconds there was nothing but the roar of the dying engines and the wind screaming past her ears. Then the parachute cracked open above her, the world went silent, and below her the forests spread out like … Read more

At ten past two in the morning on the 16th of October 1946, Alfred Rosenberg stepped onto the gallows in the prison yard at Nuremberg. He was 53 years old. The American executioner, Sergeant John C. Woods, had calculated the drop with an error that would prove fatal in the most agonizing sense: too short … Read more

Louis Edward Curtis was born in 1912 and grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana. His father considered himself an aviation buff and often helped friends work on their aircraft in his spare time. That early exposure stayed with the boy and eventually fueled a desire to fly. Curtis attended Purdue University for several years before … Read more

By the morning of June 19, 1944, all the pieces of a catastrophe were already in place, though the man who would bear its weight did not yet know it. Vice Admiral Ozawa Jisaburo had sailed his First Mobile Fleet out of Tawi-Tawi in the southern Philippines six days earlier, bringing Japan’s last great carrier … Read more

In the autumn of 1951, the town of Montpelier, Vermont, began to feel the weight of an unsettling quiet. The maple trees had shed their leaves early, leaving the landscape bare under grey November skies. For those who lived near the old colonial estate at 1847 Elm Ridge Road, the silence carried a burden that … Read more

In the winter of 1980, a team of engineers climbed inside the Statue of Liberty to find out why she was rusting from the inside, and what they found should not have been possible. The iron skeleton holding her up had been quietly eating itself for almost a hundred years. Some of the iron ribs … Read more