History

On the morning of October 5, 2012, ten-year-old Jessica Ridgeway woke in her Westminster, Colorado, home, ate a granola bar, and peeled an orange with her mother, Sarah. She had recently asked for an alarm clock so she could wake on her own, a small sign of independence. She put on her winter coat, said … Read more

In the spring of 1781, Colonel Daniel Brodhead, commanding the western division of the American army, set out to strike a decisive blow against the hostile Indian towns along the Muskingum River. An expedition of about eight hundred men, many of them the most experienced Indian hunters on the Virginia and Pennsylvania frontier, rendezvoused at … Read more

In the spring of 1945, amid the rubble and smoke of a dying city, a young woman lay flat against shattered concrete, her eye pressed to the scope of her rifle. Around her, the advance of the Red Army had stalled. Somewhere ahead, a German machine gun position had pinned down an entire Soviet infantry … Read more

The phone call came into the White House, and when Jacqueline Kennedy picked up the line, Marilyn Monroe was on the other end. Monroe told her, directly, that John Kennedy had promised to marry her. Jackie did not get angry. She did not raise her voice. She told Monroe exactly what the job would look … Read more

The auction house in Charleston had listed it simply as “wedding portrait, circa 1868,” and for Dr. James Miller it sat among boxes of family papers and tarnished silver like so much else that day. The cracked glass and water-damaged frame suggested decades of neglect. James, a historian specializing in Reconstruction-era photography, bid thirty dollars … Read more

The private dining room sat off Mulberry Street, tucked away in a building where men came to settle debts that could not be written down. The yellow lights hung low enough to catch the lines forming around a man’s eyes when he realized he had miscalculated everything. Ice melted slowly in glasses that neither man … Read more

By the winter of 1942, the men who designed Germany’s warplanes were working against a clock that could not be stopped. The Luftwaffe that had swept through Poland, France, and western Russia just two years earlier was no longer the confident instrument of blitzkrieg. Losses on the Eastern Front were mounting. British bombers were hitting … Read more

In 1994, a Houston businessman named Ted Miller bought 133 cell towers scattered across the suburbs of Harris County, Texas. They were steel lattice structures, most under 200 feet tall, bolted to small parcels of leased land behind strip malls and along highway frontage roads. Each tower rented antenna space to one or two wireless … Read more

In November 2015, the small farming community of Scottsville, Kentucky, population just over four thousand, was preparing for the biggest football game of the year. The local school team was set to face a rival county, and nearly everyone in town planned to attend. Among them were the Doolins, a family of five whose oldest … Read more