History

In 1924, quarry workers blasting limestone near the town of Taung in South Africa uncovered a small fossilized skull embedded in the rock. Raymond Dart, the anatomist at the University of the Witwatersrand who examined it, recognized immediately that it belonged to a child roughly three to four years old, and that it was not … Read more

If you strip the outer jacket off a three-phase power cable, you will notice something odd. Three conductors are the same thickness, but the fourth, the neutral, is visibly thinner, in some cables about half the cross-section of the phase wires. It is not a defect. It is a deliberate engineering decision that has persisted … Read more

The company that invented the modern minivan, built the tallest building in the world, and put Walter Chrysler on the cover of Time magazine as Man of the Year was rescued by the United States government not once, but twice. Congress rewrote the rules of capitalism to keep it alive. The American taxpayer bankrolled its … Read more

She knew before she walked down the aisle that she was marrying the wrong man for the right reasons. The world would never understand that distinction, and in the autumn of 1968, it did not try to. The announcement that Jacqueline Kennedy, the most admired widow in America, the woman who had walked behind her … Read more

In the fall of 1906, a surveyor named Orrin Ashmore stepped off the road at a crossroads store in Carroll County, Arkansas, and rented the only empty room in the house above ParMelia Vance’s shop. He was forty-four, a careful, methodical man who believed in measurement the way other men believed in scripture — that … Read more

Princess Helena Augusta Victoria, the fifth child of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, was barely noticed by history. Of all the Queen’s children, hers is the name most often forgotten, and the reasons for that obscurity were woven into her life from the very beginning. It started with a difficult birth. Helena arrived on the … Read more

In the winter of 1353, a fourteen-year-old French princess named Blanche of Bourbon crossed into Castile to meet the man she was to marry, King Pedro I. She had been promised to an eighteen-year-old monarch described by contemporaries as a muscular, unusually tall beauty for his time. To her family, the match seemed ideal. But … Read more

The cotton sack lay on the marshal’s desk in Fort Smith, Arkansas, still damp from the creek bed where a farmer had plowed it up that same afternoon. Inside was a Sharps carbine, military issue, its stock blackened by old fire, its barrel warped from heat. Wrapped in the rotted remains of the sack, the … Read more

For a country that had built the Concorde, the world’s fastest passenger jet, and the TGV, its high-speed rail network, the question seemed almost unthinkable. France had assembled its own fighter jets, nuclear reactors, cars, and satellites, driven by a state that poured billions into factories and laboratories with an ambition that would make Silicon … Read more