History

The temperature on the field south of Gettysburg had climbed past ninety degrees by early afternoon on July 3rd, 1863. Twelve thousand Confederate soldiers were being arranged into lines nearly a mile wide. Among them was a fifty-one-year-old general named Lewis Armistead, wearing a gray coat and a black felt hat with the brim pinned … Read more

The single gunshot echoed through the Chiricahua Mountains shortly after three in the afternoon on Thursday, July 13, 1882. The people at the B. F. Smith Ranch in the western foothills heard it plainly. A few other residents in the area heard it too. At the time, it attracted little attention, because firearms were a … Read more

At ten-fifteen on the night of October 23, 1935, Arthur Flegenheimer—Dutch Schultz to the world, the Bronx beer baron of Prohibition days, now the gambling king of Harlem—sat at the back table of the Palace Chophouse at 12 East Park Street in Newark, New Jersey, just across the river from the New York that had … Read more

In the last year of his life, Aristotle Onassis decided to end his marriage, and he chose his instrument with care. He hired Roy Cohn, a New York attorney with a reputation for being the most aggressive and least scrupulous lawyer in the city. Cohn had made his name as a very young man as … Read more

For nearly a century, the Swedish Crown deployed the full coercive machinery of the state to bury a fact that it dared not let the public see. History long honored King Gustaf V as the sober patriarch who kept the Nordic nations neutral through the Second World War. The declassified record tells a very different … Read more

The first rays of dawn were just beginning to color the sky over San Antonio when the sound of cannon fire split the quiet of March 6, 1836. On the southwestern corner of the Alamo, Davy Crockett and a handful of defenders shouldered their rifles and loosed volley after volley into the Mexican soldiers scrambling … Read more

She was born an Imperial Highness, the granddaughter of a Holy Roman Emperor, the grandniece of Marie Antoinette. She was promised a sun-drenched throne, unlimited power, and a legacy meant to last for centuries. Yet she ended her life as a stateless refugee, a living ghost wandering the cold halls of a borrowed castle, forced … Read more

The fireball rolled over the blocks around the tracks at seven minutes to three in the afternoon, and when it passed, sixteen people were dead, among them the town’s fire chief and its police chief, Guy Barnett. Forty-three more were hurt. Buddy Frazier, then a young Waverly policeman and later the town’s mayor, said the … Read more

At 1:30 in the morning on June 11, 1970, Tommy DeSimone, Jimmy Burke, and Henry Hill were driving up the Taconic State Parkway with a dead man in the trunk. At least, they believed he was dead. They had beaten Billy Bats unconscious at the Suite, a nightclub in Queens, forty minutes earlier, wrapped him … Read more