In 1906, a land surveyor named Orrin Ashmore arrived in a remote Arkansas valley where locals refused to cut timber above a split beech tree, warning him never to cross it after dark or answer any…
The old people called it Thrawl Hollow, a fold in the land in Carroll County, Arkansas, that looked like nothing at all. In spring it was green, with clear water running over stone, and the slope was so gentle that a tired man could climb it with his hands in his pockets and never lose … Read more
On August 16, 1944, in Chartres, France, American tanks had reached the town and the Germans were pulling out. Behind the prefecture, a prison barber shaved the heads of eleven women, one after…
The American photographer stepped into the path of the procession and raised his camera. Before him came eleven women, one after another, their heads freshly shaved, marched home through the streets of Chartres with a crowd following behind. One of them carried a baby, less than three months old. The mother was in her early … Read more
In 1843, two weeks after her wealthy husband died, 26-year-old widow Ella Whitfield summoned his lawyer with a request that stunned Savannah: free one of her husband’s enslaved men, Samuel, and…
The letter from Dr. Richard Harris, dated the 12th of October, 1842, was never meant to be read by anyone but an old medical school friend in Charleston. In it, the Whitfield family physician described a professional dilemma that had kept him awake for nights. Mrs. Whitfield had come to him complaining of fatigue and … Read more
In November 1875, an Indian Bureau inspector named Irwin Watkins filed a report claiming the Lakota were murdering settlers and richly deserved punishment. There was no evidence for it. Just days…
The Lakota stole the Black Hills. They took them by force from people who already lived there, and they held them for barely a hundred years before somebody else took them away again. That is an irrefutable historical fact. But it is equally true that the United States government promised the Lakota they could keep … Read more
In 1792, more than 400 enslaved men, women, and children were rented out to build the home of the American president. Their owners were paid about five dollars a month; the workers received only…
In October 1901, a restoration crew working on the east wing of the President’s House struck bone. Six feet below the present ground level, digging to expose the original foundation stones laid in 1792, a shovel hit something that was neither stone nor soil. The foreman was called. They dug more carefully. Skulls, at least … Read more
In 1884, an unsigned letter reached a Louisiana courthouse with one unsettling accusation: the family at a place called Beelzebub Fork was eating what it should not and worshipping what it should…
In the late spring of 1884, Théodore Blanchard crouched behind a fallen cypress log eighty yards from the clearing, watching a family he had come to investigate prepare something he could not yet name. He had left Madisonville before dawn with three other men, traveling north through the upper Tchefuncte River until the channels narrowed … Read more
In 1871, a coal town in Pennsylvania gathered for a wedding between Thomas and Margaret Kelligan, who shared the same father. Snow fell on Centriia as Margaret, nineteen, wore burgundy velvet and…
The alarm spread through Centriia before the first church bell rang. On a raw December morning in 1871, with snow piling against the wooden storefronts and the sulfurous breath of the underground coal fires curling through the streets, the town assembled outside St. Ignatius Church to witness a wedding that should never have been. Margaret … Read more
On June 25, 1876, Lieutenant Winfield Scott Edgerly rode across the cracked, sun-scorched plains of Montana with Major Marcus Reno’s battalion, ordered by General George Armstrong Custer to…
The order came at midday, carried by an orderly who had pushed his horse hard across the broken ground. It was from General Custer, and it was brief: We have found a large village. Hasten your pace. Bring up the packs. I was Lieutenant Winfield Scott Edgerly, riding with the battalion commanded by Major Marcus … Read more
In 1925, Howard Carter’s team used heated knives to cut the famous face of Tutankhamun free from his coffin, because the boy king’s body was fused to the wood by hardened resin. What the scans…
In November 1925, a man used a hot knife to cut through the most famous face in history, because the body beneath it was stuck to its coffin. But what that knife revealed was not the body of a god. It was a nineteen-year-old boy with a clubfoot, a rotting toe, and parents who were … Read more
On June 27, 1876, a column of soldiers crested a ridge in the Montana Territory searching for George Armstrong Custer and the 7th Cavalry. The smell reached them first, sweet and thick, rising…
On June 27th, 1876, a column of soldiers on horseback crests a ridge in the Montana territory. They are looking for George Armstrong Custer. They are looking for the 7th Cavalry. What they find instead is a field. The smell reaches them first, sweet, thick, wrong. It is the smell of two hundred bodies swelling … Read more