History

On the third of April 1982, four hundred guests gathered in the First Christian Church in Bloomington, Indiana, to witness the marriage of a woman named Emily Ruth Black to a member of the most famous political family in American history. She had graduated with honors from Indiana University. She had worked her way through … Read more

In December 1893, two children were admitted to a regional asylum in the Scottish Highlands. The case register records a single entry for them. Not a page for each, but one entry, one name, one age, one line for the parish that sent them, and one column for the measurements taken on the day they … Read more

Steve McQueen was born on March 24, 1930, in Beach Grove, Indiana, into a family that would shape him in ways both brutal and defining. His father, a stunt pilot for a flying circus, abandoned his mother when he learned she was pregnant. His mother, Julia, was rebellious and drank heavily, and she left young … Read more

Under the ovens at 27 Prince Street, customers lined up for slices of pizza the way they had since 1959. Above their heads, the small, plain shop front in the heart of New York’s Little Italy did its ordinary business, crowded with a counter, a few tables, and the smell of baking dough. Below their … Read more

The preacher told them to join hands and stand in the middle of the road. That was all he asked of them. One cold morning in the winter of 1937, in the hills of Hancock County, Tennessee, there was no church and no family to watch. There was only a bend in a frozen dirt … Read more

On a September night in 1878, Obadiah Crenshaw sat on the porch of a neighbor’s farmhouse with his Bible on his lap, an old percussion-cap rifle across his knees, and a lantern swinging from a hook above his head. He was a deacon in the Amish settlement of Yarrow Hollow, a man sent for when … Read more

In the summer of 1907, the crowds were out on the pier when the fire began moving through the hotel row on shore. It took down six of the town’s major hotels and roughly seventy cottages, and then it reached the steel and planking of the pier itself, consuming the first hundred feet of decking. … Read more

On the 18th of May 1972, Queen Elizabeth II finally climbed the stairs to see her dying uncle. He was Edward VIII, the man who had given up the throne for Wallis Simpson, and he would be dead within ten days. The Crown would later turn that afternoon into a tender family goodbye. But the … Read more

In late July 1914, the financial center of the world froze solid. The discount markets in London, where banks traded commercial paper, simply stopped functioning. Banks that needed cash could not obtain it at any price. The seizure was global. Some fifty countries faced simultaneous financial crisis before a single shot had been fired in … Read more