History

Amos Breedlove saw the flames first, licking through the eastern wall of the Whitfield house, each of the seven windows glowing orange against the storm-black sky. It was the night of September 12th, 1869, and lightning had struck the property. He rode through the downpour to help, and when he stepped through the unlocked front … Read more

The kitchen of the big house was fragrant with the meat that she would never taste. In her apron pocket, pressed flat against her hip, was a biscuit wrapped in a cloth scrap. One biscuit, stolen while the mistress’s back was turned. The cook knew the punishment if it were found—a whipping, perhaps, or sale … Read more

The telephone call reached Copenhagen in the autumn of 1938, and King Haakon VII of Norway wasted no time. His wife, Queen Maud, had fallen ill during one of her habitual visits to England and was now recovering from an abdominal operation in a London nursing home. The king hastened across the North Sea to … Read more

The neighbor stood at the edge of his lawn and watched the man come running out of the house across the way. It was a little after six in the morning, and the man was out of breath, clutching a bedsheet that was stuffed full of something. The neighbor thought it looked strange, so he … Read more

The water was black and still. Somewhere behind her, the largest ship ever built was sliding into the Atlantic, its stern rising against a sky full of stars. Meline Force Astor gripped an oar with bare hands and pulled. She was eighteen years old. She was five months pregnant. And the richest man in America, … Read more

On July 23, 1892, a young man carrying a revolver and a steel dagger walked into Henry Clay Frick’s office in downtown Pittsburgh. He was Alexander Berkman, an anarchist who had come to kill the most hated industrialist in America. He fired twice. The first bullet struck Frick in the neck, the second missed. Frick, … Read more

Elizabeth Tudor was being sent to the Tower of London. Her sister had already executed Lady Jane Grey. Why would Elizabeth live and become queen? She was twenty years old. The woman deciding her fate was Mary, Queen of England, and Elizabeth’s royal blood made her dangerous whether she joined a rebellion or not. Before … Read more

In December 1779, a woman lay dying in the Hudson Valley, and as she passed, she left behind a story so harrowing that her kinswoman felt compelled to share it. That story, first published in serial form that same year by Ann Eliza Bleecker, was written to comfort women who had lost children in the … Read more

On a gray November afternoon in 1966, an 18-year-old mother named Karen Snyder was killed inside her modest home in Calumet City, Illinois. The crime would go unsolved for 58 years, longer than Karen had been alive. The man who took her life did not break in, vanish, and disappear into history. He washed the … Read more