In July 1899, gunfire shattered an ordinary afternoon in Brandon, Manitoba. Mary Lane, a mother of four, was shot twice while hanging curtains in her NaN
On the afternoon of Wednesday, July 5, 1899, the sound of gunfire shattered the ordinary quiet of a house in Brandon, Manitoba. Mary Lane had been shot twice, once in the back and once in the head. Despite her wounds, she staggered from her home before collapsing on the sidewalk. Neighbors rushed to her aid, … Read more
In April 1997, a tabloid paid a former TWA flight attendant to lure Frank Gifford into a Manhattan hotel room secretly wired with cameras. The NFL legNaN
In the spring of 1997, two men from the same extended family became entangled in scandal within weeks of each other. One was a son-in-law. The other was a father-in-law. The two wives would spend the rest of their lives bearing the consequences of what the men had done, but in very different ways. One … Read more
When Japanese aircraft came over Guam on December 8, 1941, Navy nurse Leona Jackson ran for the nearest cover and stopped dead in the doorway of the lNaN
In the linen room of the naval hospital in Agana, the young Chamorro nurses knelt in their white uniforms, saying the rosary as Japanese aircraft roared overhead. Leona Jackson, one of five American Navy nurses on Guam, tried to run for cover but stopped in the doorway, taking a mental roll call of the faces … Read more
On July 3rd, 1941, just eleven days into the invasion of the Soviet Union, Germany’s Army Chief of Staff Franz Halder wrote in his diary that the campaign would be won within two weeks. German…
On July 3rd, 1941, eleven days into the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Chief of Staff of the German Army, Franz Halder, put his assessment in writing. The campaign, he concluded, would be over within two weeks. It lasted four more years. The men who survived it left behind letters and, unknown to them, … Read more
In 1887, a young drifter named Harry Longabaugh stole a gun, a horse, and a saddle near Sundance, Wyoming. Caught and sentenced to eighteen months, he walked out of prison carrying a new name: the…
At around two in the morning, the men outside the little hut in San Vicente, Bolivia, heard a scream from inside. Then a gunshot. The screaming stopped. A few minutes later, another shot rang out. By then, the hut had been under siege for hours. It had started the day before, when two masked American … Read more
In November 1943, near the bombed Italian town of San Pietro, an American soldier knelt in the rubble and fed a starving baby animal from a can of military rations. The photograph, donated by…
At the National World War II Archives in College Park, Maryland, military historian Dr. Sarah Chen was digitizing a collection of photographs donated by the family of the late Sergeant Michael Thompson when she stopped at an image from the 1943 Italian campaign. A young American soldier knelt in what appeared to be a bombed … Read more
In 1941, Henry Kaiser had never built a ship in his life. He had built dams, bridges, and pipelines. So when the U.S. handed him the impossible task of out-producing German U-boats, he applied…
On the morning of September 27, 1941, the SS Patrick Henry slid down the launching ways at the Bethlehem-Fairfield shipyard in Baltimore and entered the waters of the Patapsco River for the first time. President Roosevelt was there. He named the ship “Liberty Ship,” borrowing the phrase from Patrick Henry himself, and the name stuck. … Read more
In November 1966, police in the Berkshire village of Beenham asked every man aged 16 to 50 to roll up his sleeve and give a blood sample to catch a kiNaN
In November 1966, in a small village in Berkshire, every man between the ages of sixteen and fifty was asked to roll up his sleeve and give a blood sample so police could find a killer. Nothing like it had ever been tried in the country before. More than two hundred men came forward, and … Read more
In 1902, a photographer in Greenwood, Mississippi, took a formal portrait of a Black family of seven—and decades later, an archivist named Sarah Mitchell noticed something in the mother’s hands….
It was a humid Tuesday morning in August when Dr. Sarah Mitchell found the photograph that would upend everything she thought she knew about American history. She had spent twenty years in the basement archives of the National Museum of African-American History, cataloging donated collections, examining thousands of images—faded tintypes, cracked daguerreotypes, portraits of people … Read more
In 1938, deep in West Virginia’s Harkins Gap, forest ranger Jubal Ashmore watched an unbroken fog settle over the hollows and refuse to leave for nine days. On the third day, he found his…
The fog closed in over the top of Alva Pell’s head, and Jubal Ashmore stood on the landing of the fire tower and watched the old trapper go down into it, slow and careful, the way a man steps down into cold water. The hound stayed pressed so tight against his leg that it near … Read more