History

In the winter of 1937, as Joseph Stalin’s secret police executed hundreds of thousands across the Soviet Union, an American woman sat across from the dictator at his own table, dressed in diamonds and smiling. Marjorie Merriweather Post, the richest self-made woman in America and the driving force behind the General Foods empire, had stepped … Read more

The agreement came apart in a single gesture. On April 11th, 1873, under a flag of truce, the Modoc leader Kintpuash spoke three words to the American commissioners gathered on the lava field: “Ot-we-kau-tux. ” Let us do it. He drew a pistol and shot General Edward Canby in the face. The bullet killed him … Read more

They did not die quietly, these Depression-era outlaws. It went against their religion. They died in ditches outside Gibsland, Louisiana, like Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, their car punched through with a hundred and thirty rounds. They died like John Dillinger on the Chicago sidewalks, coughing blood into the streetlights outside the Biograph Theater. They … Read more

In the cold, damp early hours of March 24, 1603, Queen Elizabeth I lay dying on a pile of cushions in Richmond Palace. For days she had refused her bed entirely, sometimes sitting or standing rigidly for more than fifteen hours at a time. Her attendants believed she was convinced that if she ever lay … Read more

On a warm Saturday afternoon in July 1975, two teenage girls climbed into a white pickup truck in Pensacola, Florida, and were never seen alive again. They left behind a half-empty bag of sunflower seeds, a pair of yellow roller skates, and a town that spent five decades searching for answers the authorities decided it … Read more

On the morning of January 14th, 1979, Tommy DeSimone walked out of his house in Queens and climbed into a car with two men he trusted. He was twenty-eight years old. He believed he was on his way to the ceremony that would make him a made man in the Lucchese crime family. Instead, he … Read more

In February 1988, in a quiet corner of Abedeen, Marian Crawford was buried. For sixteen years she had raised two little princesses, delayed her own marriage to stay with them, and loved them as her own. Not one member of the family she gave her life to sent a wreath. Only a silence that had … Read more

The rattle of a Swan Vesta box, the scrape, the little hiss and flare that lit the gas ring, the coal fire, the last cigarette of the night—for generations of Britons, this sound was as ordinary as breathing. At its height, the empire behind that flame produced 45 billion matches a year. The Garston works … Read more

The bolt slid home with a sound like thunder, and for one suspended moment there was nothing but the heavy silence of the night pressing in around her. Then Harlon’s roar shattered it. His body crashed against the oak door from the inside, his fists pounding until the whole structure shuddered. The air that night … Read more