History

The voice on the radio told Colonel Haim Yisraeli to move. It was May 1991, and the Ethiopian government was collapsing within hours. Rebel forces were closing in on Addis Ababa, and the country’s Marxist military council, the Derg, was finished. Israel had negotiated with the dying regime, reportedly paying tens of millions of dollars … Read more

In the winter of 1918, a bricklayer climbed a wooden scaffold in the Deer Lodge Valley west of Montana, and set a course of brick four hundred feet above the ground. Beneath him, the Anaconda Copper Mining Company’s Washoe smelter spread across fifty flat acres of river bottom. The roasting furnaces were running. They were … Read more

She was born to wear a queen’s crown, to be adored by crowds, to take her place at the summit of an empire that had ruled Europe for six centuries. She ended her days shivering on a damp Brussels street corner, selling withered violets to strangers who saw only a beggar woman. Her name was … Read more

On a July afternoon in 1943, a woman leaned over a forbidden radio in a hunting lodge at the foot of the Alps, listening to reports that would decide the fate of the kingdom she had married into. Marie José of Belgium, Princess of Piedmont, had spent three years warning her husband and her father-in-law … Read more

Dawn had not yet broken over Stinking Springs when Charlie Bowdre stepped outside the stone building to tend the horses. He had no reason to think the night would end any differently than the others that had passed since he and Billy the Kid had gone on the run. But Pat Garrett’s posse had surrounded … Read more

In April 1945, George Patton’s Third Army sat on the western bank of the Mulde River, just forty miles from Berlin. His tanks had crossed the Rhine, punched through central Germany, and now faced a road network his engineers had already cleared. The German military was collapsing by the day, surrendering by regiment and by … Read more

Dr. Evelyn Chase had examined thousands of photographs in her career as a medical historian at Johns Hopkins University, but she had never expected to make a diagnosis from an image taken 93 years ago. The photograph arrived on a Tuesday morning in March 2024, part of a collection donated by the estate of a … Read more

The salad bar was the thing. More than fifty ingredients lined up in a long refrigerated row—romaine, cherry tomatoes, shredded cheese, house-made croutons, sunflower seeds, pickled beets, a full lineup of dressings. You could go back as many times as you liked, and for roughly three decades, that garden bar was the quiet anchor of … Read more

The smell hit Dale Morrison before his mind could make sense of what his net had brought up. It was 5:17 in the morning on February 10th, 1979, and the commercial fisherman was running his troller through the Barnegat Inlet near Toms River, New Jersey, when something heavy snagged in the lines. He figured it … Read more