History

The blow came out of the darkness without warning. Sandra Rivet had reached the bottom of the basement stairs at 46 Lower Belgrave Street, a tray of empty teacups in her hands, when the lead pipe swung. There was no shout, no challenge, no moment to turn. The first strike caught her on the head … Read more

On March 23rd, 1946, less than a year after fleeing the wreckage of Hitler’s mountain retreat, Gerda Bormann died in a hospital bed at the age of 37. The cancer had been discovered during Allied interrogations, when the wife of the most powerful man in the Nazi party chancellery sat before her captors and could … Read more

At eleven o’clock on the morning of January 30, 1943, Hermann Göring, the head of the Luftwaffe, stood before a microphone in the great broadcasting house in Berlin. It was the tenth anniversary of the Nazi seizure of power, and the second most powerful man in Germany was about to address the nation. Loudspeakers had … Read more

The spring of 1959 arrived in New York not with a gentle whisper but with the heavy, humid breath of a metropolis waking from a bitter freeze. Sunlight bounced off the chrome bumpers of taxi cabs and lit the concrete canyons of Manhattan, but the light, much like the money and power in this city, … Read more

The night call came after years of silence. For nearly thirty years, the families of Timothy Hack and Kelly Drew had waited for someone to answer for the murders of their children. On the other end of the line was a woman who believed she knew the truth. Her voice trembled as she told the … Read more

The phone rang in Esther Rolle’s small apartment, and on the other end was the voice of a young actress who had just been slapped across the face on national television. The scene had been scripted, the blow staged, but the moment felt so real that millions of viewers gasped. Rolle, who played Florida Evans, … Read more

On the morning of June 14, 1831, just before sunrise, a farmer named Heinrich Probst stepped out of his stone house in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and looked down at the foundation his neighbors had spent three weeks laying in the field below. It was a stone foundation, sixty feet wide and ninety feet long, sunk … Read more

Justina Bolter had been in her new home for barely two months when the Sioux rose against the white settlers of Minnesota. She had come from Prussia in 1854, leaving her aging parents behind in Posen, and after a time near Buffalo, New York, she had settled in Wisconsin, where in 1856, at twenty-two, she … Read more

On the morning of Sunday, October 29th, 2006, two men drove down a dirt road onto an oil lease off Fritz Swanson Road, just north of Highway 31 outside of Kilgore, Texas. They had come out to do some target shooting, but when they got down there, they smelled smoke. Off in the trees, a … Read more