History

She had been away in Belgium when the scandal broke, and in those first days she could only imagine what was being said about her in Paris. But when Marie Curie finally returned to her home, she found the truth waiting at her doorstep: an angry mob had gathered in front of the house. No … Read more

In December of 1930, a surgeon in Vienna guided an instrument through a man’s nostril, past the sinuses, and into the base of the skull. Oskar Hirsch had pioneered this route twenty years earlier, and now he was using it to reach a tumor that had been reshaping the man’s body for a decade. The … Read more

Anne Boleyn refused the King of England. Not once, not with a coy game of delay, but with a strategy so firm that Henry VIII, a man who believed he could have anything he wanted, found himself writing love letters to a woman who would not take his bed. He had already had her sister. … Read more

On the damp but mild evening of 13 November 1946, Walter Combs was walking home in Woldingham, Surrey, when he spotted what looked like a man lying in a hollow inside a chalk pit. He fetched his father, and the two returned for a closer look. There they found the body of a man in … Read more

He had one wish above everything else: to hear his little daughter speak. His name was Hong Van Duong, a construction worker raising seven-year-old Thao and her two older brothers alone after their mother left when Thao was only a few months old. She never returned to see them again, and never helped financially. When … Read more

The cold case of Springfield haunted investigators for thirty-one years, anchored by a single piece of evidence that science could preserve but not yet identify. On the morning of June 2, 1995, two men walking through Gertrude Park in Springfield, Massachusetts, discovered a body on a slope near Jessie and Warwick Streets. She was twenty-four … Read more

The pilot had been told to hold his altitude and keep his speed low, and nothing more. The men in the back of the aircraft refused to explain what the equipment was for, offering only that it had cost more than the airplane itself, and that if he drifted even a few meters off course … Read more

Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt was forty-five years old, and he was dying by inches in the summer of 1925. The doctors had told him his liver was failing. They had told him for years. His family had pleaded with him, his young wife had watched him deteriorate, and now the evidence was impossible to ignore. Jaundice … Read more

Tom Kearney fired the last round of the night shift, and when the smoke cleared, there was a hole in the face of the rock and behind it, empty air. It was not an old working, because no one had ever cut into this stone before. Above him lay 1,400 feet of solid rock without … Read more