History

In October 1870, four men rode up a dangerous mountain trail in Cumberland County, Tennessee, and found a house where the windows should have been glowing with candlelight. They were dark. For the first time since anyone could remember, the six flames that had burned every night in that remote building were out. The men … Read more

Edmund Hail lowered the letter to his desk and read the words he had written one more time, then folded it into oil cloth and pressed it into a gap behind the wall of his own house. He would never send it. He would never speak of it. He hid the confession where no one … Read more

In the winter of 1906, on a slope above the Wynoochee River in Grays Harbor County, Washington, a choker setter named August Brennan started his morning the way he had for three years. He pulled on his caulked boots, wrapped a canvas jacket against the coastal cold, and walked into a mountainside that no longer … Read more

The German intelligence officer leaned across the table and spoke to the guard standing by the door, assuming the dark-skinned prisoner before him understood not a word. He said in German, “Diese Neger sind alle gleich, stur und dumm. ” These Negroes are all the same, stubborn and stupid. Sergeant Leon Bass answered in the … Read more

In the silver boomtown of Tombstone, in the 1870s, a man could walk into a drugstore and, for the price of a few coins, walk out with an arsenal that would put him in a federal prison today. Opium, morphine, cocaine, cannabis—all sitting on the shelf right next to the soap and horse liniment, all … Read more

The typing pool is gone now, but the room where it lived still exists in the bones of old office buildings. A visitor under the age of forty will walk past it without noticing a thing. But the evidence is there if you know how to read it: a reinforced floor on the third story … Read more

In the autumn of 1943, on a gray morning at the naval proving ground in Dahlgren, Virginia, a group of engineers and ordnance officers stood behind blast shields and watched a single heavy projectile leave the muzzle of a specially mounted test gun. The round had been years in the making, a desperate answer to … Read more

In the winter of 1944, Soviet infantry advancing through the forests near Nova Sakuliki noticed something strange. German soldiers were not retreating. They were hesitating. These were men who had survived years of blood and artillery, veterans of the eastern front hardened by combat, yet now they were slowing their advance, scanning tree lines, refusing … Read more

In the heart of Riverside, California, stands a building that occupies an entire city block, its rooftops crowded with domes, bell towers, gargoyles, and turrets drawn from five different centuries and six different countries. Beneath its floors lie catacombs. Inside its chapel, a golden altar shipped from Mexico in 32 pieces sits reassembled like a … Read more