In 1880, a Cleveland banker who had never operated heavy equipment bought an idle Ohio foundry for $17,000. Daniel Eells pivoted it into steam shovels, and by 1904 his company, Bucyrus, supplied…
On May 22, 1969, the largest machine ever to walk the earth was completed in a factory in South Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It weighed 13,500 short tons, stood 222 feet tall, and stretched 487 feet long. Its bucket held 220 cubic yards—enough to fit two Greyhound buses inside—and it drew 52,500 horsepower from 28 DC motors, … Read more
On June 4, 1942, Vice-Admiral Chuichi Nagumo watched 108 aircraft lift from the carrier Akagi toward Midway, certain the Americans were unprepared andNaN
At 4:30 on the morning of June 4, 1942, Vice-Admiral Chuichi Nagumo stood on the bridge of the aircraft carrier Akagi, flagship of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s First Air Fleet, 240 miles northwest of a tiny coral atoll called Midway. He watched the last of his strike aircraft climb into the gray dawn: 108 planes, … Read more
In 1946, sixteen-year-old Martin Adolf Bormann was hiding on a remote Austrian mountain farm under a false name when he picked up a newspaper by oil lamp and read that his mother had died in an…
A 15-year-old boy sat alone in a small room in a mountain farmstead in the Austrian Alps, reading a newspaper by the light of an oil lamp. The year was 1946, and the name he was living under was not his own. It could not be his own. The boy was Martin Adolf Bormann, eldest … Read more
In 1930, Japan signed a naval treaty limiting its heavy cruisers, then quietly built ships that looked like light cruisers but were designed to becomeNaN
The Imperial Japanese Navy’s heavy cruiser force was built on a lie. The London Naval Treaty of 1930 granted Japan twelve heavy cruisers, while the United States was permitted fifteen. Within a few years, Japanese strategists were deeply dissatisfied. They resented being treated as an inferior naval power and considered heavy cruisers essential to their … Read more
On December 31, 1941, Chester Nimitz raised his four-star flag aboard the submarine USS Grayling, with Pearl Harbor still smoking around him. Eight baNaN
On December 31, 1941, Chester William Nimitz took command of the Pacific Fleet, still reeling from the shock of Pearl Harbor. He had no way of knowing where the Japanese would strike next, whether his handful of carriers could stop them, or which of his officers remained trustworthy. Over the next three years, three situations … Read more
On April 14, 1847, a small notice appeared in the St. Charles Herald: Evelyn Duval, wife of plantation owner Gerard Duval, had vanished from their LouNaN
Evelyn Duval vanished from her husband’s plantation on the night of April 10, 1847. She was last seen around eight in the evening, when she asked the cook to bring tea to the library. By morning, she was gone. So was Henry Carter, a skilled carpenter and literate man who had been purchased at the … Read more
On June 2nd, 1953, as Elizabeth was crowned Queen, her sister Princess Margaret stood in the abbey in a robe of purple velvet, and reached toward a maNaN
She was born on August 21, 1930, in Glamis Castle, during a violent thunderstorm. The second daughter of the Duke and Duchess of York, she arrived in the tapestry room of a fortress already thick with legend. The government had sent the Home Secretary to witness the birth, a relic of an age when royal … Read more
In February 1951, snow fell on Tehran as a teenage bride prepared to marry the Shah of Iran. Soraya Esfandiary-Bakhtiari, just eighteen, had recently NaN
In March 1958, the people of Iran listened to their sovereign’s voice crack and break as he announced the end of his seven-year marriage. The shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, had summoned the composure expected of a ruler, but the reports of the broadcast described a man struggling to keep control, his voice faltering as he … Read more
In August 1908, in the small Welsh mining village of Abertridwr, a 24-year-old lodger named Percy Collins walked into a Cardiff shop and bought two knNaN
In the summer of 1908, the small Welsh mining village of Abertridwr was a place where everyone knew everyone else’s business, and the Lawrence family at number five Aberffwr Terrace was no exception. The household was cramped, with only two bedrooms for seven people, but it was a warm and respectable home. William Lawrence, the … Read more
In 1958, the Shah of Iran divorced his second wife, Soraya Esfandiari-Bakhtiari, not for betrayal or scandal, but because she could not give him an heir. Born in Isfahan to a Bakhtiari aristocrat…
The news reached her through palace channels, as everything did in those final months. The Shah of Iran, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, had made his decision. Under mounting pressure from his government and the unrelenting demands of the Pahlavi bloodline, he was divorcing her. The year was 1958, and Soraya Esfandiari Bakhtiari, the woman the world … Read more