History

The two Bowie brothers had been riding since dawn, and by ten on the morning of November 19, 1831, they were deep in the open prairie country of central Texas, roughly six miles from the old Spanish fort on the San Saba River. They were not alone. With James Bowie and his older brother Rezin … Read more

The dust rose around them in a slow brown haze, thick enough to sting the eyes and coat the throat. It was the morning of April 2, 1855, and Nelson Lee was on a dirt road north of Brownsville, Texas, driving horses west toward California with a handful of other men. The sun had just … Read more

The mall in 1978 hit you before you saw it. Three smells collided at the entrance: caramel popcorn from Karmelkorn, warm baking pretzels from Hot Sam, and the sweet, cold scent of the Orange Julius stand by the escalator. Those three odors defined the space. The department stores were the anchors of the building, but … Read more

The night of August 4, 1964, in the Gulf of Tonkin, the sea was slick with diesel and the only light came from the eerie green glow of radar screens. History books would claim this night launched a crusade for democracy. But the ledgers tell a different story. Vietnam was never merely a military quagmire; … Read more

On a cold February afternoon in 2006, Ronald Hunter walked into his brother’s apartment in the Campo Plaza housing projects on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Harold Hunter had been silent for days, unusual for a man who served as the social hub for an entire generation of New York skaters. Ronald found his brother’s body … Read more

In the autumn of 1953, an unusual stillness settled over Crow’s Nest Hollow, a remote valley deep in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia’s Pocahontas County. Residents later described the season as eerily quiet, as if the mountains themselves were holding their breath. It was during this time that the first documented complaints about the … Read more

In the spring of 71 BC, the Via Appia, Rome’s grandest highway, became something no civilization had ever produced: a slaughterhouse stretching two hundred kilometers. Six thousand survivors of the slave rebellion were nailed to crosses along its length, one every thirty meters, from the gates of Rome to the city of Capua. The executions … Read more

The rain in Harlem fell like an interrogation, a cold, relentless November downpour that washed the cheap perfume off the street walkers and drove the corner boys into the smoky sanctuaries of basement speakeasies. It was a Tuesday night in 1966, a night meant for drawing heavy velvet curtains, pouring a glass of neat bourbon, … Read more

It was past midnight when the Acme Saloon grew quiet, the dice still resting on the bar where John Wesley Hardin had thrown his last roll. His final words hung in the smoky air, four sixes to beat, a gambler’s boast that would serve as his epitaph. Before the hour struck, John Selman, a former … Read more