History

At first glance, the strange twin-tailed fighter looked like an oversized reconnaissance plane. Slow, awkward, hardly a threat. Japanese pilots smirked as they closed in. But within minutes, entire formations of Zeros were tumbling into the sea, their reign of dominance broken in a single morning. This machine was no experiment. It was the Lockheed … Read more

In the early hours of February 21st, 1960, the door of a bedroom in the British colonial capital of Jesselton, North Borneo, was opened, and the people who came in found Edwina Mountbatten dead. She had gone to sleep the night before and never woken. She was fifty-eight years old, thousands of miles from the … Read more

On a clear July afternoon in 1930, in an orchard in the Kentish village of Marden, searchers walked between the apple trees and found the body of a woman who had fallen out of the sky. There was little left by which to know her. In the end, they were certain of her only by … Read more

In a quiet room in New York, in the spring of 1913, the last will of the most powerful banker in America was read aloud. It opened not with money but with a prayer, a confession of faith, a plea about the blood of Christ and a soul carried faultless before the throne of God. … Read more

Alphonse D’Arco sat in a room at the Kimberly Hotel on East 50th Street in Manhattan, and he understood what he was looking at. It was September 1991, and the men around him were supposed to be his. He was the acting boss of the Lucchese crime family, one of the five Mafia families of … Read more

In February 1676, Mary Rowlandson and her children were taken captive by Wampanoag warriors after a raid on Lancaster, Massachusetts, that left many settlers dead, including her own daughter. The raid was part of King Philip’s War, a conflict that Metacom—known to the English as King Philip—had launched against the colonies of Massachusetts and Rhode … Read more

In the summer of 1852, at a wharf in New Orleans, stacked with bales of cotton six tiers high and sugar barrels rolling across the planks, the steamboat Eclipse came to rest. A river pilot who had been sounding the river since before the Mexican War threw his line over the stern. The reading came … Read more

On October 7, 2019, the first call to 911 spoke only of a disturbance: a man and a woman arguing violently outside a spa in Fort Myers. When police arrived, they found a terrified woman, the girlfriend of Wade Wilson, and signs of a physical assault. The suspect had fled, but not in his own … Read more

On the morning of September 3rd, 1891, a man named Joseph Barzak stood on a wooden platform one hundred and eighty-six feet above the concrete footing of a chimney under construction at the Carnegie Steel Company’s Homestead Works, on the South Bank of the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh. The platform was four feet wide. It … Read more