History

The scream that echoed through the Virginia countryside on March 15th, 1847 was unlike anything the residents of Cumberland County had ever heard. It was not the cry of an animal being slaughtered, nor the wail of a woman in childbirth. According to sealed court documents discovered only decades later, thirteen members of the Peton … Read more

On the night of November 10, 1916, the sky above Glen Cove on Long Island turned a violent orange. The first mansion of Frank Winfield Woolworth, a sprawling wooden estate built as the ultimate symbol of his rise from a barefoot farm boy to one of the richest men in America, was burning. The volunteer … Read more

The barn doors were still chained when the fire took the sky, but no one inside could say who had bound them. The master sat upright in the char of the house for seven nights afterward, his sockets glowing like embers that refused to die, and the villagers learned that looking too long meant your … Read more

The study door stood slightly ajar, revealing a sliver of amber light within, and as the two women approached, they could hear him speaking in low, urgent tones, though no other voice answered. When Nathaniel Crowe commanded them to enter, Eta and Ruth stepped into a room that had been transformed since either of them … Read more

On the morning of September 4th, 1902, a man named Albert Alvord slipped away from a camp sixty miles south of the Arizona border and quietly told the other man there, a stranger to the third member of the party, that his part was done and he was heading out. He also said something odd … Read more

In the autumn of 1891, a geological surveyor named Vernon Ashcroft arrived in the high country of eastern Kentucky, and within two weeks he stood trembling in the dark beside his campfire, rifle raised at figures that should not exist. He was thirty-four years old, a man who had spent nearly twelve years mapping coal … Read more

On the night of October 17th, 1859, in the dining room of Thornton Plantation in Alabama, I killed twelve white people with my bare hands in under twenty minutes. The only regret I carry is that I didn’t kill them sooner. But to understand why a man trained to protect became a massacre, you need … Read more

The crowd pressed shoulder to shoulder in front of the Brandenburg Gate, stretching back through the square until it dissolved into a sea of faces. On the platform, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy stood at the microphone, and the photographer behind his shoulder captured the moment from above—the President’s back, the massed thousands before him, the … Read more

The sod walls pressed in close, and the roof would not let her rise. Six feet below the grass on a Nebraska hillside, the dugout smelled of turned earth and tallow and something that never left. There was no window. Wind pressed against the high door and never stopped. Her hands were cracked to the … Read more