In the summer of 1910, a powder man drilled a line of holes into a granite cliff face above the Skeena River in northern British Columbia, packing each one with dynamite as he edged along a rock…
In the summer of 1910, a powder worker on the southern face of a granite cliff above the Skeena River in northern British Columbia opened a line of holes with a steel drill, holes his partner had started at dawn. He loaded dynamite into each hole in sequence, moving along a flat rock ledge about … Read more
In May 1890, Leonard Harrison told a Pennsylvania newspaper his crews would peel about 3,000 cords of bark from his Pine Creek timber tract. The trees were eastern hemlocks, some over 100 feet…
On the side of the hill, William S. Krippen was doing the one job the whole enterprise existed for. He was peeling bark. It was the 30th of June 1893, the last weeks of the peeling season, and he was working the bark woods at L. S. Mills in Potter County, Pennsylvania. A short distance … Read more
In January 1933, Dr. William Thornton, the only physician in Lynch, Kentucky, vanished without a trace. What unsettled Sheriff James Mallister most waNaN
In the winter of 1933, the coal mining town of Lynch, Kentucky, became the center of a case that local newspapers would later call the Hollow Incident. On the morning of January 23rd, Dr. William Thornton, the town’s only physician for over fifteen years, failed to appear at his clinic. Three miners had been injured … Read more
In 1943, as Allied forces landed in Sicily and Mussolini’s regime began to collapse, the woman who had stood beside him for three decades was nowhere to be seen. Rachele Mussolini had never wanted…
On the night of 9 July 1943, Allied forces came ashore in Sicily, and for the first time in the war, the fighting reached Italian soil. Within weeks, the fascist regime began to crumble. Benito Mussolini, who had ruled Italy for more than twenty years, was stripped of power by order of King Victor Emmanuel … Read more
In the summer of 1852, a bricklayer stood on scaffolding more than 100 feet above the floor of Virginia’s Appomattox River valley, laying the lower courses of a stone pier that would eventually…
The bricklayer stood at the bottom of the Appomattox River valley beneath Farmville, Virginia, setting the lower courses of a stone pier that had already risen thirty feet above the valley floor. The pier still had more than ninety feet to climb before it reached the height where the wooden bridges of the South Side … Read more
In 1953, Porfirio Rubirosa, a Dominican diplomat famed for his lavish bachelor life in Paris, married Barbara Hutton, one of the world’s richest women. She showered him with a coffee plantation,…
The Ferrari hit the tree and stopped. Porfirio Rubirosa, fifty-five years old, was dead. No one ever established whether the crash that ended his life in 1965 was the result of too much drink or the weight of a depression that had been closing in on him for years. What was certain was that the … Read more
In the 1960s, Frank Sinatra underwent one of the earliest forms of hair transplantation, a crude process called punch grafting that left thick, doll-lNaN
Hollywood’s golden age has often been remembered as an era of effortless elegance, when leading men seemed to glide across the screen with charisma that looked as natural as their perfectly styled hair. But behind the carefully composed press photos and flattering studio lighting, many of those same icons were quietly wrestling with a problem … Read more
On May 1, 1536, Henry VIII rose without a word from his seat at the May Day joust, mounted his horse, and rode for London, leaving Anne Boleyn behind NaN
On May 19, 1536, a French swordsman hired for a single purpose planted his feet on the scaffold at the Tower of London. With one fluid horizontal swing, he separated Anne Boleyn’s head from her body. But death did not arrive instantly. For up to thirty seconds, her brain continued to function inside the severed … Read more
In 1300, a Genoese nobleman named Branca Doria was alive and well in Genoa, greeting neighbors who had known him for decades. According to Dante’s Inferno, his soul had already been in hell for…
The wind that froze the bottom of hell had been blowing for four years, and Branca Doria was still walking the streets of Genoa. An old man in furs, eating, sleeping, running his family’s affairs, greeting neighbors who had known him for decades—while the most famous poem in Europe circulated the news that his soul … Read more
In 1894, the same year cinema itself was born, Barbara Castleton arrived in Little Rock, Arkansas. By the 1910s she was acting for the World Film CorpNaN
Barbara Castleton was born in 1894 in Little Rock, Arkansas, in the same year that Thomas Edison unveiled the kinetoscope in New York and the Lumière brothers began their experiments in France. She arrived, almost poetically, in the same year as cinema itself, and her life would run parallel to the fragile art she would … Read more