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In early 1914, a letter arrived at Buckingham Palace that made King George V go pale. A woman was threatening to sell his late father’s love letters to the American press. She was no stranger and no enemy of the Crown. She was a countess and a former confidante of the royal family—a woman who … Read more

By 1996, the spy genre was searching for a new direction. The Cold War was over, the old certainties had vanished, and the heroes who defined the previous era no longer fit the moment. Paramount believed an old television property could fill the gap if someone could pull it forward into a colder, sharper form … Read more

In August 1862, Union General George Gordon returned to a battlefield he had just lost and found the body of one of his most popular officers lying among the dead. The officer, William Blackstone Williams of the 2nd Massachusetts Infantry, had been killed at the Battle of Cedar Mountain. Gordon never forgot the sight, and … Read more

Anna Nicole Smith gave birth to a daughter, Danylynn Hope, in Nassau, Bahamas, on September 7, 2006. She was 38 years old. Three days later, her 20-year-old son, Daniel, flew in from Los Angeles to meet his new sister. He sat at her bedside and held the baby. By morning, he could not be woken. … Read more

The Soviet state needed heroes. Clean ones, the kind you name streets after and put on posters. The problem was that the civil war that built the state had largely been fought by men who were anything but clean. One of those men was Grigory Ivanovich Kotovsky, a shaved-headed, left-handed, stuttering bank robber from Bessarabia … Read more

The defeat of George Armstrong Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876 is often remembered as a sudden, chaotic collapse. But the outcome was not decided in those final moments. It was set in motion years earlier by a series of decisions, misjudgments, and the survival of one man who history barely … Read more

On March 25, 1964, at 2:00 in the afternoon, three men entered a National Tea Company grocery store at 4720 South Cicero Avenue in Chicago, a quiet working-class neighborhood a few blocks from Midway Airport. They were not there to shop. Moments earlier, a Brink’s armored car had made its cash delivery, leaving the store … Read more