l2910 In 1920, the bestselling soft drink in the United States was not Coca-Cola. It was Moxie, a bitter, dark soda from New England, brewed from medicinal roots and sold in bottles bearing a pointing man on the label. That year, Moxie outsold Coca-Cola nationally, and the numbers were not close. Three decades later, a person … Read more
The most exclusive residential street in Chicago in the 1880s had a clear social code: every mansion faced the street with tall windows, carved facades, and grand staircases, so passersby could admire exactly what wealth had built. Then John Jacob Glessner, a farm equipment executive and soon-to-be International Harvester vice president, built a home that … Read more
That morning, most of the women went out to dig turnips, and his uncles went hunting. He stayed behind in the tipi with his grandmother, who was old and weak, and one of his uncles. He went down to the river to swim, wearing only a shirt with his hair braided. When he returned, his … Read more
They were the two people in the presidential box at Ford’s Theatre whom history forgot. History remembers Abraham Lincoln and his wife, Mary. It almost never remembers Clara Harris and Henry Rathbone, the engaged couple who sat beside them on the night of April 14, 1865. By morning, Clara’s white dress was soaked in blood. … Read more
In 1943, at the height of her fame as America’s wartime pin-up girl, Betty Grable received an anonymous letter that read: “This is an extortion. Under threat of your life or great bodily harm, gather $25,000 and uncut diamonds. ” The sender, calling himself the Lap, instructed her to mail the ransom to a Los … Read more
On the afternoon of July 3, 1863, the temperature at Gettysburg reached 87 degrees, and the humidity made the air feel almost suffocating. Confederate soldiers lay flat in the trees along Seminary Ridge, exhausted, hungry, and low on water. In front of them stretched nearly a mile of open farmland, and beyond that ground stood … Read more
The Red River Campaign of 1864 was meant to be a decisive Union victory that would secure eastern Texas and its vital cotton supplies, but instead it became one of the most remarkable engineering survival stories of the Civil War. By June 1862, only a quarter of New England’s cotton spindles were still operating, giving … Read more
In the fall of 1886, a train carrying more than 300 captured Chiricahua Apache prisoners was moving east through Missouri at about 25 miles per hour. The prisoners—men, women, and elders—were being taken to a military prison in Florida following Geronimo’s surrender the previous month. Many of them would die of tuberculosis in the humid … Read more
The climactic battle scene in Oliver Stone’s 1986 film *Platoon* is widely regarded as one of the most harrowing depictions of the Vietnam War ever put on screen. But almost nobody knows that Stone did not invent the chaos, the terror, or the sheer scale of the violence. He lived through it, and according to … Read more
In the summer of 255 BC, a Roman fleet of 364 ships carrying more than 100,000 men was destroyed off the southern coast of Sicily. No enemy fleet attacked them. There was no battle at all. A violent storm drove the ships onto the rocks, and only 80 vessels survived. More men died in a … Read more