l2910 In 1875, James Buchanan Eads made the United States Congress a bet: he could make the Mississippi River dig its own ship channel 30 feet deep through the mud bar at its mouth. At that spot on the South Pass, there was only about 8 feet of water. Eads and his backers would pay for … Read more
Snow swept across the Montana Highlands in January 1877, when two determined forces met in a frozen standoff. Troops under Colonel Nelson A. Miles confronted Lakota warriors led by Chief Crazy Horse in what became known as the Battle of Wolf Mountain, one of the last major engagements of the Great Sioux War. The fight … Read more
The discovery of her husband’s body initially appeared to be a tragic suicide, but a shocking forensic finding turned the case into one of the most controversial murder trials in Australian history. It ended with Ellen Thompson becoming the first and only woman in Queensland ever sentenced to hang. Ellen Lynch was born in Mallow, … Read more
Christina Onassis inherited a multi-billion-dollar shipping empire, and her first act was to eliminate Jackie Kennedy from the Onassis family. She never saw Jackie as an American icon; she saw a fortune-hunting parasite. Christina used her wealth as a weapon, paying Jackie $26 million in cash to legally remove her from the family. She won … Read more
When Alice Clay Vanderbilt married into the Vanderbilt dynasty in 1867, she joined America’s most powerful family at the peak of its Gilded Age glory. Over the following decades, she witnessed the Commodore’s vast fortune swell and then slowly crumble, watching from the sidelines as her descendants squandered an empire that once seemed limitless. Alice … Read more
In the spring of 1972, Coca-Cola sent a brand-new product to Waco, Texas, the birthplace of Dr. Pepper. The choice was deliberate: the soft drink giant wanted to challenge a regional rival on its home turf. The plan was to copy the popular pepper-style soda, undersell it, and use Coca-Cola’s massive distribution network to bury … Read more
In the final days of September 1943, as the Allies pushed toward Naples, German engineers carried out one of the most thorough demolitions of the war. They sank more than a hundred vessels in the harbor, blew up the docks, toppled the giant electric cranes into the water, and destroyed the power plant, water lines, … Read more
The friendly face on the red and white bucket was a real man, but the truth about Harland Sanders is far stranger and darker than the cheerful logo suggests. He was never a soldier, never earned the title Colonel through military service, and the grandfatherly image he projected for decades was a carefully constructed costume. … Read more
In May 1801, a leather-bound farm ledger at Monticello recorded a birth. The month was noted. The day was not. The child was Harriet Hemings, born into slavery on the estate of Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States and the author of the words “all men are created equal. ” Under Virginia … Read more
Barry Newman, the actor whose portrayal of the enigmatic driver Kowalski in the 1971 cult classic *Vanishing Point* cemented him as a counterculture icon, died on May 11, 2023, at New York-Presbyterian Columbia University Irving Medical Center. He was 92 years old. His wife, Angela, confirmed his death, which resulted from complications of a lung … Read more