l2910

In November 1944, on a rain-soaked sector of the German border where fighting had ground forward barely two miles in three weeks, a German company commander reviewing his morning intelligence summary noticed something he could not reconcile with his training. His men had taken prisoners the day before—soldiers from the same American division that had … Read more

In the spring of 2002, PepsiCo paid Britney Spears $7. 5 million to endorse a new blue-colored, berry-flavored cola called Pepsi Blue. It was the largest celebrity endorsement deal in the history of the cola industry, and the product launch was backed by an estimated $150 million marketing budget. By the summer of 2004, Pepsi … Read more

In 1905, a German immigrant named Friedrich Trump wrote a desperate letter to Prince Luitpold of Bavaria, begging to be allowed to remain in Germany with his pregnant wife. He had left the country twenty years earlier without completing his mandatory military service, and Bavaria considered him a deserter. The prince refused his request. Friedrich … Read more

In the summer of 1983, on a Los Angeles set that was essentially his own home, John Cassavetes was told he had six months to live. He told no one—not his wife, who was starring in the film, and not the crew, who noticed only that his stomach had swollen tight beneath his shirt while … Read more

Most people assume the iconic Old West showdown, a lone hero facing a deadly villain in the middle of a dusty street, was a staple of frontier life. In reality, that image is almost entirely a Hollywood invention. The real American frontier was far harsher, more chaotic, and less glamorous than any Western film ever … Read more

On the American frontier of the 1870s, a man walking through the wilderness of the West was not merely in trouble—he was as good as dead. Death had simply not caught up with him yet. Forty miles of desert separated him from the nearest water source. A hundred miles of open plains separated him from … Read more

When historians ranked U. S. presidents in a C-SPAN survey in 2000, Ulysses S. Grant placed among the ten worst. Fourteen years later, a U. S. News & World Report survey again criticized Grant, with corruption ranking as his worst-reviewed area of presidential performance. Grant himself was never a beneficiary of that corruption, which was … Read more

It was late in the morning of June 27, 1876, and a young lieutenant was walking across a hill in Montana Territory that smelled like a slaughterhouse. Bodies were everywhere, hundreds of them, stripped, swollen, and mutilated in ways he would not describe in his official report. Then he saw it: a pale body at … Read more

At 4 a. m. on July 6, 1964, a burning camp in the mountains of Vietnam fell silent. From the darkness beyond the barbed wire, a loudspeaker crackled to life. The voice addressed the local soldiers inside the camp with an offer: “Drop your weapons. We don’t want you. All we want is the Americans. … Read more

In the summer of 1867, a 54-year-old cattleman named Oliver Loving was shot by two Comanche arrows during a fight along the Pecos River in West Texas. He told his younger partner, Bill Wilson, to keep moving north for help. Then, alone, bleeding, without a horse or water, in the middle of 100 miles of … Read more