PN1501

In March 1945, a captured German Panzer general was brought to Third Army headquarters. He was tall and rigid, the kind of Wehrmacht officer who still believed Germany could win. His uniform was immaculate despite days in captivity, and his Iron Cross was still pinned to his chest. Intelligence officers wanted to interrogate him about … Read more

Millions of Americans romanticize the Wild West as an era of rugged cowboys, untamed spirits, and trailblazing pioneers, but historians and health experts are now warning that the frontier’s legendary hygiene habits were far deadlier than any gunfight ever staged on a dusty main street. From whiskey consumed as a full meal to cocaine-based toothache … Read more

MINNESOTA TERRITORY, August 1862 — A survivor of the Dakota uprising has provided a harrowing first-person account of the violence that swept across southwestern Minnesota this summer, describing the murder of her family, her abduction by warriors, and the brutal sexual assaults she endured while held captive, in testimony that has now emerged from a … Read more

Colonel William Crawford, a veteran frontier commander leading a 465-man militia expedition against British-allied Indian towns along the Sandusky River, was burned alive at the stake, his bones reduced to “almost ashes,” according to the harrowing eyewitness account of Dr. John Knight, the expedition’s surgeon, who escaped captivity after bludgeoning his guard and walking nearly … Read more

Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the legendary “Desert Fox” of the German Wehrmacht, privately conceded in the final months of his life that the American Third Army under Lieutenant General George S. Patton Jr. had achieved “the most astonishing achievements in mobile warfare” he had ever witnessed, according to his personal papers compiled nine years later … Read more

Tokyo’s most triumphant broadcast of the Pacific War was built on a lie so complete that the empire that told it would never recover from believing it. On October 16, 1944, Imperial Radio announced to a starving nation that Japanese aviators had destroyed 11 American aircraft carriers, two battleships and three cruisers in the waters … Read more

  VIENNA — Margaret Theresa of Spain, Holy Roman Empress and the central figure of Diego Velázquez’s masterpiece “Las Meninas,” died at the Hofburg Palace on March 12, 1673, at the age of 21, her body destroyed by a genetic inheritance that the most powerful family in Europe had spent two centuries deliberately constructing.   … Read more

MADRID — The autopsy report that landed on the desks of Europe’s royal courts in November 1700 read less like a medical document and more like a confession of two centuries of biological self-destruction. Charles II, the last Habsburg king of Spain, had died at thirty-eight with a heart the size of a peppercorn, lungs … Read more