PN1501

A Virginia colonel and personal friend of George Washington was burned alive for two to three hours on an Ohio prairie in June 1782, and the full account of what preceded his death — and why the Lenape chose him instead of the officer who led the massacre they were avenging — has been preserved … Read more

The legend of Jim Bridger, the quintessential American frontiersman whose life spanned the better part of the 19th century, is once again capturing the public imagination, but the true story of the man behind the myth is far more complex and fascinating than any Hollywood portrayal. Born in 1804, Bridger would go on to become … Read more

GDANSK, Poland — In an unprecedented spectacle of public justice that drew a crowd estimated at 200,000 people, eleven former guards and officials of the Stutthof concentration camp were hanged simultaneously from gallows erected on Biskupia Gorka Hill on July 4, 1946, their executions carried out in a manner so deliberately slow that each condemned … Read more

August 1944. Brittany, France. The Americans had been sweeping the Germans out of France for two months. Patton’s Third Army was moving east fast, sometimes fifty miles in a day, town after town, the Germans falling back ahead of them. On this particular morning, a supply convoy was moving through a stretch of Brittany that … Read more

April 12, 1945, near Hamburg, Germany. Dawn came in gray streaks over the wire, and the first thing Sergeant Eli Mercer saw was not a rifle, not a guard tower, not even the dead horse rotting beside the road. It was a boy. He stood outside the shattered gate of a makeshift prison camp in … Read more