Maria Mandel was born on January 10, 1912, in Münzkirchen, then part of Austria-Hungary. The daughter of a master shoemaker, she worked as domestic help in Switzerland and Innsbruck before taking a job at the Münzkirchen post office in 1937. When German troops crossed into Austria on March 12, 1938, they were met not with … Read more
Grace Vanderbilt once told a room full of dinner guests that she felt deeply for Marie Antoinette, because if a revolution ever came to America, she would be the first to go. She was not joking. She genuinely believed she occupied the same position in American life that the French queen had held in hers, … Read more
On March 11, 2025, police arrested an 82-year-old man in Pinehurst, North Carolina, accusing him of a murder committed 46 years earlier. The breakthrough in the 1979 killing of Katherine Donaghue did not come from a confession or a tip. It came from a discarded plastic fork pulled from a trash can outside the suspect’s … Read more
On April 15, 1945, the British 11th Armored Division liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northwest Germany. British forces found approximately 13,000 unburied bodies and nearly 60,000 prisoners who were sick and starving. Thousands more inmates died from diseases such as typhus in the months following the camp’s liberation. British forces captured male and female … Read more
In the late 1840s, five men from Ohio stopped before a bronze statue of Thomas Jefferson on the White House grounds in Washington. One of them asked which man in their town most resembled the statue. The answer came back from the group in unison: a Black fiddler in Chillicothe named Eston Hemings. He was … Read more
In the winter of 1920, a seven-year-old girl died in a small Quebec village after enduring months of horrific abuse that her own father and stepmother inflicted upon her. The case of Aurore Gagnon, whose battered body was found to bear more than fifty wounds, would become one of the most infamous child abuse cases … Read more
A 15-year-old Missouri girl who admitted to killing her nine-year-old neighbor told investigators she did it simply because she wanted to know what it felt like. Alyssa Bustamante pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in the 2009 death of Elizabeth Olton, a child who lived just four houses away. To those who knew her in the … Read more
On April 11, 1961, in Jerusalem, chief prosecutor Gideon Hausner opened the trial of Adolf Eichmann. He declared that he stood not alone, but with six million accusers whose voices could no longer be heard. Their ashes, he said, were piled on the hills of Auschwitz and scattered across the fields of Treblinka. The defendant … Read more
He was the most dominant defensive lineman of his era, a player offensive coordinators built entire game plans around for 14 seasons. But in his final years, Randy White could not perform the most basic movement in football: he could not get into his three-point stance. Born Randall Lee White on January 15, 1953, in … Read more
Heinrich Schwarz was born on June 14, 1906, in Munich, then part of the German Empire. He originally worked as a book printer and later trained as a photographer, though he worked in that profession only sporadically. Between 1926 and 1931, he was unemployed. Germany’s economic collapse during the Great Depression contributed heavily to the … Read more