The legendary rivalry and deep-seated animosity between Major Richard “Dick” Winters and Captain Herbert Sobel, the first commander of Easy Company, has been dissected for decades, but newly surfaced audio recordings and archival interviews provide a stark, unfiltered look at just how profoundly the men of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment distrusted their leader’s tactical … Read more
On February 1, 1977, someone discovered a parked Volkswagen Beetle in the carport of a San Jose apartment complex. Wedged into the back seat was the body of Janette Rston, a 24-year-old mother from San Mateo. She had been strangled with her own dress shirt, and someone had tried to set the car on fire … Read more
In the summer of 1984, Gatorade was on top of the world. As the official sports drink of the Los Angeles Olympics, it had the most credible name in sports hydration, built on genuine science developed by kidney researchers at the University of Florida nearly two decades earlier. That same summer, Quaker Oats, which owned … Read more
On the morning of July 27, 1999, Barry Sanders walked into an office in Wichita, Kansas. He was not in Detroit, not at the Lions’ facility, and not anywhere near the team that had paid him $34. 5 million. Instead, he placed a letter into a fax machine and sent it to his hometown newspaper. … Read more
In the summer of 1876, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer led the Seventh Cavalry into the Montana plains and into one of the most studied defeats in American military history. His decision to attack a massive encampment of Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors on June 25 ended in the destruction of his command and his … Read more
In January 1851, 17-year-old Maria Van Dusen defied her wealthy, respected parents and married John Hendrickson, a local young man known for his idle ways and tarnished reputation. Maria’s father, a retired Albany County Clerk, suspected the match was motivated by money, yet he allowed the couple to live in his Clarksville home for the … Read more
The ghosts of Bastogne never released their grip on Richard Winters, a reality the famed Easy Company commander acknowledged with heartbreaking candor decades after the war’s end, admitting that the trauma of the frozen Ardennes forest still surfaces in daily flashbacks that he must silently endure. In a rare and deeply personal interview conducted in … Read more
In November 1944, inside the Hürtgen Forest, German soldiers repeatedly examined captured American field rations and reached the same conclusion: this was not soldier food, it was a picnic. They noted the chocolate, the gum, the instant coffee, and the small folding can opener, and they wrote home mocking an enemy who sent sons to … Read more
In June 1787, Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter from Paris asking his daughters to join him in France. When they arrived, they were accompanied by a teenage girl who was enslaved and named Sally Hemings. Over the next two decades, she gave birth to six children widely believed to be Jefferson’s, and she became the … Read more
James Longstreet, the senior Confederate general who served as Robert E. Lee’s most trusted commander, found himself the target of a campaign of destruction after his death. But the campaign was not waged on a battlefield — it was waged in history books, memoirs, and the pages of the Southern press. Longstreet was virtually the … Read more