In August 1881, in the New Mexico Territory, a sergeant with the Ninth Cavalry reined in his horse at the edge of a dry creek bed and stared at the ground. The tracks he had been following for three days had simply stopped. Six Apache warriors had entered a stretch of rocky ground, and none … Read more
John Amery was born in London on March 14, 1912, into a family of considerable political standing. His father, Leo Amery, was a British statesman and Conservative government minister. His mother, Florence Greenwood, came from a prominent Canadian legal family. Despite this privileged background, John’s behavior worried his family from an early age. At just … Read more
When Genghis Khan divided his empire, he passed over his four famous sons entirely. The lands he handed to them were not the crown of his domain—they were open grassland, deliberately placed far from the treasury and from one another. The beating heart of the world economy never went to them. Instead, the great Khan … Read more
Abraham Lincoln’s bid for a second term in 1864 unfolded while the nation was torn apart by civil war, making it the only presidential election ever held during active national conflict. With roughly 4 million voters heading to the polls, the choice before the Northern electorate was stark: stay the course and finish the war, … Read more
John F. Kennedy Jr. was not instrument-rated, a fact that would prove fatal on the night of July 16, 1999, when his single-engine Piper Saratoga plummeted into the Atlantic Ocean about seven and a half miles off Martha’s Vineyard. The crash killed Kennedy, 38, his wife Carolyn Bessette, 33, and her sister Lauren Bessette, 34. … Read more
John Madden built one of the greatest teams in NFL history, won a Super Bowl, and created plays with names like “The Immaculate Reception,” “The Sea of Hands,” and “The Ghost to the Post. ” But when NFL Films asked him years later to name the proudest moment of his coaching career, he did not … Read more
An American colonel was stirring a pot over a fire beside the Dobodura airstrip when a young Australian officer found him. The Australian, Lieutenant Colonel Robertson, was the senior liaison officer to General Edmund Herring, who commanded New Guinea Force. He had come looking for the American front line and found the division commander had … Read more
On the night of July 22–23, 1944, soldiers of the Red Army reached Majdanek, the first major Nazi camp to be liberated, located in German-occupied Poland. The discovery became one of the most significant moments of World War II and the Holocaust, exposing the full scale of Nazi crimes to the world. Soviet officials invited … Read more
A photograph taken on April 8, 1971, on a low mound of red earth in South Vietnam shows six men who had just returned from nine days in the jungle, squinting toward the camera. Four Australians stand around an American, a U. S. Navy SEAL who had volunteered to accompany them into one of the … Read more
Actress Natalie Wood was found floating face down in the Pacific Ocean off Catalina Island on the morning of November 29, 1981. She was 43 years old, alone in the water in a nightgown and down jacket, roughly a mile from the yacht where she had gone to sleep the night before. The three men … Read more