When Roald Amundsen reached the South Pole in 1911, he was wrapped in Burberry gabardine. When Robert Falcon Scott’s five-man team reached it weeks later and died on the return journey, they perished inside a Burberry tent that remained intact when their bodies were found eight months later. By the First World War, half a … Read more
Winnie Creech, a 32-year-old widow living in the remote hill country of Crawford County, Indiana, vanished without a trace in 1958 after killing 22 sheriff’s deputies. Despite one of the most intensive manhunts in Indiana history, authorities never found her and eventually concluded she had died shortly after disappearing. But in 2012, spelunkers exploring a … Read more
In the early 1980s, the Soviet Union appeared to the outside world as an invincible superpower, spanning 11 time zones with tens of thousands of nuclear warheads and a four-million-strong army. But beneath the military parades and missile displays, the Soviet economy was in deep trouble, and its survival depended almost entirely on one thing: … Read more
The story of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and the 20th Maine at Gettysburg is one of the most celebrated moments in American military history. The desperate bayonet charge down Little Round Top on July 2, 1863, has been immortalized in books, documentaries, and the film Gettysburg. But beneath the legend lies a controversy that historians have … Read more
On June 7, 1774, her 17th birthday, Georgiana Spencer married William Cavendish, the 5th Duke of Devonshire, in a quiet ceremony at Wimbledon Parish Church. By nightfall she was the Duchess of Devonshire, mistress of one of the largest aristocratic estates in England. She barely knew the man she had married. The match had been … Read more
A young Air Force pilot spent six days hiding face down in a Bosnian forest while Serb soldiers fired into the brush just yards from his head, surviving on rainwater wrung from his socks and insects he dug from the ground. When rescue finally came, the entire country learned his name. Six years later, Hollywood … Read more
In January 1996, a 32-year-old woman stood on a small jazz club stage in Georgetown, Washington, D. C. , and sang for an audience she had personally begged her friends to fill. She had cashed out her retirement savings from her day job at a plant nursery to rent the club, and paid for a … Read more
In March 1917, one of the most powerful monarchies in history collapsed in a matter of days, not years. The Romanov dynasty, which had ruled the largest contiguous empire on Earth for 300 years, ended so suddenly that Tsar Nicholas II recorded it in his diary like a minor inconvenience. Within months, a revolutionary who … Read more
When the sun rose over the Montana grasslands on June 25, 1876, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer had already made the decision that would define Little Bighorn. He did not know it yet, and neither did the cavalrymen riding behind him. But beyond the ridges along the Little Bighorn River, thousands of Lakota and Northern … Read more
On February 18, 1993, Judith Shemtov heard the doorbell at her Staten Island home. The 46-year-old wife and mother had no reason to fear the two men standing outside. She did not know they had been watching her family for weeks, nor that a young man waited in a getaway car down the street. She … Read more