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The Pacific lay gray and endless on August 30, 1945, the water beaten flat by wind in the final days of a war that had just ended. On the deck of a US Navy transport, Japanese women huddled in thin clothing, their faces pale with exhaustion. Some were nurses captured on Pacific islands, others clerks … Read more

In the mid-1840s, Paris talked of little else but Marie Duplessis. She was beautiful, intelligent, and connected to some of the most powerful and famous men in France. Yet only a few years earlier, she had been a starving girl in rags, born into extreme poverty in the Norman countryside. Her rise was astonishing, and … Read more

On the morning of September 14, 2018, Julia Mercer and Daniel Hayes, students at Euseite College, set out for a weekend hike in Euseite Valley. Julia, studying environmental science, and Daniel, a photography student known for chasing light and shadow, were seen laughing and holding hands as they headed toward the mist trail. Witnesses watched … Read more

Gladys Deacon was celebrated as one of the most beautiful women of the early twentieth century, a figure of such striking appearance and intellect that the writer Marcel Proust once declared he had never seen a girl with so much beauty, such remarkable intelligence, and such kindness and charm. But her life, which began amid … Read more

In the summer of 1866, a woman who had been born a Belgian princess and became an Austrian archduchess through marriage set sail from Mexico for Europe. She was on a desperate mission to save the empire she and her husband had been given the year before. The Empress Carlota hoped to convince the courts … Read more

On April 9, 1865, officers spilled out of a small parlor in Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia, into the afternoon light. The war was over. Ulysses Grant walked out in his usual campaign coat, muddy, unbothered by ceremony. He scanned the yard and saw a face he had not seen since before the war: a broad, heavily … Read more

In the fall of 1861, President Abraham Lincoln, worn down by months of inaction, sent a message to his commanding general that captured his frustration in a single bitter joke: “If General McClellan does not wish to use the army, I would like to borrow it for a time. ” The President of the United … Read more

Klaus Weber stood in the back of an American army truck at 2:47 in the afternoon on June 18, 1943, watching palm trees slip past the canvas opening and trying to understand what was happening. He was twenty-four years old, had been captured three weeks earlier in Tunisia, and had been shipped across the Atlantic … Read more

It is April 9, 1865. Appomattox Court House, Virginia. The war is over. Officers spill out of a small parlor into the afternoon light, dazed, emptied. Then Ulysses Grant walks outside in his usual muddy campaign coat. He scans the yard and sees a face he has not seen since before the war: a broad, … Read more

At 6:47 on the evening of June 15, 1943, Karl Weber stepped off a transport truck at Camp Ruston, Louisiana, expecting to die within a week. He was twenty-four years old, a member of Rommel’s Afrika Korps, captured in Tunisia three months earlier. He had not eaten a full meal in seventeen days. The train … Read more