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Cesar Bowen died in 1888 in Greene County, Ohio, with an official recorded age of 126 years. His cemetery ledger listed his birth year as 1762, during the reign of King George III, when Ohio was still largely uncharted wilderness. Seven prominent local citizens swore in notarized statements that they had known Cesar since childhood … Read more

In February of 1860, a letter arrived in Syracuse, New York, from Tennessee. It was from Sarah Log, the wife of the man who had once enslaved Jarm Log. She demanded one thousand dollars. If he refused, she said, she would sell him to a slave catcher who could legally drag him back south under … Read more

On December 7, 1859, auctioneer William Marsh stood in his office on Galveston’s Strand District holding documents that made his hands shake. The man scheduled as lot 43 had arrived three days earlier by steamship from New Orleans, accompanied by paperwork unlike anything Marsh had seen in eleven years of selling human beings. The seller, … Read more

Every night for thirty years, Johnny Carson stepped out from behind the same curtain to reassure America that everything would be all right. He was quick-witted and warm, the most trusted face on television, the man millions of strangers invited into their bedrooms at 11:30. To everyone watching, he seemed to have figured out life. … Read more

The bowl was still full. That was the part nobody could get past. Not the open door, not the cold coming into the house all night, not even the man himself being gone. It was the bowl. He had set it out on the step the way everybody up there did, a big yellow mixing … Read more

The morning mist was still heavy over the Georgia fields in March 1846 when Margaret Hawthorne, a widow of three months, summoned all thirty-five enslaved women of childbearing age to the main hall of her plantation. The nearly three-thousand-acre estate had been built by her late husband over three generations, and Margaret, at fifty-two, had … Read more

For nearly a century, the spot that would become Dodge City, Kansas, had been a waypoint on the Santa Fe Trail, with thousands of wagons rolling past on their way to New Mexico. Long before that, the land belonged to the Wichita, then the Plains Apaches, and eventually the Kiowas and Comanches. The first white … Read more

In the spring of 1920, the city of Los Angeles was still young, spreading out from the dust and orange groves into something like a great metropolis. The scent of orange blossoms mixed with fresh tar along streets being cut for automobiles that were beginning to replace horse-drawn carriages. On South Catalina Street, near the … Read more

In the summer of 1858, more than eight hundred people packed a concert hall in Columbus, Georgia, to witness what the advertisements promised would be the greatest musical curiosity in the American South. Wealthy planters sat in the front rows, politicians whispered among themselves, and reporters clutched notebooks, waiting for something worth writing about. A … Read more

The camera holds a Blackfoot elder’s face in 1926. Bearbull, a Siksika man from the northern plains of Canada, wears a braided knot of hair above his forehead. It is not decoration. That knot marks him as the guardian of a sacred bundle tied to the medicine pipe tradition. In that single frame, memory, duty, … Read more