On August 28, Norway closed a chapter that had defined it for more than half a century. King Harald died at the age of 89, ending a reign that had made him the most beloved figure in the nation. His body was brought to the Red Room of the Royal Palace, where, for the first … Read more
At dusk they came down out of the mountains, a small band of horsemen leading a bound man through the camp of their worst enemy. The prisoner had once called himself a match for any khan on earth. His name was Jamukha. The men who brought him were his own followers, his closest companions, and … Read more
On October 20, 1865, Champ Ferguson was marched to the gallows in Nashville, Tennessee. Ten days earlier, a military court had found him guilty of fifty-three counts of murder, and even that staggering number did not cover the full scope of his wartime killing. Ferguson himself claimed to have killed more than one hundred men. … Read more
In June 1999, a woman died in a former abbey in Essex, and the newspapers found a story they could not resist. Christina Foyle, who had run the world’s largest bookshop for more than half a century, had left a fortune of nearly £60 million. Most of it went to a new charitable foundation. A … Read more
The bullet struck James Ewell Brown Stuart in the left side of his abdomen. It was fired from barely thirty yards away by a dismounted Union private whose name almost no one would remember. It was May 11, 1864, and the most famous cavalryman in America was about to begin an ordeal that would last … Read more
On June 25, 1876, a thirteen-year-old Lakota boy named Black Elk knelt in the dust beside a dying soldier. The soldier’s legs were still kicking. Black Elk’s knife was dull and would not cut cleanly, so he pressed the barrel of a gun to the man’s forehead, pulled the trigger, and finished what he had … Read more
On the afternoon of December 5, 1919, two senators entered a bedroom in the White House to test whether the president could still govern. The woman beside his bed had already decided what they would be allowed to see. Albert Fall and Gilbert Hitchcock found Woodrow Wilson propped against pillows, his left side hidden beneath … Read more
A twenty-seven-ton steel needle hung suspended above Manhattan, eight hundred and sixty feet above the street. The architect William Van Alen stood on the sidewalk watching, his stomach churning. If the cable snapped, fifty-four thousand pounds of metal would tear through seventy floors and crash onto Lexington Avenue. Rumors had circulated for weeks that workers … Read more
The two M’s in M&M’s were never meant to be an abstract trademark. The name came directly from the surnames of two men: Forrest Mars and Bruce Murrie. And the second man happened to be the son of the president of Hershey, the Mars family’s biggest competitor. By the early 1940s, Forrest Mars needed Murrie … Read more
In October 2014, a two-day school trip to White Rock Mountain in Arkansas turned into a nightmare when 18-year-old Elizabeth Kelly and her history teacher, Curtis Baker, vanished without a trace. For three months, the disappearance was treated as a scandal, with the public convinced that Baker had kidnapped the quiet student and fled with … Read more