Fourteen miles above Johnstown, Pennsylvania, there was a lake. It was beautiful, and it was stocked with fish, and along its shore stood the summer cottages of some of the wealthiest men in America. Below that lake, in a valley so narrow the town had nowhere to grow but up the hillsides, lived the families…
On May 19, 1875, the widow of Abraham Lincoln was put on trial by her own son. She was fifty-six years old. She had buried a husband and three sons. And she walked into a courtroom in downtown Chicago not as a guest of honor, but as the accused. The proceeding asked whether she should…
On the morning of May 10, 1889, armed guards filled the jail yard in Ozark, Missouri. Inside a closed enclosure stood a scaffold built for three men. Dave Walker. His son William. John Mathews. Only a handful of witnesses were allowed inside. When the trap fell, the ropes stretched so far the men’s feet touched…
In the winter of 1770, colonial bundling meant a young man could walk five miles through Massachusetts snow to call on a daughter — and end the night in her bed. Her parents did not always seat him by the fire until midnight. In many farmhouses they walked him to her room, watched the two…
In September 1887 a twenty-three-year-old woman walked into the New York World with a story about immigrants. Joseph Pulitzer’s editor had a different assignment. Get yourself committed to Blackwell’s Island Lunatic Asylum. Go in as a patient. Write what is behind the walls. Come back out alive. Elizabeth Jane Cochran — the name on the…
In 1975, in a hospital near Hazard, Kentucky, a baby arrived the color of a bruise. Not pale. Not “a little off.” Blue. Deep indigo, scalp to heel. Nurses froze. Doctors assumed his blood was poisoned. An ambulance was called. A transfusion was being readied for a one-hundred-and-sixteen-mile run. Then the grandmother spoke from the…
Every morning, in almost every American kitchen, someone opens a box with a rooster on it. They pour the flakes. They add milk. They eat. The man who invented that food did not design it to be delicious. He designed it as a weapon against the body. The company that still sells his name has…
On September 8, 1900, about six thousand Americans died in a single night. More than the Great Chicago Fire. More than the Johnstown Flood. More than the San Francisco earthquake. Those three, added together, still fall short. Men who studied storms saw this one coming. They tried to warn the country. The United States government…
Christmas Eve, 1926. A man staggers through the doors of Bellevue Hospital in New York. His eyes are wide. He is screaming that Santa Claus is behind him with a baseball bat. The nurses think he is drunk. They lay him down. Within an hour he is dead. Then another man arrives. Then another. Then…
There is a photograph from 1938, taken in the courtyard of Buckingham Palace. A young woman stands in a white tulle gown. She is smiling. She is curtseying before the King and Queen of England. She is the daughter of the American ambassador. She is a Kennedy. Within three years of that picture, her own…
