The murder of one of the most famous architects of the era, Stanford White—whose mark on New York City is second to none—became “The Crime of the Century.” His murder by Harry K. Thaw in 1906 has beco
Susan Bayliss became notorious when she blew the whistle on her boss, a famous heart surgeon at a renowned children’s hospital. She accused him of negligence, operations were halted, and an inquiry la
Amy was once a party girl, but she now lives a lonely life, helping the house-bound to receive communion in the Gravesend neighborhood of Brooklyn. She stops in at one of the apartments on her route,
The US 8th Air Force came of age in 1944. With a fresh commander, it was ready to demonstrate its true power: from Operation Argument in February—targeting German aircraft production plants—to bringin
Beginning with their introduction in the eleventh century, and ending with their widespread abandonment in the seventeenth, Marc Morris explores many of the country’s most famous castles, as well as s
What do Virginia Woolf, the rotation of hurricanes, Babylonian kings and Einstein’s General Theory Relativity all have in common? Eclipses. Always spectacular and, today, precisely predicable, eclipse
Andrea Buchanan lost her mind while crossing the street one day. Suffering from a horrible cough, she inhaled the cold March air, and choked. She was choking on a lot that day. A sick son. A pending d
The Saudi royal family and Aramco leadership are, and almost always have been, motivated by ambitions of long-term strength and profit. They use Islamic law, traditional ideology, and harsh justice t
The way I die is two taps to the head, stuffed in the trunk of a rental sedan, my body set on fire. The way I die is both arms broken, both legs broken, tossed off a cigarette boat in the middle of L
The Devil’s Bible. Once considered an eighth wonder of the world, the ancient book is shrouded in mystery. No one knows who wrote it or where it was written. Even dry-boned scholars whisper about the
Inspired by the twenty-three "tales," Matthew Dennison takes a selection of quotations from Potter's stories and uses them to explore her multi-faceted life and character: repressed Victorian daughter
St. Petersburg has always felt like an impossible metropolis, risen from the freezing mists and flooded marshland of the River Neva on the western edge of Russia. It was a new capital in an old countr
Dr. Harry Kent likes to keep himself busy—juggling hospital duties with his work as a police surgeon for the London Metropolitan Police—anything to ward off the memories of his time as an army medic.U
Comprehensive and authoritative, The Secret State skillfully examines the potential pitfalls of the traditional intelligence cycle; the dangerous uncertainties of spies and human intelligence; how the
In 1704 a bankrupt English merchant sent home the colt he had bought from Bedouin tribesmen near the ruins of Palmyra. Thomas Darley hoped this horse might be the ticket to a new life back in Yorkshir
Eleanor Roosevelt is viewed as one of the most pioneering women in American history. But she was also one of the most enigmatic and lonely. Her loveless marriage with FDR was no secret, and she had a
London, summer 1763.At nineteen, Anne Jaccob is awakened to the possibility of joy when she meets Fub, the butcher's apprentice, and begins to imagine a life of passion with him. The only daughter of
Paris: September, 1890. Newly promoted Chief Inspector Achille Lefebvre attends the execution of the anarchist assassin, Moreau. Following the execution, outgoing Chief Féraud warns his protégé: "I've
Only twenty-four people have seen the whole earth. The most beautiful and influential photographs ever made were taken, almost as an afterthought, by the astronauts of the Apollo space program from t
Since the time of the ancient Greeks we have been fascinated by accounts of the Amazons, an elusive tribe of hard-fighting, horse-riding female warriors. Equal to men in battle, legends claimed they c
Perched on the chalk uplands of Salisbury Plain, the megaliths of Stonehenge offer one of the most recognizable outlines of any ancient structure. Its purpose—place of worship, sacrificial arena, gian
In New York City, a young man is found murdered in a dingy Times Square sex theater—his neck gruesomely snapped—and the only clue is a torn receipt from the Montpelier School for Boys bookstore.Christ
On 28 January 1547, the sickly and obese King Henry VIII died at Whitehall. Just hours before his passing, his last will and testament had been read, stamped, and sealed. The will confirmed the line o
An unidentified body is discovered in New York City, with numbers and symbols are written in blood near the corpse. Gilmo, a North Korean national who interprets the world through numbers, formulas,
In 1844, Alexandre Dumas published The Three Musketeers, a novel so famous and still so popular today that it scarcely needs introduction. Shortly thereafter he wrote a sequel, Twenty Years After, tha
The French Revolution casts a long shadow, one that reaches into our own time and influences our debates on freedom, equality, and authority. Yet it remains an elusive, perplexing historical event. It
Inversgail, on the west coast of the Scottish Highlands, welcomes home native daughter and best-selling environmental writer Daphne Wood. Known as the icon of ecology, Daphne will spend three months a
In the vein of Tim Cope’s On the Trail of Genghis Khan and Scott Wallace’s The Unconquered, Himalaya Bound tells the story of one man’s immersion with a tribe of nomadic water buffalo herders on their
“The black earth was already baking and the sun was just rising when they mounted their horses and rode across the grasslands towards the horizon on fire . . .”Imprisoned in the Gulags for a crime he
The tale of a tormented creature created in a laboratory began on a rainy night in 1816 in the imagination of a nineteen-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, newly married to the celebrated Romantic
Agatha Christie is undoubtedly the world’s best-selling mystery author, hailed as the “Queen of Crime,” with worldwide sales in the billions. Christie burst onto the literary scene in 1920, with The M
In March of 1844, the Parisian paper The Century began publishing installments of a new tale by France’s favorite author, Alexandre Dumas. Week after week readers thrilled to the adventures of the bra
A dazzling history of the modest family that rose to become one of the most powerful in Europe, The Medici is a remarkably modern story of power, money, and ambition. Against the background of an age
The story of the world's greatest civilization spans 4,000 years of history that has shaped the world. It is full of spectacular cities and epic stories—an evolving society rich in inventors, heroes,
Yellowstone is America's premier national park. Today is often a byword for conservation, natural beauty, and a way for everyone to enjoy the great outdoors. But it was not always this way. Wonderland
When we think of slavery most of us think of the American South. We think of chattel slavery, of back-breaking work, and of cruel and inhumane treatment on plantations. We don’t think of slavery in th
Today, we know that a mammoth is an extinct type of elephant that was covered with long fur and lived in the north country during the ice ages. But,how do you figure out what a mammoth is if you have
Weather, water, and climate. How we feel, how productive we are, even our sheer existence, depends on these three things. The United States economic activity varies annually by 1.7% due to weather—tha
In 1993, Alaskan artist and paleo-fish freak Ray Troll stumbled upon the weirdest fossil he had ever seen—a platter-sized spiral of tightly wound shark teeth. This chance encounter in the basement of
July 22, 2011 was the darkest day in Norway’s history since Nazi Germany’s invasion. It was one hundred eighty-nine minutes of terror—from the moment the bomb exploded outside a government building un
