Who was Terence Otway? And why was he chosen to capture one of the biggest German bunkers in the early hours of D-Day? Turns out that he was one of the most extraordinary Allied commanders to fight … Read the article
Who was James Eads? And why did he find himself in such danger in the early hours of June 6, 1944? Turns out he was spearheading a mission of such danger that neither he nor his comrades … Read the article
Who was Howard Vander Beek? And what happened to him on the night before D-Day? Well, it turns out that his quick thinking saved the lives of no fewer than 21,000 men.
General Eisenhower and the architects of D-Day knew that the Allied landings would only be successful if they had up-to-the-minute information about the German coastal defenses.
They already had French spies working on their behalf—and we’ll get … Read the article
Wayfinding is a fascinating look, both sweeping and intimate, at how finding our way makes us human. O’Connor takes readers all over the world, from the frigid Arctic to Australia, talking to master navigators, scientists, and … Read the article
For David Ariosto, the island of Cuba is an intriguing new world, unmoored from the one he left behind. From neighboring military coups, suspected honey traps, salty spooks, and desperate migrants to dissidents, doctors, and Havana’s empty … Read the article
The clash of old and new in Yunnan Province, China, is mind-numbing. Ancient Buddhist temples vie for attention with massive infrastructure projects around the provincial capital, Kunming: parades of towering apartment blocks, superhighways and bullet trains. One … Read the article
…let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison’d by their wives: … Read the article
When Hartmut Topf was a small boy, he was captivated by puppets. On a warm summer’s day in 1930s Berlin, he would sit with his sisters under the blossom of the fruit tree in the family’s back … Read the article
Since the summer of 1941, the Nazis had been mulling over how to implement Hitler’s ‘final solution of the Jewish question’ and in August of that year, they discovered a horrible possibility. When testing a delousing agent, … Read the article