Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, would never forget the moment his boots hit the sand during Operation Overlord—the D-Day invasion of Normandy in 1944. Shortly after the landings, Ike toured the beaches, which were littered with broken, ...read more

How important was George Washington’s network of spies to winning the American Revolution? It’s hard to imagine that the fate of the American cause would rest so heavily in the hands of a tailor, an enslaved double agent—or a judge’s wife who sent surreptitious signals on her ...read more

On December 16, 1941, nine days after Pearl Harbor, a mother of three from Maryland named Adelaide Hawkins signed an affidavit with the U.S. Office of Strategic Services [OSS] in Washington saying she would “defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, ...read more

Steven Rinella stands at a curious intersection in American culture. He’s an adventurer, a conservationist, a hunter, a TV host, a best-selling author with an MFA in writing, and a student of the history of frontier explorers like Daniel Boone. Not many figures can tell such ...read more

In the late 1970s, Bob Chandler was just another car guy, the owner of Midwest Four Wheel Drive Center in St. Louis, Missouri. “I had a pickup truck that I put product on,” he recalls. “Big tires, big axles. I always wanted it bigger. It was a vicious cycle.” Friends joked that ...read more

Ever since August 6, 1945, when the first atomic bomb detonated over Hiroshima, the human race has lived in fear of nuclear annihilation. In the annals of history, few events have had more import than this first atomic bombing, and no historical figure has been associated with ...read more