In November 1942, in a Berlin coffee shop, a Jewish woman living under a fake name sat down with a woman married to a soldier serving Hitler's army, a woman who reportedly liked to boast that she could smell a Jew. Two years later, the Gestapo had one of them, and the other was writing letters to a concentration camp that would never be answered. In between, the two women fell in love, wrote each other a private marriage contract, and exchanged rings, all while one of them wa

In the summer of 1961, a 19 year old model climbed out of a swimming pool at a Buckinghamshire country estate, and a British government started dying without anyone in the room realising it yet. By the time the fallout finished two years later, a cabinet minister had lied to Parliament and resigned in disgrace, an osteopath had killed himself rather than face a guilty verdict, a prime minister had quit citing his health, and an entire government had lost the next election. Th

In July 1930, a Broadway dancer named Faith Bacon was arrested for performing nude on a New York stage, fans in hand, nothing else. Three years later, another dancer doing essentially the same act with the same fans was the single biggest attraction at the Chicago World's Fair, pulling crowds that reportedly saved the whole event from a financial flop. That second dancer was Sally Rand. The first was Faith Bacon, and she's the one who actually invented the fan dance. History

For eight years in the middle of the disco era, there was a place in Manhattan where you could grab a plate of barbecued chicken, take a dip in an Olympic sized pool, and watch forty or fifty naked bodies moving together on a mattress the size of a basketball court. That was Plato's Retreat, the heterosexual swingers' club that ran from 1977 to 1985 and became just as famous, in its own way, as its flashier neighbor a few blocks south, Studio 54. Both clubs opened the same ye

For nearly thirty years, one man decided what Atlantic City was allowed to be. Enoch “Nucky” Johnson never held real power through an election, technically he was just the county treasurer, but he controlled the police, the courts, the bootleggers, the brothels and the boardwalk itself, all from a suite on the ninth floor of the Ritz-Carlton. He inspired the HBO series Boardwalk Empire, though the real version of the man was stranger, less violent, and in some ways far more s

On the morning of August 1, 1966, a 25-year-old former Marine named Charles Whitman carried a footlocker full of rifles, a shotgun, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition to the top of the University of Texas Tower in Austin. By the time police finally reached him 96 minutes later, he'd already killed his mother and his wife in the night, and would go on to kill more people from that observation deck than any single gunman had ever killed in one attack on American soil. It beca