American History

On the day before Thanksgiving in 1971, a quiet, well-dressed man bought a one-way ticket for a short flight from Portland to Seattle. He ordered a bourbon and soda, lit a cigarette, and handed a flight attendant a note. The note said he had a bomb. What followed was the only unsolved case of air piracy in American aviation history — a brazen, meticulously executed hijacking that has captivated investigators, amateur sleuths, and the public for over 50 years. The hijacker’s name was almost certainly not D.B. Cooper. But that’s what the world came to call him. And despite one of the longest-running FBI investigations in history, nobody knows who he really was. ...

In the year 2000, Enron Corporation was the seventh largest company in the United States. It employed 29,000 people. Its stock traded at $90 a share. Fortune magazine had named it “America’s Most Innovative Company” for six consecutive years. Fourteen months later, it was bankrupt. Its stock was worth 26 cents. Twenty thousand employees had lost their jobs. Thousands of ordinary workers had watched their retirement savings — invested almost entirely in Enron stock — evaporate to nothing. ...