In 2024, a curator sorting a deceased collector’s estate in Boston pulled out an 1892 portrait from Jay Morrison Studio. Five figures posed with Victorian precision: Thomas and Elizabeth Harper,…
On a freezing Tuesday morning in early 2024, a weathered cardboard container arrived at one of Boston’s most prestigious historical institutions. Inside were seventeen seemingly unremarkable items from a deceased collector’s estate. Among faded tintypes and deteriorating cabinet cards sat what appeared to be just another Victorian family photograph. But this single image would soon … Read more
On June 25, 1876, along the Little Bighorn River, Crazy Horse and some 2,500 Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors surrounded Lieutenant Colonel Geor…
On June 25, 1876, along the banks of the Little Bighorn River, known to the Lakota as the Valley of the Greasy Grass, Crazy Horse could already sense triumph as Cheyenne and Lakota warriors crushed George Armstrong Custer’s men. Swinging north along the ridge, Crazy Horse and his fighters cut off any path of retreat. … Read more
In 1541, Margaret Morton knelt on the freezing stone floor of Pontefract Castle and pressed her eye to the keyhole of Queen Catherine Howard’s locked bedchamber. Inside, she saw Thomas Culpepper,…
The heavy iron keyhole was cold against Margaret Morton’s eye, and through it, by the guttering light of beeswax candles, she saw a man standing inside the Queen of England’s locked bedchamber. Not a guard, not a servant—Thomas Culpepper, a gentleman of the King’s own privy chamber, one of Henry VIII’s closest favorites. The door … Read more
In 1963, inside the Hotel Theresa ballroom, 400 people watched a young server place a ringing telephone on Bumpy Johnson’s podium in front of every camera in Harlem. The most feared man in the…
The service door at the far left of the stage level opened. Not the main entrance, not the kitchen corridor, but the narrow door that led from the stage platform to the hotel’s internal service passages, the one that was supposed to be locked from the outside, the one only hotel staff with a specific … Read more
In 1835, a blind, elderly enslaved woman named Joice Heth was exhibited across New England as George Washington’s 161-year-old nursemaid. Crowds paid …
Ada Bricktop Smith was born into a world that offered her little, but she built a life that made her a legend of the Jazz Age. Born Ada Beatrice Smith in Alderson, West Virginia, on August 14, 1894, she came from a family shaped by the legacy of American slavery. Her mother had been born … Read more
In 1888, Samuel and Grace Thomas paid two dollars—a small fortune for a Black family in Richmond, Virginia—to have their portrait taken with their four children. For over a century, the photograph…
The matriarch’s eyes were what stopped her. Dr. Maya Richardson had spent three months in the Smithsonian’s basement cataloging thousands of post-Civil War photographs for the African-American Heritage Photography Project, most of them faded, damaged, or barely identifiable. But on that March morning in 2019, she opened a box labeled *Virginia Studios, 1880-1890* and found … Read more
In January 1998, four FBI agents were waiting for a 24-year-old woman inside a Virginia shopping mall. When she arrived for lunch, they took her upstairs to Room 1012 of the Ritz-Carlton, where…
On January 16, 1998, four FBI agents were waiting for her at a shopping mall in Arlington, Virginia. She was twenty-four years old, unemployed, and she had agreed to meet her friend Linda Tripp for lunch in the food court of the Pentagon City Mall. Tripp arrived with two FBI agents. They took her upstairs … Read more
In the winter of 1872, a teenage kitchen maid stood over a breakfast of deviled kidneys, bacon, eggs poached in cream, and toast cut into precise triangles—food that would have fed her family for…
The winter of 1872 had not yet loosened its grip on the English countryside when a kitchen maid stood over a breakfast spread that would have fed her entire family for a week. Delved kidneys, bacon, eggs poached in cream, toast cut into precise triangles. She had been awake since 4:30. Her hands were still … Read more
On October 25th, 1957, Albert Anastasia, the mob’s notorious “Lord High Executioner,” sat down in chair number four at a Manhattan barbershop. Two masked gunmen walked in and shot him dead. Carlo…
On the morning of October 25th, 1957, Albert Anastasia sat down in chair number four at the Park Sheraton Hotel barbershop in midtown Manhattan. Two masked gunmen walked in. The barber dove to the floor. Anastasia was shot multiple times, and in the confusion, he lurched toward his own reflection in the mirror, apparently trying … Read more
In 1960, archivist Elizabeth Carter was cataloging a photographer’s estate when she turned over a portrait from 1912. On the back, faded ink read: “Rachel, October 14th, 1912. Free.” Then her…
Elizabeth Carter was fifty-five years old and had spent twenty-three of those years cataloguing the past for the Chicago History Museum. On a gray November morning in 1960, she was sorting through a box of estate donations that had come from a deceased photographer named Isaac Solomon, who had once run a modest studio on … Read more