In 1915, Cecilia Cavendish-Bentinck, Countess of Strathmore, received word that her son Fergus, a captain in the Black Watch, had been killed in action in France at just 26. It was not the first…
In April 1938, at a wedding reception in London, Cecilia, Countess of Strathmore and Kinghorn, collapsed. The celebration was for her granddaughter, Lady Anne Bowes-Lyon, daughter of her eldest son John, who was marrying Viscount Thomas Anson. For a woman of seventy-five, the sudden pain in her chest was unmistakable, and those around her understood … Read more
In 1862, Varina Howell Davis confided to her mother a truth she could never speak aloud in Richmond: the South could not win. The North’s discipline and perseverance, she believed, would make it…
She stood at the window of her Manhattan hotel room and looked out over the trees of Central Park. Once she had been the first lady of the Confederacy. She had defended slavery while despising it. She had predicted the defeat of the South before almost anyone dared speak of it. And now she had … Read more
In 1934, federal surveyor Harlon Goss pushed into a West Virginia hollow so narrow his compass failed. There, he found a living settlement of 60 to 80 people whose clothing and features matched…
In the winter of 1934, a federal surveyor named Harlon Goss found himself standing in a clearing that no map had ever recorded, surrounded by nineteen structures and somewhere between sixty and eighty people who spoke a language he could not understand. He had been sent into the Gory River backcountry of central West Virginia … Read more
In July 2022, Ivana Trump was buried beside the first hole at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey. One grave, one plaque, grass tended by her ex-husband’s employees. Thirty-one…
In the winter of 1989, the Trump family went to Aspen for Christmas, as they had most years. At a mountain restaurant called Bonnie’s, Ivana Trump encountered a young woman named Marla Maples. The accounts of what was said vary, told and retold by people with their own interests, and no version can be treated … Read more
In 1960, Cox hired engineer Bill Atwood to build a .010-cubic-inch engine that could actually run, and physics nearly made it impossible. Every Cox engine used a reed valve to breathe, but at that…
In October 1979, the British aviation press subjected a small engine to a comprehensive review, using a dynamometer to measure its power. When the tests were finished, they issued a formal verdict. The Cox 010 TD was the smallest internal combustion engine in commercial production in the world. No other manufacturer in aviation, defense, or … Read more
In 1986, Abram Nicholas Pritsker died in Chicago at 90, still working to the end. His heirs told the IRS he had left about $25,000. Two years later, Fortune put the family’s wealth at $3.5 billion…
On a spring evening in 2002, an eighteen-year-old Columbia freshman had dinner with her cousin Tom. The table was probably pleasant enough; he was the head of the family’s empire, and she was a college student who had grown up largely outside its inner circles. But the dinner was not merely social. Tom told her … Read more
When Japanese aircraft came over Guam on December 8, 1941, Leona Jackson ran for the nearest cover, a hospital linen room. She stopped dead in the doo…
The linen room at the naval hospital in Agana was a long, narrow storeroom with a table down the middle. On the morning of December 8, 1941, when Japanese aircraft came over from Saipan in the second wave of the attack on Guam, Chief Nurse Marion Olds and four junior Navy nurses—Leona Jackson, Lorraine Christensen, … Read more
In the winter of 1864, a Georgia woman prayed for a monster to punish the Union soldiers marching through her state. What arrived instead was a man who wrote love letters to his wife and wept at a…
In the winter of 1864, a woman in Confederate Georgia wrote in her diary that she prayed to God to send a beast to punish the Union soldiers marching across her state. She wanted a demon. What she got instead was a man who wrote love letters to his wife, worried constantly about his children’s … Read more
On November 14, 1877, a four-ton chunk of Ohio limestone twisted as it rose from a canal bed, concentrating stress on flawed terminal fittings that engineers had modified to cut costs. In three…
The morning of November 14th, 1877, began with a humidity that settled over the Great Lakes Canal construction site like a warning. Henry Marian stood by his flagship steam shovel, watching condensation form on 114 individual steel wires that made up the hoist cable, each one part of a system European engineers swore would collapse … Read more
In 1958, a 25-year-old enforcer named Tommy Chen walked into the Royal Diner on Lenox Avenue with four armed men, certain that Harlem’s aging king, Bumpy Johnson, was finished. Chen delivered a…
He had known about Tommy Chen for three weeks. He had known about Vincent Lau’s arrangement with the Chinatown Syndicate for considerably longer than that. And now, on a cold November afternoon in 1958, with the rain hammering against the windows of the Royal Diner on Lenox Avenue, Ellsworth Bumpy Johnson sat in his corner … Read more