The Sassoon family built one of the largest fortunes in Asian history on the back of opium addiction. At their peak, they controlled an estimated 70 percent of the opium flowing into China, a trade so vast that historians estimate they supplied enough drug to maintain addiction for roughly 15 percent of China’s entire population. … Read more

In the spring of 1943, a Japanese naval flight instructor at the Kasumigaura airbase north of Tokyo stood before a classroom of newly qualified Zero pilots and removed a diagram from the curriculum he had been teaching for four years. The diagram showed the maneuver that had made Japanese naval aviation the most feared air … Read more

Philip of Spain moved through the darkened corridors of the Alcázar of Madrid just after eleven o’clock on the night of Sunday, January 18th, 1568. He wore armor beneath his robes. The king of the most extensive empire in the world was putting on a helmet to enter his own son’s bedchamber. Walking with him … Read more

The bells of Lisbon had not stopped ringing, and still the queen lay dying. In the summer heat of the Rivera Palace, Maria Sophia of Neuburg, queen of Portugal, was slipping away two days short of her thirty-third birthday, her body ravaged by erysipelas, a severe skin infection that the physicians could not stop. The … Read more

At the height of the Civil War, in the Confederate capital of Richmond, the woman who was supposed to embody the new nation found herself at war with its own people. The newspapers, eager to wound her and her husband through her, printed insults that were meant to shock. They called her a mulatto and … Read more

The aircraft was breaking apart in the air somewhere over the English countryside near Moffam in Kent. On the ground, witnesses saw the plane in trouble. Then the wreckage came down into the fields below, and everyone on board was killed. Among the passengers was Lady Rosemary Leverson Gower, Viscountess Ednam, thirty-six years old, returning … Read more

On February 14, 1906, the most famous young woman in America stood in the East Room of the White House and became a bride. Alice Roosevelt, daughter of the president, married Nicholas Longworth, a congressman from Ohio, in a ceremony that drew crowds so thick they spilled down the streets of Washington. Gifts arrived by … Read more

The jury foreman’s voice cut through the silence of the Lancaster County courtroom. Asked whether the panel had reached a verdict, he answered yes. A clerk read the charge—first-degree murder in the death of Claire Whitaker. The answer came back clear and final: guilty. Richard “Rick” Whitaker lowered his head slightly. His daughter Emily raised … Read more

The order came from the White House, and it ended six years of listening. The agents walked back into the tailor shop, reached behind the baseboard, and pulled out the microphone they had hidden there. It was the summer of 1965. President Lyndon Johnson had decided that the Bureau’s practice of planting hidden microphones in … Read more