On May 3, 1446, Margaret of York was born into a family that guaranteed she would never know an ordinary life. Her father, Richard of York, was one of the leading claimants to the English throne, and her mother, Cecily Neville, known as the proud Cecily, was one of the most unyielding women of her … Read more

On the third of September 1971, a small peninsula jutting into the Persian Gulf declared its independence from Britain. The new state, Qatar, had barely a hundred thousand people and an economy that would have seemed modest for a single mid-sized city. Its ruler, a family called the Al Thani, governed a flat, barren stretch … Read more

They buried Lucky Luciano in a bitter February wind, and twelve armed men came to the chapel carrying guns they meant to use. The crowd outside St. John’s Cemetery in Queens had swelled past two thousand, dark overcoats and somber suits stretching along the frozen paths, breath misting in the gray air. Inside, the most … Read more

When Catherine of Valois died in 1437, she was one of the most important royal women in England. Queen of England, wife of the legendary warrior king Henry V, mother of Henry VI, and eventually the ancestor of the Tudor dynasty, she might have been expected to rest peacefully within Westminster Abbey. Instead, Catherine lived … Read more

In 1921, in Wichita, Kansas, a short-order cook named Walter Anderson and a businessman named Edgar Ingram opened a small restaurant that would quietly invent an entire industry. They called it White Castle, and they built it on a radical idea for the time: selling the same clean, cheap, standardized hamburger at multiple locations, prepared … Read more

On May 1, 1945, as Soviet shells fell on the burning ruins of Berlin, Heinrich Müller walked out of the Führerbunker and vanished. He was the head of the Gestapo, the most feared secret police force in history, a man who had coordinated the logistics of the Holocaust and crushed resistance across occupied Europe. No … Read more

The air in Tunnel M had always been cool, the kind of cool that came from being deep enough that the seasons never reached. But on the morning of September 23rd, 1906, Virgil Latimer felt a different kind of cold. It started in his chest, a tightness that made him want to cough even though … Read more

On the night of January 5, 2015, a 67-year-old woman collapsed in a restaurant in West Hollywood. Her fiancé dropped to the floor and began performing CPR while they waited for paramedics. She was rushed to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where she was pronounced dead at 10:20 that evening. Her name was Francesca Hilton, the only … Read more

For eight years she was an inmate in a state asylum for the insane. In her own words, she deteriorated into a wild, frightened creature intent only on survival, assaulted by orderlies, gnawed on by rats, poisoned by tainted food, chained in padded cells, strapped into straight jackets, and half drowned in ice baths. She … Read more