Caroline Webster Schermerhorn was born in the autumn of 1830 on Greenwich Street, the ninth child and youngest daughter of a family whose power rested not on fortune but on memory. The Schermerhorns had arrived in New Amsterdam in 1636, and for nearly two centuries they had done what old New York required: they endured. … Read more

On the morning of April 30, 1970, Inger Stevens was discovered on the floor of her kitchen by her housekeeper. She was pronounced dead at Hollywood Hospital. The cause of death was listed as acute barbiturate intoxication. She was thirty-five years old. To the public, the news was nearly incomprehensible. Stevens had seemed to be … Read more

The last time Frances Coles was seen alive, she was walking toward a covered railway arch in Whitechapel with a man she had only just met. It was just before two in the morning on February 13, 1891, and the streets of East London were dark and nearly empty. A woman who knew Frances tried … Read more

The call came to the hospital in the late morning of December 5, 2001. Nancy Smith, thirty-two, had not shown up for her shift, and for a woman her colleagues described as dependable and responsible, that was unusual enough to cause real worry. Friends and coworkers tried to reach her. When their calls went unanswered, … Read more

On the morning of November 20, 1947, Westminster Abbey was packed with 2,500 guests. Crowds lined the route from Buckingham Palace despite the cold, despite rationing books still folded in coat pockets, despite a country that had spent six years learning what it meant to lose things. Inside, a 26-year-old naval lieutenant named Philip Mountbatten … Read more

The oxygen tank hisses in the white room, the only sound besides the slow, rattling breath of the man in the bed. It is April 1965, in a hospital in Hot Springs, Arkansas. The man is Owney Madden, seventy-three years old. His hands, the same hands that once held a pistol steady enough to kill … Read more

In 2019, a man in eastern Tennessee submitted a DNA sample, expecting to find exactly what his family had always told him. Scots-Irish, maybe a little Cherokee. That was the story. That was always the story in the mountains. What came back shook him: sub-Saharan African ancestry, Iberian Peninsula markers, haplogroups that traced back to … Read more

In the spring of 1963, on the South Side of Chicago, the city was about to lose the house that Frank Lloyd Wright himself considered the true beginning of his career. The building at 4414 Greenwood Avenue in Kenwood had stood for more than seventy years, and by then its fate had already been sealed. … Read more

On the afternoon of August 12, 2000, a hospice nurse walked into a bedroom in Los Angeles and found an eighty-seven-year-old woman dead in her bed, clutching a rosary in one hand and a small black-and-white photograph in the other. The woman was Loretta Young, once the most beautiful brunette in Hollywood, an Academy Award … Read more