In 1902, at age 67, Mary Custis Lee—daughter of Robert E. Lee—was arrested in Alexandria, Virginia, for refusing to move to the segregated section of a streetcar. The image was striking: the…
In the spring of 1862, the letter reached Robert E. Lee while he was commanding troops in Virginia. It was from his wife, and it carried the news no father should have to read. His daughter Annie was dead, taken by typhoid fever at twenty-three in a North Carolina plantation house far from home. The … Read more
In 1967, Frances Shand Kydd walked away from her marriage to Viscount Althorp and left her four children behind, including six-year-old Diana. In aristocratic Britain, wives endured unhappy…
The telephone rang in the quiet house on the Isle of Seil, and Frances Shand Kydd answered it herself. It was the night of August 31st, 1997, and the call was not from the palace, not from her son-in-law, not from any member of her family. It was a journalist, offering a sterile condolence, and … Read more
On August 27th, 1979, an IRA bomb tore apart Lord Mountbatten’s boat, the Shadow V, off Ireland’s northwest coast, killing the patriarch, his 14-year-old grandson Nicholas, the Dowager Lady…
The morning of August 27th, 1979, was calm off the coast of Mullaghmore on Ireland’s northwest shore. The Shadow V, a small fishing boat owned by Lord Louis Mountbatten, sat at anchor, ready for its daily run to check the lobster pots. At 11:39, a radio detonator triggered fifty pounds of gelignite hidden aboard. The … Read more
In 1989, at her stepson Charles Spencer’s wedding, Princess Diana shoved her stepmother down a marble staircase. The fall was the violent climax of a hatred the Spencer children had nursed for…
On a day meant for celebration, the wedding of her stepson Charles Spencer in 1989, Diana, Princess of Wales, and her stepmother Rain Spencer erupted into a furious argument. The conflict reportedly began over Rain’s perceived lack of attention toward Diana’s mother, Frances Shand Kydd, a slight the princess took as the latest in a … Read more
In 1858 Kentucky, enslaved laundress Harriet Sims stood at a wash line tying scraps of cloth while armed slave hunters laughed at her from the yard. They saw laundry. They saw a woman they…
The first disappearance did not begin with shouting. Lucas Boon rode out before the others wanted him to, a man who had spent weeks growing irritated by empty roads and wasted sweeps. He wanted a capture he could claim as his own. Just before sundown on October 3rd, 1858, a rumor reached the stable that … Read more
In 1965, Edie Sedgwick walked into a party and Andy Warhol spotted her across the room. Silver-haired, rail-thin, drowning in heavy eyeliner, she was a wealthy Santa Barbara runaway who had…
It was barely past dawn on November 16, 1971, when the small bedroom in a modest California house yielded its discovery. Edie Sedgwick lay crumpled, her heart stopped by the barbiturates she had swallowed the night before. The official cause of death would be recorded as acute barbiturate intoxication, a clinical phrase that closed the … Read more
In the summer of 1959, FBI agents picked the lock of a Chicago tailor shop on North Michigan Avenue and hid a softball-sized microphone behind a baseboard in the back room. They called it Little…
The order came from the White House, and it ended six years of listening. Agents returned to the tailor shop, reached behind the baseboard, and pulled out the microphone where it had been hidden. It was the summer of 1965. President Lyndon Johnson had decided that the FBI’s practice of planting hidden microphones in organized … Read more
In February 1946, General Tomoyuki Yamashita, the man newspapers had once called the Tiger of Malaya, stood under a hangman’s rope in the Philippines. Four years earlier he had stunned the British…
On the night of February 23, 1946, General Tomoyuki Yamashita stood on the scaffold inside the prisoner-of-war camp at Los Baños in the Philippines. The noose was placed over his head, and within moments the man the world press had once called the Tiger of Malaya was dead. Four years earlier, he had delivered Japan … Read more
On August 27th, 1979, an IRA bomb tore apart Lord Mountbatten’s boat, the Shadow V, off the Irish coast, killing the patriarch, his 14-year-old grandson, and two others. Hundreds of miles away,…
The morning of August 27, 1979, began with the ordinary rhythm of a summer holiday on Ireland’s northwest coast. Lord Louis Mountbatten had woken at Classiebawn Castle, the cliff-top fortress where he spent every August, and prepared for his daily ritual: the short trip out on his boat, the Shadow V, to check his lobster … Read more
In June 1934, a 22-year-old woman named Gerda Sommer was found dead in the Berlin apartment of Wilhelm Brückner, Adolf Hitler’s chief adjutant and bodyguard. She had been seen with him just days…
At the end of April 1945, with the Red Army closing in on Berlin, Adolf Hitler gathered his most loyal followers for the last time. He told them they were free to leave the city or die with him. Few chose to go. His secretary prepared the final documents. His new wife, Eva Braun, whom … Read more