At 11:47 on the night of October 14, 1963, Bumpy Johnson walked alone down 7th Avenue in Harlem. No entourage. No car idling at the curb. No bodyguard scanning the rooftops. Just one man in a dark wool coat, hands loose at his sides, moving through the heart of his kingdom as if he had … Read more

In the spring of 1974, at the age of eighty-four, Rose Kennedy published five hundred pages about her family. The book discussed her eldest daughter at length. It never once used the word lobotomy. Rosemary had been living in an institution in Wisconsin since 1949, and according to the accounts of many of her biographers, … Read more

By the early 1960s, John F. Kennedy had become the most photographed man in America, and the image was flawless. A young president, an elegant wife, children who looked like they had stepped out of a painting. The White House glowed like a storybook, and the nation believed it was watching Camelot come to life. … Read more

The door of the wedding chamber opened, and what stepped through it was not the charming prince of fairy tales. Ferdinand, King of Spain, was thirty-five years old, overweight, gouty, with thick protruding lips. But it was none of that which sent the blood draining from sixteen-year-old Maria Josepha Amalia of Saxony’s face as she … Read more

On the eighteenth of May 1827, a young woman named Maria Martin hurried from her cottage in the Suffolk village of Polstead, dressed in boy’s clothing. Her stepmother had urged her to disguise herself so she would not be recognized on the road. William Corder, the man who had promised to marry her, had warned … Read more

On the morning of a spring day in 1909, a survey party from the United States Army Corps of Engineers rowed their boat into Manila Bay and looked up at a small rocky island rising from the water near the southern entrance of the bay. The island was called El Fraile, a Spanish word meaning … Read more

The bomb came from above, from a balcony overlooking Calle Mayor, thrown down toward the royal carriage as it passed directly beneath. It had been hidden inside a bouquet of flowers, the kind of gesture a well-wisher might make at a wedding procession, which meant no one in the crowds and certainly no one inside … Read more

On December 11th, 1826, a deathly silence smothered the São Cristóvão Palace. Servants trembled and avoided the empress’s chamber, where the air reeked of vinegar, blood, and the rotting sweetness of sepsis. Inside lay the body of Maria Leopoldina, the jewel of the Habsburgs, dead at twenty-nine. Official records claimed she had died of a … Read more

In March of 1902, a continuous line of cut stone more than three-quarters of a mile long closed across the Susquehanna River a few miles north of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. It was the longest stone bridge the world had ever seen, and it had been raised in about two years. More than a century later, it … Read more