In 1874, Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna of Russia arrived in England with a dowry of £100,000 and jewels so extravagant they made the British crown jewels look modest. As the only daughter of…
The telegram arrived on a quiet Sunday afternoon in London. It was addressed to the Duke of Edinburgh, but the news it carried was for his wife. The first message was garbled, as tragic telegrams always are: attempt on the emperor’s life, grave injuries. Then came the second, and there was nothing garbled about it … Read more
In 1991, with Microsoft’s operating system on most of the world’s computers and antitrust scrutiny closing in, Bill Gates faced a personal question the way he faced everything else: he put a…
In the autumn of 2019, Melinda Gates began calling divorce lawyers. She contacted more than one firm. This was not a decision made in a single moment of anger, but the culmination of six years of quiet accumulation—a list of grievances that had been growing since 2013, when she had walked into a Manhattan townhouse … Read more
In 1895, Alba Vanderbilt divorced her husband and walked away with roughly ten million dollars, a Newport mansion, and custody of her three children. …
In 1895, Alba Vanderbilt walked away from her marriage with a divorce settlement worth ten million dollars, a Newport mansion built from 14,158 cubic meters of marble, and custody of her three children. It was the most spectacular divorce in American history. But what no one reported was this: before she could hire a lawyer, … Read more
In 1890, Boston photographer Theodore Welch took a family portrait of the Harrisons, and the image survived remarkably intact—except for one detail. The shadow cast by nine-year-old Grace did not…
Elena Martinez’s fingers brushed against something wrapped in yellowed cloth at the bottom of the final box. The November rain drummed against the basement windows of the Boston Historical Society as she carefully unwrapped the fabric to reveal a wooden frame containing a large photographic portrait mounted on heavy cardboard. The image showed a Victorian … Read more
In March 1944, a bomb blast in Rome killed 33 German soldiers, and the Nazi command demanded ten Italians for every one of their dead. Erich Priebke, an SS officer, sat with police records and…
The cave mouth swallowed the last group of five, and Erich Priebke followed them in. It was the second or third group he had entered with, and in his hand he carried an Italian machine pistol. Inside, the prisoners were forced to kneel, and shots were fired into the backs of their heads. Priebke raised … Read more
In 1897, surveyor Virgil Ashmont climbed a narrow Appalachian ridge and found an elderly stranger hammering strange symbols into the rock. The man claimed he was Hosea Craven, a former mathematics…
The old man’s eyes fixed on Virgil’s face, wild and terrified and furious all at once. When he spoke, his voice came like gravel sliding down a metal chute. “You shouldn’t be here,” he said, each word separate, as if he had to remember how to form them. “You shouldn’t see this. Nobody should see … Read more
In 1955, Walt Disney was casting The Mickey Mouse Club and wanted fresh faces, not seasoned performers. During a concert in Burbank, he spotted a twel…
Annette Funicello was twelve years old when Walt Disney spotted her dancing the part of the Swan Queen in a production of Swan Lake at a concert in Burbank, California. Disney was casting for his new television venture, the Mickey Mouse Club, and he wanted newcomers rather than experienced performers. The little girl dancing in … Read more
In 1963, Studebaker closed its South Bend plant and terminated its pension plan, and roughly 4,000 workers between 40 and 59 received about 15 cents for every dollar they had been promised. They…
Inside a cluttered office in suburban Pennsylvania, on a Saturday afternoon in the fall of 1979, a benefits consultant named Ted Benna sat flipping through the Internal Revenue Code. He was looking for a way to design a tax-efficient retirement savings plan for a banking client, and as he worked, his eyes landed on a … Read more
In 1991, Penelope Knatchbull’s five-year-old daughter, Leonora, died of kidney cancer. Penny had married into the Mountbatten family in 1979, weeks after an IRA bomb killed Lord Mountbatten and…
By the time most people noticed her, the palace had already stopped pretending not to. Not that Prince Philip had a close female friend—royal men have had close female friends since crowns were made of hammered metal and bad decisions. What made people stare was the ease of it. The steadiness. The way Penelope Knatchbull … Read more
In 1976, a Tamiya designer named Fumito Taki mounted a battery-powered motor onto a static plastic Formula 1 model and set it on the factory floor dur…
In May 1946, in Shizuoka, Japan, with World War II barely over, a man named Yoshio Tamiya opened a lumber and woodworking shop. Two years later, he added a section for wooden model kits—ships, airplanes, things to be built slowly by hand, piece by piece. By 1960, the company had released its first all-plastic kit: … Read more