History

Henry VIII had six wives, which means he also had six weddings. But none of them resembled the grand public spectacles we associate with royal marriage today. Every single ceremony was secretive, private, and deliberately hidden from the eyes of his subjects. Yet that secrecy never meant the weddings lacked scandal or drama. The most … Read more

The shift from guaranteed pensions to 401(k) accounts is often told as a simple story of corporate greed, but the real history is far stranger. It involves a tax break no one intended, a wartime wage freeze, a car company collapse that destroyed thousands of lives, and a law designed to fix that collapse that … Read more

When King John of England died in October 1216, his realm lay in ruins. French forces occupied London, Scottish armies pressed south, Welsh princes raided the borders, and the barons who had risen against him controlled much of the country. His crown passed to a nine-year-old boy, and his surviving children scattered across the courts … Read more

On October 15, 1946, Hermann Göring cheated the gallows. Hours before his scheduled execution at Nuremberg, the Reichsmarschall, convicted on all counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, swallowed a cyanide capsule in his cell. He left behind a widow, Emmy, and an eight-year-old daughter, Edda, who had visited him in prison during the … Read more

The bidding paddles came down, and for a moment the Paris auction hall seemed to hold its breath. The ring on the block was a slender band of gold set with two small stones placed side by side, a blue sapphire and a white diamond, each weighing less than a single carat. The auction house … Read more

It is April 1865, and the world is collapsing. Not with a roar, not with the thunder of artillery or the shriek of the rebel yell, but with a silence so absolute it feels as though the earth itself has stopped breathing. A gray morning. The Virginia mud is still cold from the night. The … Read more

In late September 1976, Denis Healey, Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, sat in the departure lounge at Heathrow Airport with a gin and tonic, waiting for his flight to Washington. A phone call changed everything. Sterling was collapsing, and the country was effectively bankrupt. Healey turned back to the Treasury and announced that Britain—the former … Read more

In the last weeks of 1098, on the edge of a marsh in northern Syria, a priest watched men wade into cold standing water to drag out corpses. He knew exactly whose corpses they were. Two weeks earlier, his own army had thrown them in. These were the dead of a town called Maarat al-Numan, … Read more

Beneath the stone floors of Westminster Abbey, two queens of England have lain in the same vault for more than four centuries. Elizabeth I, the last Tudor monarch, was buried on top of her half-sister Mary I. The arrangement has often been read as a final insult, a Protestant queen literally overshadowing her Catholic predecessor … Read more