History

The fire that destroyed the original Breakers was not, in the end, a catastrophe. It was an opportunity. And Cornelius Vanderbilt II, with the systematic intelligence he applied to everything else, treated it as one. He summoned Richard Morris Hunt, the same architect who had built Marble House for his sister-in-law Alva, the same Hunt … Read more

On May 26, 1993, in a movie theater somewhere in south-central Los Angeles, the lights went down and the screen flickered to life. Within the first minutes, a Korean grocer lay dead on the floor of his own store. His wife was shot dead beside him, while a teenager called O-Dog grabbed the security tape, … Read more

On the night of May 1, 1945, a handful of people climbed out of a concrete bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery and into a city the Red Army was tearing apart street by street. They were the last of Hitler’s inner circle, the few dozen who had not chosen to die underground, and as they … Read more

In 1900, Princess Victoria Malita of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha was pregnant with her second child, a source of hope for the Grand Duchy of Hesse. The marriage between Victoria Malita and Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig had already produced one daughter, Princess Elizabeth, but the absence of a male heir had begun to strain the relationship. … Read more

The balcony was the last place anyone expected to see them. For more than four decades, Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad had rarely been seen together, their marriage ended in 1981 after years of private struggle. Yet on May 27, 2025, at the third anniversary of the ABBA Voyage show in London, the two stood … Read more

On the morning of September 29, 1941, columns of people began moving through the streets of Kiev toward the corner of Melnikova and Doktorivska streets. They carried documents, valuables, and warm clothes, as the notices posted across the city had instructed. The announcements, appearing in the final days of September, ordered all Jews of the … Read more

The first streaks of grey light were just beginning to show over the Louisiana plain on the morning of January 8, 1815, when the most experienced army Britain had deployed in a generation stepped out of the fog and walked directly into a catastrophe. They advanced in ordered columns across the open field toward an … Read more

The morning of September 23rd, 1859, began like any other on Thornhill Plantation in Covington County, Mississippi, with the sun rising over cotton fields that stretched to the horizon. But by the time it was fully light, something had happened that would echo through the entire Deep South for years to come. In four separate … Read more

On the morning of May 23rd, 1994, a Belgian-born diamond dealer stood at the altar of St. Ignatius Loyola Church on Park Avenue and read a Greek poem over Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. America called it the gentlest love story of her life. He was another woman’s husband that morning, and had been for forty-five years. … Read more