History

The photographic conservator slid her white cotton gloves on, one finger at a time, and lifted the lid of another archival box in the dimly lit storage room of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She had spent eight years as the curator of the museum’s photography division, and over that time she had developed a … Read more

In a Mayfair drawing room in the autumn of 1865, a twenty-eight-year-old woman sat with a letter she had not yet decided whether to answer. It had come from her younger sister, who had entered the Community of St. John the Baptist at Clewer eighteen months before and who now signed herself by a name … Read more

The order came down from above, and it was brutally simple. Any German soldier who captured a woman wearing the uniform of the Soviet army was to shoot her on the spot. No trial, no interrogation, no mercy. The commander of the Fourth Army, Günther von Kluge, put it in writing for his men at … Read more

On May 15, 1940, a coded cable reached Washington from the American Embassy in London. It was addressed to the President of the United States. It was signed with a pseudonym: Former Naval Person. The man behind that pseudonym had been prime minister of Great Britain for exactly five days. Early that same morning, the … Read more

In the summer of 1977, at Royal Ascot, a twenty-two-year-old woman named Sarah Spencer caught the attention of Prince Charles, the thirty-year-old heir to the British throne. Charles was on a desperate quest to find a suitable bride, and Sarah, the eldest daughter of the Spencer family, seemed to fit the part. They began dating, … Read more

On a June evening in 1769, a bride stood before the altar in Vienna while the groom remained three hundred miles away. The marriage had been decided long before by someone else entirely—the bride’s mother, Maria Theresa, the most powerful woman in Europe. The bride was twenty-three years old, an archduchess of Austria. The groom … Read more

On a July evening in 1938, in a Carpathian castle, surgeons removed the heart of a dead queen. Marie, granddaughter of Queen Victoria and last queen of Romania, had left written instructions five years earlier that her body was to be divided. Her body would be buried beside her husband in the royal monastery at … Read more

The suitcase sat open on the bed in the Manhattan townhouse, and Eleanor Roosevelt was doing what a wife did in 1918: unpacking her husband’s luggage while he lay upstairs, half dead with double pneumonia. Franklin had come home from a naval inspection tour of the European front so sick that sailors had to carry … Read more

The file in the headquarters of the Tacoma Police Department has outlived the men who first wrote it. It has outlived filing systems, computer systems, and an entire century. The oldest pages are typed on manual typewriters, the ink pressed so hard into some letters that you can feel them from the back of the … Read more