History

In the spring of 1975, the most expensive motorcar on Earth could not be bought with money alone. You had to be invited. The car was the Rolls-Royce Camargue, priced at £29,250 in Britain and $147,000 in America, where roughly three-quarters of the production was destined to go. To understand what that price meant in … Read more

The cold hits first. It has nothing to do with the weather outside. It settles into the rooms of this house like water settling into a stone basin, patient and still, even in the warm months when the forest above Corte Buena buzzes with insects. Paint flakes hang from the ceilings like rolls of old … Read more

On the morning of July 12, 1864, a small wagon train was moving west across the plains when riders appeared on the horizon. At first, there was no reason to believe the meeting would end in disaster. Travelers on the western trails had seen Native horsemen before. Sometimes there were trades. Sometimes there was conversation. … Read more

She was twenty-three years old, and she had decided to tell them the truth. Sitting across a restaurant table from two newspapermen in the early months of 1978, she said plainly that she was not in love with the Prince of Wales. The whole country believed she would marry him, and she told them she … Read more

In August 1905, Theodore Brown waded ahead of a steel cable in the Lake Maurepas swamp, threading a hook through a chain wrapped around a felled cypress section. He was the hook man, the highest-paid and most dangerous job in the Louisiana cypress industry, three times the rate of an ordinary swamp hand. On the … Read more

The key turned in the lock with a sound that Joseph II would replay in his mind for the rest of his life. It was 1763, deep inside the Hofberg Palace, and the Holy Roman Emperor stood alone in the private rooms of his dead wife. Isabella of Parma had been taken by smallpox only … Read more

In September 2011, Jacqueline Kennedy’s daughter released eight and a half hours of audio recordings from 1964. America finally heard Jacqueline Kennedy speaking in private. She called Martin Luther King a phony, described Indira Gandhi as domineering and hateful, and said women in politics were a mistake. The widow’s opinions were as sharp as razor … Read more

In the spring of 1995, in the attic of a crumbling brick building beside Seneca Lake, a man climbed through a locked door and found something no one was supposed to see again. Rows of wooden shelves, dust thick as snowfall, and on them hundreds of suitcases. Each one carried a name written in fading … Read more

In January 1888, a rivet heater stood on a work platform 280 feet above the Firth of Forth and looked down at the water. To the north, across the estuary, the coast of Fife appeared low and grey beneath a clouded sky, two and a half miles away. To the south, the Lothian shore lay … Read more