In 2013, geneticists studying Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry found something that split the story of their origins in two. Paternal DNA told one tale: roughly 60 to 70 percent of Ashkenazi men carried…
The question landed like a strike against everything scholars thought they had settled. In 2013, a major genetic study announced that nearly forty percent of Ashkenazi Jews could trace their maternal ancestry back to just four women. Those women were not from the Middle East. They were from prehistoric Europe. At the same time, paternal … Read more
On August 3, 1955, a pile driver operator stood on a steel barge twelve miles from the nearest shore in Lake Pontchartrain. He looked in every direction and saw only flat, gray water meeting sky…
On the morning of August 3, 1955, the pile-driving operator on a barge in the middle of Lake Pontchartrain looked north and saw nothing. He looked south and saw nothing. East and west, the same. In every direction the lake stretched flat and grey to the horizon, and the horizon was simply where the water … Read more
In late 1888, a 24-year-old woman walked into Vienna’s Imperial Police headquarters and asked to report the Crown Prince of Austria-Hungary. Her name was Mizzi Kaspar, and she had just refused his…
History remembers Mary Vetsera. She is the tragic teenager found dead beside Crown Prince Rudolf in the hunting lodge at Mayerling, the Juliet to his Romeo. But Mary Vetsera was a mistake. She was a replacement, the understudy who got the role because the lead actress walked off the stage. The real love of Rudolf’s … Read more
On November 6, 1661, in a dimly lit chamber of the Royal Palace of Madrid, Spain’s queen recoiled from her own newborn son. The baby’s head was grotesquely large, his breathing labored, and his…
The midwives had barely finished when the queen recoiled. The child delivered on November 6th, 1661, in a dimly lit chamber of the Royal Palace of Madrid, had a head grotesquely large, labored breathing, and a body that seemed wrong in ways the most experienced attendants could not immediately name. Queen Mariana reportedly shuddered at … Read more
On November 4th, 1791, soldiers cooked bacon over campfires near the Wabash River, unaware that roughly a thousand Miami, Shawnee, and Delaware warriors had crept within earshot of their voices….
The frost had already hardened the ground by the time the first cooks bent over their fires. It was not yet dawn on November 4th, 1791, and the camp would not exist in four hours. Between the tents, flames flickered as men cut bacon and set cornbread to bake, the small, ordinary things soldiers do … Read more
In the summer of 2020, Robert Trump, 71 and gravely ill, spent his final weeks in court trying to stop his own niece from publishing a book about the family. He wasn’t arguing the book was false….
In the summer of 2020, the last act of a dying man was to sue his niece. Robert Trump, seventy-one years old, wanted to stop the publication of her book. He was known publicly as the loyal brother, the one who supported Donald Trump absolutely. He was also the brother who, according to several accounts, … Read more
In February 1909, deep in the woods of northern Maine, a 20-ton Lombard steam log hauler slid down an icy logging road at 15 miles per hour with six massive sleds chained behind it carrying 200…
The three sharp whistle blasts cut through the roar of the boiler, but the machine kept accelerating. On the foot plate, the engineer gripped the steering wheel with both hands, feeling the terrible weight behind him. Two hundred tons of freshly cut timber on six chained sleds was no longer following. It was pushing. The … Read more
In 1977, 22-year-old Steve Jobs was building Apple in his family’s garage when his girlfriend Chrysanne Brennan told him she was pregnant. He went cold. He refused to discuss it, then began…
He sat cross-legged on the bare wooden floor of a nearly empty living room, a single lamp beside him, a cup of tea in his hands, and nothing else around him except space. The photograph from the early 1980s made it look peaceful, even monk-like. The women who shared those rooms with him would remember … Read more
In August 1853, Empress Elisabeth of Austria was stabbed once in the chest with a sharpened needle file and told her companion it was nothing—just a man who had knocked against her. She walked…
At shortly before half past one on the afternoon of September 10, 1898, a woman walking along the promenade of Lake Geneva felt a sudden blow below her left breast. She stumbled, the impact knocking her to the ground, but she was on her feet again in an instant. She told her companion, Countess Irma … Read more
In 1598, a German lawyer named Paul Hentzner talked his way into Greenwich Palace to watch Queen Elizabeth I dine. He saw the ritual first: kneeling servants, plates rubbed with bread and salt,…
It starts before dawn. Cold air, a stone chamber. Her ladies open a small pot and begin to work. Inside that pot sits Venetian ceruse, lead ground into vinegar until it becomes a thick white paste. They spread it across her face, one careful layer over another, filling the craters that smallpox left behind. This … Read more