In 1912, an 18-year-old princess watched her father die after he helped save others from a sinking ship off Morocco. Princess Maud of Fife had grown up in the quiet Scottish hills, far from the…
The royal family had just lost a king, and in the raw January of 1936, Princess Maud sat with the grief that came to every one of them. For nearly twenty-five years, her uncle had been the fixed point of her world, the man who gave his formal consent to her marriage, who stood as … Read more
In 1917, a man in workman’s clothes knocked on the side door of an abandoned St. Petersburg palace. Inside, behind a hidden door in her bedroom, Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna had left the jewels…
On a December evening in 2019, an elderly woman stood in a reception room at Buckingham Palace, greeting members of the diplomatic corps. On her head sat the Vladimir tiara. She had inherited it, as queens do, from another queen before her. But its story did not begin with either of them. Her name was … Read more
In 2018, historian Dr. Rebecca Torres was examining a fragile 1900 photograph of a mother and son at a Boston railway station when high-resolution scanning revealed something invisible to the…
In the summer of 2018, Dr. Rebecca Torres sat in the dimly lit archives of Harvard University’s Widener Library, surrounded by boxes of deteriorating photographs from the turn of the century. As a historian specializing in immigration and labor movements in early twentieth-century America, she had spent countless hours examining images of working-class families, hoping … Read more
By the mid-1950s, Jackie Kennedy was preparing to divorce John F. Kennedy over his repeated infidelities, a move that threatened to destroy his political future before it began. His father, Joseph…
The famous pink suit, the pillbox hat, the perfect smile frozen in grainy footage from Dallas. That is the image most people hold of Jacqueline Kennedy. But behind that carefully composed surface was a woman who carried secrets that would have shocked the public if they had ever come to light. She was a chain-smoker … Read more
In 1957, a 29-year-old former boxer waited in the lobby of a Central Park West apartment building, called out to Frank Costello, and fired a single shot that grazed the mob boss’s scalp without…
The courtroom in Brooklyn fell into a familiar rhythm that summer of 1997. The defendant was wheeled in, a man of sixty-nine with thin hair along his famous jaw, his lips moving in a constant, silent mumble. His eyes wandered the room as if the proceedings concerned someone else entirely. His lawyers told the court … Read more
In 1849, a Charleston photographer captured a wealthy family posed before their mansion, and at the edge of the frame stood a 14-year-old enslaved girl holding paper and a pencil. The exposure…
On a humid April morning in 2024, Dr. Marcus Webb, chief curator at the Charleston Museum of Southern History, stood in a climate-controlled room in the Beaumont Mansion on Meeting Street, carefully opening a leather case that had remained hidden behind a loose brick in the mansion’s basement for over a century. The daguerreotype inside … Read more
In 1962, a thirteen-year-old boy was flown to a remote Scottish airbase by his own father, then driven to Gordonstoun, the spartan school that had once shaped the father himself. The boy was shy,…
On the first of May 1962, a plane carrying the heir to the British throne touched down at RAF Lossiemouth on the cold northern coast of Scotland. According to local accounts, his father was at the controls himself. The thirteen-year-old boy who sat beside him was shy and easily moved; his mother had once written … Read more
In 1928, Joseph P. Kennedy bought a summer cottage in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, overlooking Nantucket Sound, and turned it into the family’s beloved retreat. Within decades, his sons John and…
In the summer of 1928, Joseph P. Kennedy stood on a stretch of grassy bluff in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, looking out over Nantucket Sound. The house before him was modest—a shingled Cape Cod cottage built in 1904—but Joseph saw something more. He wanted a summer refuge for his growing family, a place where his nine … Read more
In August 1715, a black spot appeared on the leg of Louis XIV, the 76-year-old Sun King who had ruled France for 72 years. His physicians dismissed it as sciatica and prescribed donkey milk baths…
The royal bedchamber at Versailles had witnessed four decades of carefully staged ritual, but on the morning of September 1st, 1715, it held a scene no choreography could control. Around the great bed, a crowd of nobles pressed shoulder to shoulder, their faces a mixture of fear and calculation, their perfumed handkerchiefs doing little against … Read more
On May 19, 1836, thirty-four settlers stood behind the timber walls of Fort Parker on the Texas prairie, believing the stockade made them safe. Then the tree line moved. Comanche riders came out…
The ground itself seemed to produce them. That was the thought that would fix itself in Rachel Parker Plummer’s mind, years later, when she tried to put words to what happened on the warm May morning in 1836. She was standing inside the timber walls of a small stockade on the Texas prairie, a 17-year-old … Read more