History

At 6:03 on the morning of June 3, 1950, the telephone rang in Bumpy Johnson’s Harlem home. He answered on the second ring, his voice hoarse with sleep. The caller was Dr. Morris Chen of Harlem Hospital. His mother had been admitted. She had suffered a severe heart attack. She was stable, but it was … Read more

The photograph sits in the collection of the National Anthropological Archives, catalogued and boxed, and almost no one has seen it outside a small circle of archive researchers. It was taken in 1888 by James Stevenson during the Bureau of Ethnology’s Smithsonian expedition to Canyon de Chelly in northeastern Arizona. The image shows the floor … Read more

On the third of October 1611, Margaret of Austria, Queen of Spain and Portugal, died from complications of childbirth. She was twenty-six years old and had just given birth to a son, Alonso Mauricio, who would not survive his first year. Her husband, King Philip III, was so devastated that he never remarried, despite being … Read more

Shortly before dawn on August 6, 1915, the Russian defenders of Osowiec Fortress braced for another German bombardment. They had survived two sieges already, holding a vital rail junction on the eastern front despite being outnumbered ten to one by the attacking Germans. Some nine hundred Russians, a mix of soldiers and militia, manned the … Read more

At the bottom of a Siberian cave, the Russian archaeologist lifted a fragment of bone so small it could rest on the tip of a finger. It looked like nothing. A splinter. Something you would step past without ever noticing. He almost could not be bothered to send it for testing. But that tiny piece … Read more

The night wind moved softly through the tobacco fields of Willow Creek, and somewhere behind the barns, the overseer Bu was about to die. Sarah had waited years for this moment—waited through every beating, every humiliation, every night of listening to her brother gasp in pain from wounds that never healed. She had watched Bu … Read more

On August 21, 2020, a flag-draped coffin was placed in the East Room of the White House. That room had held the bodies of Lincoln and Kennedy. It was the largest ceremonial space in the executive mansion, not a family funeral parlor. The man inside it was Robert Stuart Trump, dead at seventy-one, and the … Read more

The phone rang on the podium in front of four hundred people and every camera in Harlem. Bumpy Johnson picked up the handset and brought it to his ear, leaning slightly toward the microphone so the room could hear both sides of whatever came next. The voice on the other end was Junie’s—he would have … Read more

Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra were married in a quiet living room in Westchester, Pennsylvania, on the seventh of November 1951. The bride wore a dress by Howard Greer. The groom was thin and grinning. They cut the cake and laughed for the photographers, and the picture that went out to the world showed a … Read more