In November 1928, Rose Kennedy crossed the Atlantic with her husband Joseph and his mistress, the actress Gloria Swanson. Rose had eight children waitNaN
In November 1928, three people crossed the Atlantic aboard the SS France. Joseph Kennedy was already wealthy and ambitious. Beside him stood Rose, his wife and mother of eight children. Near them was Gloria Swanson, the celebrated actress who had become Joseph’s lover. Swanson later remembered Rose as composed, courteous, and impossibly warm. No public … Read more
In June 1942, just weeks after the Battle of Midway, a Japanese destroyer fired a torpedo into the burning carrier Hiryu and sailed away—leaving roughNaN
In June 1942, the Battle of Midway had just ended. Four Japanese aircraft carriers lay at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. The Imperial Navy was in full retreat. But two weeks after the battle, an American ship spotted something floating in the open ocean, a small boat. Inside were dozens of men, barely alive, … Read more
On 23 October 1943, the USS Narwhal, one of the largest submarines in the U.S. Navy, slipped out of Cape Morton in Queensland carrying 92 tons of ammNaN
On October 23, 1943, the USS Narwhal sailed from Cape Morton in Queensland with 92 tons of ammunition and stores aboard, along with ten passengers. She was one of the two largest submarines in the United States Navy, and her orders came from the headquarters of General Douglas MacArthur. The destination was the Philippines, and … Read more
In 1878, Sheriff Ephraim Calder built Coldwater’s jail from two-foot limestone walls and iron bars freighted from San Antonio, telling county commissioners he would rather have a wall he did not…
The end came in a gray hour, in a room made of two feet of limestone, with a key in a deputy’s hand and a lamp going dim in the other. He had eleven years of trust to weigh against a month of quiet poison, and no test left that could tell him which side … Read more
On June 6, 1944, sixteen bulldozers were scheduled to land on Omaha Beach, their job to smash through German concrete barriers and open paths off the NaN
The bulldozer never fired a shot. It dropped no bombs and launched no torpedoes, yet without it, the Allied victory in the Second World War might have been delayed by years, if it came at all. When reporters and historians asked the top Allied commanders after the war which tools had been most critical, Dwight … Read more
On 14 December 1861, Prince Albert lay dying at Windsor Castle while his 18-year-old daughter Alice held his hand. She had nursed him for eleven daysNaN
She became queen at eighteen, in the small hours of a June morning in 1837, informed by riders who had traveled through the night from Windsor to Kensington Palace. She was barely five feet tall, dressed in a hastily wrapped dressing gown, and she asked for an hour alone to write in her diary that … Read more
In January 1932, inside Texas’s brutal Eastham prison farm, Clyde Barrow took an axe to his own left foot. He removed his big toe and part of the next one, hoping to escape the cotton fields. Some…
On the morning of May 23, 1934, Clyde Barrow sat behind the wheel of a stolen Ford V8 on a dirt road outside Gibsland, Louisiana. His hands rested easy on the wheel, the way they always did. His eyes scanned the road ahead. And beneath the dashboard, his left foot, the one missing two toes, … Read more
On the 18th of every month, Maria Theresa locked herself inside rooms painted entirely black and refused to see anyone. She was the most powerful womaNaN
Maria Theresa of Austria reached the nadir of her power in October 1740. Twenty-three years old, seven months pregnant, and almost entirely untrained in statecraft, she inherited an empire on the brink of collapse. Her father, Charles VI, had died after eating a dish of poisonous mushrooms while hunting in Hungary, leaving his daughter a … Read more
In 1908, two court-appointed physicians prepared to examine a countess and an earl to determine whether their marriage had ever actually happened. FivNaN
In August 1908, a London court ordered two appointed physicians to examine a countess and an earl to determine whether their marriage had ever truly happened. The woman at the center of the examination was Alice Thaw, daughter of a Gilded Age fortune and sister of the man who had shot architect Stanford White in … Read more
On June 29, 1964, twelve-year-old Michael Shap opened the toilet door on the 3:25 Southampton to Reading train and found a teenage girl lying in blooNaN
On the afternoon of June 29, 1964, a warm and sunny day in southern England, a twelve-year-old boy named Michael Shap was train-spotting with friends near Basingstoke. When the 3:25 from Southampton pulled out of the station, he visited the toilet compartment at the end of his carriage. Opening the door, he found the body … Read more