History

In April 1552, a fifteen-year-old king caught the measles. He recovered completely. Fourteen months later, he was dead, his lungs so destroyed that the surgeon who opened his chest found nothing but rotting holes where healthy tissue should have been. What happened in those fourteen months is one of the most horrifying medical declines ever … Read more

The woman hanged herself on the first of September 1967, in her cell at Aichach prison in Bavaria. She was sixty years old. The date carried a dark irony that the newspapers did not miss: it was the twenty-eighth anniversary of Germany’s invasion of Poland, the act that had begun the war in which her … Read more

In the final years of her life, confined to a small London flat, the woman once called the most beautiful in the world lay paralyzed and broken. She spent her days alone, listening to old tape recordings of Frank Sinatra’s voice, a voice she had lost decades earlier. The face that had terrified studios and … Read more

The letter sat in the desk drawer the way it always did, except Joanne Chambers had never seen it before. On that Tuesday morning in 1993, the 41-year-old first grade teacher was doing what she always did, humming softly as she arranged colorful posters on the wall of her classroom at KBA Learning Center in … Read more

The shot came from behind, and Dallas Stoudenmire never saw it. James Manning, standing at his back, fired twice. The first bullet chewed into a barber’s post. The second struck behind Stoudenmire’s left ear, and the man widely regarded as the fastest shooter in the American West dropped dead on an El Paso street, killed … Read more

On the morning of the sixth of May 1960, Anthony Armstrong-Jones stood at the altar of Westminster Abbey waiting for the most photographed woman in the world to walk toward him. Princess Margaret, the younger sister of Queen Elizabeth II, moved up the long aisle in a gown of silk organza chosen with deliberate simplicity … Read more

On the morning of October 25, 1957, Albert Anastasia sat in the barber’s chair at the Park Sheraton Hotel, the corner of Seventh Avenue and 55th Street in Manhattan. It was chair number four, and his face was covered with a hot towel, his eyes closed, while the barber worked on his chin. He had … Read more

The gun went off in the dark street, and Tombstone’s town marshal crumpled to the ground, shot through the groin. It was just past midnight on October 28, 1880, and the man who had fired the shot was Curly Bill Brocius, standing drunk and unsteady in the dirt road. Wyatt Earp saw it happen. He … Read more

In 2019, Marcus Chen, a photograph restorer in Boston, received a commission that would not let him go. A woman named Eleanor Heartwell had inherited her great-grandmother’s estate in Connecticut, and among the boxes of forgotten memories sat a single photograph that had haunted her family for over a century. The image seemed innocent enough … Read more