History

In the summer of 2015, Kayleigh McEnany was a law student with a growing interest in politics, and she reached out to a rookie pitcher she had never met through social media. That simple connection would quietly shape the rest of her life, though at the time there was no reason to expect it would … Read more

The Copa scene in Goodfellas is one of the most celebrated sequences in American film history. A man in a tuxedo walks into a nightclub, and the camera never cuts, following him through corridors, a kitchen, up a staircase, until a table materializes at the edge of the stage. Martin Scorsese called it seduction, the … Read more

On the night of May 12, 1976, the southern half of the longest steel arch in the world shifted. It was past midnight over the New River Gorge in West Virginia, and both halves of the arch had been reaching toward one another for nearly a year, jutting out from the cliff tops, held against … Read more

Lillie Langtry died at dawn on 12 February 1929, in a cliff-top villa in Monaco. In her final moments, only a paid nurse and two poodles in the next room kept her company. Her daughter refused to visit. Her husband lived in another city. Yet when the news reached London, the newspapers gave her the … Read more

On the night of October 14, 1911, young women staying at a Boston boarding house heard groaning coming from the bathroom of their friend, Avis Linnell. When they forced open the door, they found her unconscious. A physician was summoned, but by the time he arrived, he could only confirm that the seventeen-year-old was dead. … Read more

On the evening of October 4th, 2001, Emily Roark finished cross-country practice, waved goodbye to her teammates, and walked toward the far edge of the school parking lot in Maren, Vermont. She was seventeen years old, the anchor of the high school team, and she carried a red spiral notebook where she had logged every … Read more

In March 1945, with the Rhine the last natural barrier shielding the German heartland, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery spent weeks preparing the largest river assault in history. Three thousand guns, an entire airborne corps, and the world’s press were assembled for the spectacle. On the night before it was to begin, four words passed quietly … Read more

In 1967, a thirty-one-year-old mother of four was branded with a word that British high society wielded with devastating precision. A “bolter” was a woman who had abandoned her marriage, her children, and her entire aristocratic existence for another man. The label was permanent. Names were struck from invitation lists, and whispers followed her from … Read more

In July 1923, three shots fired in a fifth-floor suite at London’s Savoy Hotel brought down an Egyptian prince and placed the British crown itself under threat. The woman who pulled the trigger was Margarite Alabert, a former courtesan who had once been the mistress of the future King Edward VIII. By the time the … Read more