History

At the Basilica of Santa Chiara in Naples, the crowd did not shout for the president. They shouted for the king and queen. Flowers fell, men wept, and thousands lined the streets as coffins were carried into the church. It was 1984, and the last Bourbon rulers of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies were … Read more

In the summer of 1900, a mason working inside a wooden cofferdam at the bottom of the Susquehanna River near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, set the foundation stone of a granite pier, one of 47 identical piers spaced across the breadth of the river. The Susquehanna at Rockville is not a deep river. It is a wide … Read more

In October 1990, three children were staying in a rented villa in the south of France. The eldest was six, the youngest three. Their father, a world champion at the wheel of a high-speed powerboat, had gone out onto the water between Monaco and Nice that morning and never come back. Eight years earlier, almost … Read more

The water off Mullaghmore was glass that morning, the kind of perfect Atlantic calm that holiday brochures promise and rarely deliver. Lord Mountbatten stood at the wheel of the Shadow V, his thirty-foot wooden boat, wearing his old fishing clothes, content in the ritual of it all. The plan was simple: motor out to the … Read more

On the day of her own wedding, in New York in the spring of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee year, Louise Whitfield signed a legal paper. She was thirty years old. Her groom was Andrew Carnegie, soon to be the richest man in the world. By that paper, she gave up every claim to his fortune. … Read more

In the British National Archives, among files that were once marked secret, sits a passport application dated July 1933. The man who filled it in wrote that he was a British subject by birth, born in Galway on the west coast of Ireland. The passport was granted. Five years later, he renewed it. And in … Read more

On the afternoon of May 14, 1893, William Knoll returned from teaching Sunday school at the Wesleyan chapel in St. Lawrence to his home at 9 Adelphi Terrace on Grange Road in Ramsgate, Kent. When he arrived shortly before four o’clock, he found the front door locked. He rang the bell. No one answered. He … Read more

In the summer of 1925, a survey team from the Bureau of Public Roads climbed onto a section of a mountain called the Garden Wall in what had recently become Glacier National Park and looked at a problem that had confounded every road engineer who had examined it before them. The Garden Wall is not … Read more

The 17-year-old who ascended the throne in 1509 was not supposed to be there. Henry Tudor, the second son born in the shadowed halls of Greenwich Palace in 1491, had been groomed for the church, educated for scholarship rather than sovereignty. His elder brother Arthur, Prince of Wales, was the chosen heir. But Arthur died … Read more