History

In December 1626, a few days after a difficult labor in a castle in Stockholm, a queen was reported to have said of her newborn daughter, “Take her from me. I will not have such a monster. ” The woman who recorded those words was the daughter herself, decades later in Rome, a long memory … Read more

Jean Stein was the daughter of the most powerful man in Hollywood, a woman who spent her life watching history unfold from inside the rooms where it was made. She chronicled the Kennedys, the Warhol superstars, the moguls and the broken children of the elite. At eighty-three, in her penthouse at 10 Gracie Square, she … Read more

It is the last week of October 1955. The maple leaves have turned red. A pumpkin waits on the kitchen table for a knife. And the finest night of autumn is only a few days away. You wake to a cold in the bedroom that was not there a week ago, the kind that makes … Read more

At the center of Las Meninas, one of the most famous paintings in the world, stands a five-year-old girl in a silver dress. Her name was Margaret Theresa of Spain, and by the time Diego Velázquez painted her in 1656, her life was already a contract. She was betrothed to her uncle, the Holy Roman … Read more

Alcott Frein knelt in the dead grass beside the sealed well, and the cold came up through the concrete slab into his hand. It was not the cold of autumn. It was a cold with weight, settling against the back of his neck like a hand placed there from behind. And beneath the slab, from … Read more

The bubble lights sat near the top of the tree, and no child could walk past them without stopping. Inside each thin glass tube, a colored liquid moved as if it had a life of its own, boiling and bubbling like a tiny coffee pot that never ran dry. NOMA Electric introduced them in 1946, … Read more

A dead woman had been pulled from a burning house, and the investigators sifting through the ashes were already uneasy. The fire itself was strange enough, but the details emerging from the ruin did not fit the picture of a simple accident. Before the case was over, the truth would look less like a tragedy … Read more

At the Battle of Midway in June 1942, the Imperial Japanese Navy’s finest carriers relied on a brutal but simple method for guiding their fighters to incoming American aircraft. Gunners on screening ships fired their heaviest batteries toward the enemy, and pilots flew toward the bursts. A column of exploding shells was the fastest available … Read more

Carole Lombard was born Jane Alice Peters on October 6, 1908, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, into a comfortable upper-middle-class home. Her mother, Bessie, was the daughter of a prominent banker, and her father, Frederick, worked for a local washing machine manufacturer thanks to his father-in-law’s connections. She was the third child and only daughter, raised … Read more