History

The Vestal Virgins were the most privileged women in Rome. They owned property, drafted wills, and rode through streets that fell silent at their approach. A condemned prisoner who caught the eye of a Vestal on his way to execution was set free on the spot, no magistrate able to override her glance. Yet that … Read more

On the morning of May 23, 1934, a stolen Ford V8 sat riddled on a dirt road in Bienville Parish, Louisiana, its body punched through by roughly one hundred and thirty bullets. Bonnie Parker was slumped against Clyde Barrow. Both were dead. The fuel gauge in the stolen Ford read nearly empty. That last detail … Read more

On the sixteenth of October 1793, Marie Antoinette mounted the scaffold in Paris and was executed by guillotine. France’s last queen was not only a sovereign that morning. She was also a mother. She had given birth to four children, two daughters and two sons, all born at Versailles and raised in the glow of … Read more

The painting hangs at Hampton Court, and its composition is precise enough to read like a legal document. Henry VIII sits enthroned under a cloth of estate, Prince Edward at his knee. Beside him stands Jane Seymour, dead nine years when the canvas was painted, included because she produced the boy. The king’s daughters stand … Read more

On the morning of May 19, 1536, Anne Boleyn walked out into the pale light of the Tower of London’s courtyard. A single drumbeat summoned her forward. She had been queen of England for just under three years. Now she was a condemned woman, facing the sword. Her life had begun far from that scaffold, … Read more

Samuel Walker wrote to Samuel Colt with the directness of a man who had no patience for correspondence that failed to reach its point. He had ridden with John Coffee Hays and bled for Texas, and he knew exactly where the Colt Paterson had fallen short. The revolver was too light, too fragile, too easily … Read more

In the late 1690s, a Spanish friar sat by candlelight writing a letter with shaking hands. That morning, inside a hogan in what is now northern Arizona, he had watched a woman weave. She was perhaps forty years old, her hair tied back with a strip of red cloth. Before her, suspended between two wooden … Read more

The magistrate from Charleston set down his pen and stared at the words he had just written. Before him lay the depositions of the survivors, the medical notes of Dr. Thornton, the testimony of the enslaved witnesses, and the physical evidence recovered from the kitchen pantry of the Hammond Plantation. Nine people were dead. Eight … Read more

In 1919, a doctor stood over a map of Europe with a pencil in his hand, certain he had uncovered a secret about who people really were. Not their language. Not their country. Their blood. For the last two years of the First World War, he had spent his time collecting blood from soldiers on … Read more