History

On the night of July 5, 1881, Doc Holliday sat in a Tombstone jail cell, charged with murder. The accusation had not come from a witness to the Benson stagecoach robbery, nor from any of the Cowboys the Earps had been fighting for months. It had come from the woman who called herself Mrs. John … Read more

In January 2000, the manager of a Florida apartment complex unlocked the door of unit 414 and found Hedy Lamarr dead on the bedroom floor beside her bed. She was 85. The cause was heart failure. In her right hand, curled so tightly the responding officer had to gently uncurl her fingers, was a small, … Read more

By the afternoon of July 2, 1863, the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia had spent hours maneuvering into position along the ridges outside Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. John Bell Hood, one of Robert E. Lee’s most aggressive division commanders, had arrived with his men shortly after sunrise. The troops stacked their weapons and rested in an open … Read more

On the 11th of May 1979, a 66-year-old woman died of a heart attack in a suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Los Angeles. She had spent her final months in bed, too frail to stand, surrounded by half-empty glasses of Coca-Cola and stacks of books no one believed she still read. When the … Read more

In the royal collection there is a photograph of a thirteen-year-old princess. Her feet rest on a footstool. Her eyes are turned away from the lens. Her name was Gurama of Coorg, the daughter of a deposed Indian king baptized at Buckingham Palace. Her godmother was Queen Victoria. The queen had her painted, photographed, watched, … Read more

On the twenty-seventh of November 1947, five days after the wedding, the sisters waited in a castle in Germany, and then the visitors came. The first was Queen Frederica of Greece, the daughter of the house at Marienburg, and since the spring a queen—the same throne the bridegroom, her sister-in-law’s brother, had just renounced his … Read more

In August 2020, a woman in her early eighties walked through a department store in Palma de Mallorca wearing a surgical mask, pausing at perfume bottles. No entourage, no fanfare. Days earlier, her husband of nearly six decades had boarded a private jet and vanished from Spain, fleeing a financial scandal that stretched from Switzerland … Read more

The safe house on Rue Jean Van Velve in Ixelles had become a trap, and Marcel Demasy knew it the moment the shooting started. For hours, the Germans pressed their attack against the small cell of Belgian resisters, men and women who had gathered under Demasy’s leadership to plan the assassination of Léon Degrelle, the … Read more

She signed the register in a crown of gardenias, her favorite flower. When she emerged from Westminster Abbey, the flowers were gone, and in their place sat a glittering diamond tiara, a gift from the Queen herself. She had entered as Sarah Ferguson, a commoner, and walked out a princess of the United Kingdom. The … Read more