In 1991, William Kennedy Smith, a Georgetown-trained doctor and nephew of John F. Kennedy, stood trial in Palm Beach, Florida, accused of rape at the NaN
Jean Kennedy Smith spent her life as the diplomatic heart of the Kennedy family, serving as United States Ambassador to Ireland and quietly building the arts organization Very Special Arts. But her four children carried a heavier burden than public service. Raised under the glare of the Kennedy name, they inherited both its privileges and … Read more
In March 1997, a photographer stood at the second enclosure of Ta Prohm temple in Cambodia, examining a carved medallion on a sandstone pillar. The temple was completed in 1186 AD. The medallion…
In March 1997, a photographer stood beside a sandstone pillar in the second enclosure wall of Ta Prohm temple, part of the Angkor complex about twenty-five kilometres northeast of Siem Reap, Cambodia. He was looking at a decorative frieze rising roughly seven feet from the ground. Circular medallions ran in a vertical line, each enclosing … Read more
In 1927, William Randolph Hearst sent his lawyers to his wife with an offer he believed no woman could refuse: the Riverside Drive apartment, a country estate, and $250,000 a year for life. All…
The radio in the bedroom on Riverside Drive carried the voice of a twenty-year-old girl, and the voice was denouncing the family that had raised her. She had taken a revolutionary name, Tania. She had declared, on a sound recording released to every major news outlet in the country, that she had chosen of her … Read more
In 1911, eighteen-year-old Madeleine Force married John Jacob Astor IV, a 47-year-old divorcé and the richest man in America, and the country turned on her. Ministers refused to officiate….
She was eighteen years old. He was forty-seven, twice married, and the head of the richest family in America. In the autumn of 1911, the whole country decided it had the right to judge her. Her name was Madeleine Talmadge Force, a quiet Manhattan schoolgirl who had never asked for the spotlight. But the moment … Read more
In 1929, the heir to the British throne forced an American woman out of the country and made her write a letter to his youngest brother, Prince George. George was using morphine and cocaine,…
On Tuesday, the 25th of August, 1942, a Short Sunderland flying boat of the Royal Air Force’s 228th Squadron rose from the Cromarty Firth at Invergordon in the north of Scotland. The aircraft, serial W4026, was bound for Iceland, where the Duke of Kent was to visit the airmen stationed there. Low cloud lay over … Read more
On September 14, 2007, a clerk in the Douglas County Courthouse stamped a document that sent shockwaves through the legal world. The defendant wasn’t NaN
On September 14, 2007, a clerk in the Douglas County Courthouse in Nebraska stamped a document that would send a shock wave through the legal world. It was a lawsuit like thousands of others, but the name listed for the defendant was not a person or a corporation. It was God. The newspapers called it … Read more
In October 1971, health inspectors forced their way through a wall of tangled honeysuckle at a decaying 28-room mansion in East Hampton and found two NaN
In October 1971, health inspectors from the Suffolk County Health Department forced their way through a wall of tangled honeysuckle and dead wood that had swallowed the driveway of a decaying 28-room East Hampton mansion. What they found inside shattered the pristine facade of American high society. Hidden behind mountains of trash, wild animals, and … Read more
In 1908, a Yaqui tracker named Anselmo Bocame was hired to find five surveyors who had vanished west of Cerro Perdido, near the Amargosa. Their last camp was found abandoned, but not in panic:…
In 1955, a dying man named Anselmo Bacame asked for a Franciscan named Father Solano to come sit with him. When the priest arrived, Bacame said no—not confession, not in the way the church wanted it. Something else. He asked instead for a writer who had been recording old cases along the highway for a … Read more
In August 2012, archaeologists cut through the asphalt of an ordinary Leicester parking lot and struck human bone on the very first day. The remains lNaN
For more than five centuries, the story of Richard III belonged to his conquerors. Struck down at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, the last English king to die in combat was stripped, slung over a horse, paraded through the streets, and buried without ceremony in a hastily dug grave at a Leicester monastery. … Read more
On December 11, 1936, a former king sat before a microphone at Windsor and told the largest radio audience the world had ever gathered that he could nNaN
On the 11th of December 1936, a man who was no longer king sat before a microphone at Windsor and told the largest radio audience the world had ever gathered that he could not carry his burden without the woman he loved. The world called it the grandest sacrifice of the century, a throne and … Read more