History

Five miles from the center of Paris, behind a construction fence in the suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt, the château built for the richest man in France is coming apart. Rain leaks through gaps in its roof. Its stone facades, designed by the man who built the Crystal Palace, are cracked and blackened. Windows are missing or … Read more

She came to the throne of the wealthiest empire on earth. Forty years later, she had buried two of her children, separated by an ocean: one dead in a London hotel room at thirty-one, the other dead by his own hand in a Boston house at forty-four. The mother traveled to both. The same grief, … Read more

For decades, three brands dressed America. Between the late 1980s and early 2000s, if you wanted to look put together, you didn’t need a stylist or a fashion magazine. You walked into a mall and found your answer at Gap, J. Crew, or Banana Republic. These stores sold more than clothing; they sold a quiet … Read more

On September 4, 1882, Thomas Edison stood inside the offices of Drexel, Morgan & Company, the banking house of J. P. Morgan in lower Manhattan, and gave the signal. His chief electrician, John Lieb, closed the switch at the Pearl Street generating station six buildings away. For the first time in history, an entire neighborhood … Read more

In 1972, on the eastern shore of Lake Turkana in Kenya, at a site called Kubora, a field worker named Bernard Neno noticed bone fragments eroding out of a hillside. When the pieces were assembled, the result was a skull cataloged as KNM-ER 1470. It dates to approximately 1. 9 million years ago. Its brain … Read more

Henry Hill was never a made man. The son of an Irish father and a Sicilian mother, he grew up in the 1940s in Brownsville, Brooklyn, staring across the street at a cab stand that served as the headquarters of a Lucchese crime family capo. By the time he was ten, he was hanging around … Read more

Otis Amberdell was thirty-four years old in 1926, thin as a clothes rack, with round spectacles that were forever sliding down his nose and cheekbones prominent enough to balance a small dish on. He worked for the Tennessee State Historical Survey out of Knoxville, and that year the survey had received a small federal grant … Read more

For centuries, European courts presented their monarchs as flawless beings, set apart by divine right and royal blood. The reality was far messier. When kings and queens, princes and princesses, were born with visible conditions, psychological struggles, or developmental differences, they rarely received compassion. More often, they became family secrets, confined to monasteries, remote estates, … Read more

In August 1952, the government of West Germany told its citizens that half of everything they owned now belonged to the state. Not an income tax, not a profit tax, but a direct claim on 50 percent of private wealth. Homes, land, businesses, and farms were all subject to the levy. This was not a … Read more