History

On December 14, 1878, Princess Alice of the United Kingdom died of diphtheria at Darmstadt. She was thirty-five years old, the second daughter of Queen Victoria, and a woman whose short life had already been marked by grief. Seven months earlier she had buried her youngest daughter, Marie, taken by the same disease. Alice herself … Read more

The SS generals filed the complaints in writing. These were men who ran concentration camps, who had personally overseen mass murder on an industrial scale, men building and operating the machinery of the Holocaust. They looked at what Oskar Dirlewanger was doing in occupied Poland and decided that someone needed to draw a line. That … Read more

In the sweltering maintenance tent on Bougainville, Staff Sergeant Michael “Mickey” McCarthy stared at the gun camera footage until the pattern screamed at him. Frame by frame, the tracers from the Corsair’s six heavy machine guns swirled around the Japanese Zero in a perfect, hollow cage of lead. The bullets outlined the enemy. They never … Read more

On a rooftop in Marrakech, in January of 1969, the photographer Patrick Lichfield raised his camera. The woman in his viewfinder, 28 years old, wore a layered caftan from a souk in the Medina and stood in the desert light beside her husband, the son of the richest man in the world. The photograph took … Read more

The photograph sat in a cardboard box at the Charleston Historical Society for over a century, its edges yellowed and its corners softened by time. Dr. Rebecca Morrison, a historian specializing in post-Reconstruction America, had seen thousands of similar images in her career. But something about this one made her pause on that humid August … Read more

Rockport filed for bankruptcy twice in five years, but the brand never disappeared from store shelves. By the time of its second filing in 2023, the company that had invented the walking shoe category and built a billion-dollar retail market had been reduced to a name inside a licensing conglomerate’s portfolio. Its shoes were designed, … Read more

At its peak, Rainforest Cafe operated more than forty locations across the United States, Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, France, Japan, and beyond. It stretched from suburban food courts to the boardwalk at Atlantic City to the entrance of Disney’s Animal Kingdom. For a particular stretch of the 1990s, it was the most talked-about restaurant … Read more

On the night of March 9, 1945, a B-29 Superfortress named Shady Lady limped back toward Saipan with 76 bullet and shrapnel holes punched through her fuselage. Two engines were dead, hydraulics failing, fuel leaking. The tail gunner was dead. Three other crew members were wounded. The pilot could barely control the aircraft. By every … Read more

On March 31, 1913, in a room at the Grand Hotel in Rome, John Pierpont Morgan lay dying. He was seventy-five years old, the most powerful banker the world had ever seen, a man who had once locked the richest financiers in New York inside his library until they agreed to save the American financial … Read more