History

Santa Fe, New Mexico, November 29th, 1950. A white-haired man from Hico, Texas, slips through the rear entrance of the governor’s mansion, his hat in his scarred hands. His neighbors know him as Ollie Roberts. The town calls him Brushy Bill. By his own count, he is 90 years old. He has come for a … Read more

The story begins in the autumn of 1927, when a Knoxville surveyor named Ashen Kettering was hired by the Covel Field Lumber Company to map a tract of timber in Perry County, Kentucky. He was thirty-eight years old, a tall, quiet man with twenty years of experience walking the foothills. He kept two sets of … Read more

Look at your arm for a moment. Whatever its shade, that color is the answer to a mathematical problem your ancestors solved with their skin over thousands of years. For roughly 290,000 of the 300,000 years humans have existed, nobody cared. No one looked at another person’s skin and decided it revealed something about their … Read more

In early June of 1872, a saloon owner in Sioux City, Iowa, promised his patrons a Saturday morning spread that defied everything a frontier town was supposed to offer. Lobster salad sat beside oyster soup, deviled ham, and fish with egg sauce. Pickled oysters, salmon, tongue, pickles, lettuce, and radishes filled the counter. The meal … Read more

In the decades after 1819, when Sir Stamford Raffles established Singapore as a British trading post, a small group of Jewish merchant families from Baghdad, India, and the Ottoman Empire quietly built the commercial foundations of what would become one of the world’s great financial centers. They arrived not as refugees but as sophisticated international … Read more

The discovery came in September 1963, during the demolition of a decaying farmhouse in the Appalachian foothills. Workers stripping plaster from the walls of an upstairs bedroom found a cavity between the inner and outer structure. Inside were human remains, a skeleton of an adult female, along with a silver hairbrush, a wedding ring engraved … Read more

Rose Kennedy kept index cards on her children. Weights, dental dates, diseases, vaccinations—one child per card, updated in her own hand, filed like personnel records. America knew her as the rosary in the front pew, the woman who gave the country a president and buried three sons without breaking. Her second son told a friend … Read more

On the night of July 18th, 1969, Ted Kennedy left a party on Chappaquiddick Island with a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Mary Jo Kopechne, one of the young campaign workers who had staffed his brother Robert’s presidential bid the year before. Sometime around midnight, his Oldsmobile sedan went off a narrow wooden bridge and overturned in … Read more

On the seventh of October, 1914, outside the Church of the Holy Name in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, a cold autumn breeze crossed the cobbled streets as Boston’s political aristocracy gathered for what the press called “the union of absolute Catholic power. ” Rose Elizabeth Fitzgerald, the brilliant twenty-four-year-old daughter of Boston’s legendary boss mayor John … Read more