History

In the winter of 1887, a country doctor named Lucian Harrow answered a letter he should have ignored. The prioress of a convent called Saint Adelmar’s, perched on a high ridge above the village of Crux Hollow, wrote that her sisters were ill. She added something no physician had ever been told before: the illness … Read more

In April 1943, a small group of American fighter pilots prepared for one of the most daring missions of the Second World War. They would fly nearly five hundred miles at just fifty feet above the ocean, skimming the waves to stay hidden from enemy radar, and their target was the most important commander in … Read more

Before the headlines branded her a traitor, before the seven husbands, the starvation diets, and the billion-dollar inheritance, Barbara Hutton was a lonely child in a gilded cage. She was born in New York on November 14, 1912, the only daughter of Edna Woolworth and Franklin Hutton. Her mother died when Barbara was just four … Read more

On July 11, 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt signed a single directive that handed the entire intelligence future of the United States to one man: William Donovan. Across Washington, the reaction was immediate and hostile. J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI wanted him buried. The Army and Navy fought to limit his authority. The State Department … Read more

Mary Tobin boarded a ferry in the spring of 1889 with a promise to visit a friend in Jersey City, and then vanished. For twenty-seven days, no one knew where she had gone. Then, on the morning of Sunday, May 12, a boatkeeper named Thomas Armor noticed a bundle drifting in the water near the … Read more

In the great hall of the Red Fort in Delhi, on the night of January 6, 1903, thousands of aristocrats and diplomats fell into absolute silence. Every flickering candle in the Diwan-i-Khas seemed trained on a single figure. Mary Curzon, the Vicereine of India, moved slowly through the room in a gown of champagne silk … Read more

When the doctors and courtiers crowded around Queen Mary in September 1554, they saw what they had all been praying for. The queen was gaining weight. She suffered from nausea, missed her courses, her body swelled. After months of desperate hope, and after years of heartbreak that had followed her since childhood, Mary Tudor appeared … Read more

When Carolyn Jones accepted the role of Morticia Addams on the classic television sitcom The Addams Family, she likely did not anticipate that she was about to become an indelible part of television history, still beloved by audiences more than fifty years later. Her decision to take the part, however, was not purely based on … Read more

The Swedish liner Gripsholm sat in New York harbor in June 1942, painted white, flying enormous Swedish flags, and carrying the word “diplomat” painted along her sides. Aboard were 1,065 Japanese and 18 Thai passengers, including the two men who had handed Secretary of State Cordell Hull Japan’s final note on the afternoon of December … Read more