History

At 11:56 on the morning of January 27th, 1902, a wooden shed on Park Avenue held two hundred pounds of dynamite. Thirty seconds later, every window in the Murray Hill Hotel was gone. A steam hoist had been hurled through a brick wall. Two bodies lay in the street, blown out of a trench forty … Read more

The stone boxes waited in the darkness, each one a coffin of granite large enough to hold a small room. They had been sealed for thousands of years, and when explorers finally pried them open in the nineteenth century, they found nothing inside but the bones of bulls. That was odd enough. But the boxes … Read more

By the autumn of 1906, the cold war inside Blenheim Palace had become an open, vicious struggle. Private inquiries, intercepted correspondence, and bitter confrontations revealed that both the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough had abandoned the union in all but name. The Duke, fiercely protective of his ancestral dignity yet desperate to keep control of … Read more

London, June 1952. A 37-year-old woman is walking back to her cheap hotel after an evening with friends. It is a drab night, but she is excited. She is going to join her lover in Europe. She crosses the hotel lobby. It is the last thing she ever does. Within a few minutes, she is … Read more

In a small room in London, on the evening of November 20, 1995, a woman sits before a camera, the world watching. She is Diana, Princess of Wales, and across from her sits Martin Bashir, a journalist whose name will soon be known everywhere. For nearly a year the palace has denied everything she is … Read more

In the summer of 1755, a Shawnee war party descended on Draper’s Meadow, a small settlement on the Virginia frontier near what is now Blacksburg. The raid was swift and brutal. Colonel James Patton, the man who had orchestrated the settlement of the land, fell with a tomahawk embedded in his skull. Homes were set … Read more

By the summer of 1943, American military planners were looking at a problem that had no precedent in their doctrine. A hundred thousand Japanese soldiers held the strongest fortress in the Pacific: seventeen miles of tunnels carved into volcanic rock, hundreds of artillery pieces, four airfields, and a harbor deep and sheltered enough to hold … Read more

It was November 1943, and Major Hardy Amies had a weapon he wanted to put into the hands of a man named André Wendelen. The device was called the Welrod, a pistol designed for one purpose: to kill in silence. It had no markings, no serial number, nothing that could be traced, and SOE had … Read more

The verdict arrived on a November evening in 1995, delivered not by a court, but by the most famous woman in the world, speaking to twenty-three million people from a television studio. For James Hewitt, the question came almost as an afterthought, near the end of Diana, Princess of Wales’s interview with Panorama. Had her … Read more