History

On February 23rd, 2019, Mela Agnelli died at her family home in Turin at the age of 91. She had outlived her husband, the richest man in modern Italian history. She had outlived her only son, who had jumped from a motorway viaduct outside Turin at the age of 46. She had outlived Truman Capote, … Read more

The Trump family’s story is most often told through politics and business, but its rise is also written in the places its members called home. Before the gold-leafed penthouse above Fifth Avenue, before the marble halls of a Palm Beach estate, there was a modest Tudor-style house in Queens built by a teenage carpenter named … Read more

In the year 1542, a traveler stopped on a high mound above the confluence of two rivers and listened to a silence that had lasted for more than a century. Below him lay the ruins of Cahokia, just across the river from modern-day St. Louis. Twelve or fifteen pyramids of packed clay, soft-shouldered against the … Read more

Evelyn Chase zoomed in on the bride’s hands, and her breath stopped. The high-resolution scan had revealed what 156 years of distance and the limitations of the original print had concealed. The hands she had first thought graceful, delicate, positioned with the careful propriety of Victorian wedding photography, were covered in scars. Deep, textured scars … Read more

The dried brown paper of the manila envelope flaked at the corners as Professor Sonia Abernathy lifted it from the archival box. Inside, pressed between protective sheets, lay a photograph of three young girls. The image, stamped on its reverse with the date March 1924 and the location Gastonia, North Carolina, showed three Black children … Read more

On a morning in mid-January 1902, Deputy U. S. Marshal Joe LeFors sat across from Tom Horn in a room in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Horn was still drunk from the night before, his speech loose and his guard down. LeFors had been searching for Horn since the murder of fourteen-year-old Willie Nickell, a boy found dead … Read more

For nearly two centuries, the Comanche reigned as the dominant military power on the American plains, a mounted force so effective that they repelled Spanish, French, Mexican, and American attempts to dislodge them. Their empire, known as the Comancheria, stretched across roughly 250,000 square miles of what would become Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and … Read more

The SS bodyguard moved first. He had been watching the Finnish engineer from across the railway car, and now he gestured sharply, his eyes fixed on the table where the man sat. Thor Damen had been hired to record the conversation for Finnish state radio, a routine assignment that had become something far more dangerous … Read more

On October 7, 1649, in a church in Madrid, a fourteen-year-old girl married her uncle. The bride was Maria Anna of Austria, and the groom was Philip IV, King of Spain, forty-four years old and known at court as the Planet King. The marriage was not an ordinary royal alliance. It was the product of … Read more