Steven Sasson was 24 years old in 1975 when he built an object that had no name because nothing like it existed. It weighed about eight pounds, used a lens stripped from a home movie camera, and captured an image as numbers rather than as chemistry. When he demonstrated it to executives at Eastman Kodak, … Read more
King Louis XV of France kept mistresses like many monarchs before him, but none pushed the limits quite like he did. His love life became one of the biggest scandals of the eighteenth century, yet one family’s story stood above all others. Not one, not two, but four sisters from the same aristocratic house became … Read more
On August 27, 1979, a 79-year-old man took his family fishing in Mullaghmore, Ireland. He had launched the same boat from that harbor every summer for three decades. Minutes after leaving shore, a bomb tore the boat apart. Lord Mountbatten, cousin to Queen Elizabeth II, mentor to Prince Charles, and a decorated war hero, was … Read more
Every morning before sunrise, Caroline entered George Washington’s bedroom to light his fire. On December 14, 1799, she did it for the last time, and the first president of the United States never woke up. She was the enslaved woman who stood at his deathbed. His will freed 123 people. She was not one of … Read more
On May 10, 1945, two days after the war in Europe ended, Hermann Göring sat in a requisitioned school office in Augsburg, Germany. Across the table was General Carl Spaatz, commander of the United States Strategic Air Forces in Europe. Göring, the man who built the Luftwaffe, was about to explain exactly how the Americans … Read more
The systematic sexual exploitation of prisoners within the Nazi concentration camp network, a brutal program orchestrated under the direct orders of SS chief Heinrich Himmler, functioned as a calculated tool of degradation rather than a reward, according to survivor accounts and historical records that have only recently come to light. The initiative, which saw the … Read more
JACK RUBY USED TO BABYSIT THE GIRL WHO WOULD BECOME KIM DARBY IN A DALLAS NIGHTCLUB Decades before he shot Lee Harvey Oswald on live television, Jack Ruby once looked after a sleeping child in the back of his Dallas nightclub. That child grew up to become Kim Darby, the young actress who starred opposite … Read more
At the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal in 1946, Ernst Kaltenbrunner faced direct questioning over his role as head of the Reich Main Security Office. Appointed in January 1943, he was the highest-ranking SS leader to stand trial for the atrocities committed by the Gestapo and the security services. Kaltenbrunner acknowledged the gravity of the charges … Read more
In January 1927, a young court official sat before the British prime minister and quietly confessed that he sometimes wished the next king would break his neck while out riding to hounds. The prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, looked at him for a long moment. Then he said, “God forgive me. I have often thought the … Read more
In late September 1871, Lieutenant Robert Carter and roughly 600 men of the Fourth Cavalry rode into the vast, unforgiving plains of northwest Texas with a mission that no American military force had ever accomplished: to hunt down the Comanche in their own territory and destroy them. For decades, the region known as Comancheria had … Read more