Lillie Langtry arrived in London with no money, no title, and no connections. Within two years, she was the most painted woman in Britain. She was born Emily Charlotte Le Breton on October 13, 1853, at the Deanery of St. Saviour on Jersey. Her father was the Very Reverend William Corbet Le Breton, the Dean … Read more
On the morning of May 23, 1934, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were driving a Ford V8 sedan down Louisiana State Highway 154 near Gibsland. Bonnie held a half-eaten sandwich in her lap. Up ahead, a truck appeared to be broken down on the side of the road. Clyde slowed to see if the man … Read more
Barbara “Babe” Paley spent decades being described as the most perfect woman in New York. She was a fashion editor at Vogue, a fixture on the international best-dressed list, and the wife of William S. Paley, the man who built CBS into the most powerful media company in America. Her life appeared to be a … Read more
For more than 70 years, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh lived inside one of the most staffed households in the world. Servants, dressers, pages, ladies-in-waiting, private secretaries, equerries, drivers, cooks, gardeners, and stable hands moved through the corridors of Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, Sandringham, and Balmoral every day. Most never spoke a word … Read more
In the autumn of 1887, a Pennsylvania Dutch surveyor named Obadiah Reinhardt was hired by a Camden railroad concern to survey a parcel of land deep in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. He was 66 years old, a careful and unsuperstitious man who had spent forty years measuring property lines. The settlement he was sent … Read more
In the spring of 1798, a man named Cornelius Threlkeld walked west out of the Shenandoah Valley with his wife, two oxen, and one cracked iron pot. He was 31 years old, and he carried a land office paper promising him 160 acres on the far side of an unnamed ridge. He found the ridge … Read more
On a November night in 1817, a notice went up from a quiet house in Surrey. The princess, it said, was doing extremely well. She had a few hours left to live. Her name was Charlotte, the only child of the Prince Regent, the future King George IV. She was the heir the whole nation … Read more
In the winter of 1891, a trapper named Ransom Teague set out for Boggs Hollow. He was sixty-eight years old, a man who had spent more than fifty years reading the land and the tracks left upon it. He went because a younger man, Oren Kapp, had vanished from that hollow after reporting something strange: … Read more
In the dense forests of the Ozark Mountains, where mist clings to ancient trees, there exists a story that has been deliberately erased from most historical records. The year was 1776, a time of revolution and the birth of a nation. But while the eastern seaboard was embroiled in war, another kind of darkness was … Read more
On a February morning in 1960, in a bungalow at the edge of the jungle in North Borneo, a servant found the Countess Mountbatten of Burma dead in her bed. She had died in her sleep at 58 years old, thousands of miles from the marble palaces she had been born to inherit. Scattered across … Read more