Dr. James Mitchell had spent 15 years studying photographic archives at the New York Historical Society, but he had never seen anything quite like this. The portrait arrived in a donation box from an estate sale in Brooklyn, part of dozens of glass plate negatives wrapped in yellowed newspaper from 1923. Most showed typical late … Read more
In the autumn of 1893, a coach driver named Corless Vain refused a fare that would have carried him along the ridge road above the Little Cana River. He was offered three times his usual rate to make the run before nightfall, and he still refused. When the man who had hired him asked why, … Read more
On May 6, 2023, an 83-year-old man in morning dress took his seat inside Westminster Abbey and watched a woman he had once called his wife be crowned queen. He had married her half a century earlier, on a summer morning with the household cavalry lining the aisle. He had lost her slowly to the … Read more
On August 14, 1997, a woman sat before the cameras in Los Angeles wearing a sapphire and diamond ring. Four days earlier, the world had seen a photograph of the man who gave her that ring kissing the Princess of Wales on the deck of a yacht in the Mediterranean. She said the wedding had … Read more
In 1882, somewhere in the American South, a Black family posed inside a photography studio. They were formal and dignified, dressed in their finest clothes. At first glance, the portrait looks like hundreds of others from that era — a family proud enough to pay for the privilege of being remembered. But one member of … Read more
Washington, D. C. — Calvin Coolidge Jr. , the 16-year-old son of President Calvin Coolidge, died at 10:30 p. m. on July 7, 1924, in the White House, killed by a staphylococcal infection that entered his bloodstream through a blister raised on his foot during a casual tennis game on the South Lawn just days … Read more
Mala Zimetbaum was born on January 26, 1918, in Pszczyna, today part of Poland and then part of Austria-Hungary. She was the youngest of five children of Pinhas and Chaya Zimetbaum, both Jewish. Her family had lived in Germany for several years before her birth, which is why German was the main language spoken in … Read more
In late October 1952, surveyor Ellis Tate was sent to the old Sorrel place in Caroway County to prepare the property for a timber sale. The house had been sealed for 80 years, and no one in the county had been willing to open it. When the door finally gave way, Tate found a table … Read more
On the afternoon of December 12, 1941, a telephone rang inside the headquarters of the Third Army in San Antonio, Texas. Five days earlier, Japanese bombs had turned Pearl Harbor into a graveyard of steel and fire. The man who answered was a brigadier general almost nobody outside the army had ever heard of. His … Read more
Thousands of German women who served the Nazi war machine as nurses, radio operators, and clerical staff faced a nightmare of double condemnation when captured by Allied forces during World War II, with their stories of suffering remaining buried in historical archives for nearly half a century. Newly examined testimony and declassified military records reveal … Read more